Dear Geist,

Can you give a high-energy prose writer (me!) some idea of what publishers and agents are looking for in signing up new novels? What’s selling? I have so many ideas for books but I want to concentrate my energy into a project that’s going to go somewhere.

—Rhonda J., Cyberspace

Dear Rhonda,

Your public library will have copies of magazines that publish information on the book business, and you can browse book publishers’ websites to get a sense of what recent books have done well. But we have never heard of a successful book written by an author who wrote to someone else’s plot, setting, characters and so on. A first-book breakthrough is much more often achieved by a new writer who is obsessed by a story they came up with, and worked on that story until it was the best it could be—a story that came from that writer’s heart. Here is Betsy Lerner, author of The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice for Writers, with a bit more on this subject: “If you are one of the many people who dream of writing but have never successfully or, perhaps, even started a piece, I suggest you compile a list of everything you’ve read over the past six months or year and try to determine if there is a pattern or common denominator.” For any writer, starting out or right in the thick of it, all of Lerner’s book is inspiring from start to finish.

—The Editors