Originality? What’s that?

If you want to make money, I mean really make money, you’ve got to do just the opposite: Find what’s sold in the past, repackage it, then sell it again to an eager audience.

This isn’t a new technique. Recycled ideas are a lot older than recycling aluminum cans and plastic milk bottles. I first noticed it back in the 1970s. Products from detergents to deodorants would tinker with their formula just a touch, call themselves “new and improved,” and put on a marketing blitz to gain new customers and win back old ones.

It’s not new, but it is more popular – especially in entertainment.

Take the movies, for example. There’s still original stuff out there. Movies like Get Out and Bird Box come to mind; and a Japanese-language film called Parasite even won the motion picture cast award from the Screen Actors Guild this year.

But it’s getting harder for them to find traction amid a sea of reboots, sequels and franchises. Consider: In 2005, sequels and prequels accounted for less than 10 percent of the 100 top-grossing movies in the United States. By 2017, the figure had more than tripled, to 30 percent.

Heck, Disney’s got it all figured out: Another Star Wars film. Another Marvel movie. Hey, I know, let’s repackage all those uber-profitable Disney animated classics as live-action movies! Even without Robin Williams, we can get Will Smith to play the genie in Aladdin, and voila! Another cool billion in the bank.

Biopics are big business, too: Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Judy Garland... People love what’s familiar to them, and they’ll eat it up.

Formula won

Which brings us to my line of work: writing books. The same thing seems to be happening there, too. Familiarity rules.

What’s most familiar to most readers is an author’s name. If you’re “known,” you’ve created a reliable brand that can serve as your formula for success.

The rest of us have to latch onto an existing formula and hope against hope we catch on. The idea is simple: Choose a formula or subgenre that bears a strong resemblance to something that’s worked before, and crank out the stories. (For the record, the romance genre had nearly twice as many earnings as any other in 2016, followed by crime/mystery, religious and fantasy science fiction. Horror was in fifth place, but with just 5 percent of the earnings raked in by romance-erotica.)

So, say you’ve decided to write in a popular genre or subgenre and you’ve started writing.

Your first obstacle will be the fact that other writers have done their research, too, and have targeted the same popular genre you’ve identified as “yours.” And more people there are cranking out the same kind of stories, the harder it is to choose among them.

Some readers will read any story in a given subgenre, just like some moviegoers will see any Marvel movie. But there are a lot more books in a subgenre than there are movies in any given franchise, and it takes a lot longer to read a book than it does to watch a movie. So, sooner or later, the market will get flooded, and only tried-and-true authors need apply.

The rest of us? Well, we’re back to Square One.

The sin of originality

Maybe you don’t want to focus on formula. Maybe you’d rather try to break through by writing original stories. That’s still possible – if you can catch someone’s eye. Someone who isn’t looking for the same-old, same-old, and who has the connections it takes to put your books in front of readers. (Oprah Winfrey’s book club is an example.)

I don’t know whether it’s more difficult to do that, or whether it’s more difficult to write formulaic novels and hope they somehow find an audience in the sea of other formulaic novels out there.

There is a third option: Write an original story and tie it up nice and pretty in a familiar looking package. But you’ll face the same challenges here, too, plus another potential obstacle: Readers looking for originality might never give your book a second glance, and those looking for pure formula might feel tricked and protest, “What the hell is THIS!?”

None of these options is bad. I prefer to write original stories, but I’ve also seen all the Star Wars movies and most of the Marvel flicks. I’ve also tried to package original stories within the framework of a subgenre.

The point is, whatever option you choose, the odds are never in your favor. Or, at least, not very often. And that can lead to desperation...

...which attracts con artists like a dying animal draws vultures to the side of the road. You hire a marketing guru. You pour money into Amazon and Facebook ads. You buy into “sure-fire” systems for increasing profits, but the only “sure-fire” profits wind up going to the self-proclaimed experts selling those systems.

Catch-22

In one sense, authors face the same Catch-22 (that started out as a book title, by the way) anyone faces when getting started in a business. There’s an old saying that you have to have experience to get a job, but you have to have a job to gain experience.

The writing world is similar: You have to have exposure to sell books, but you have to sell books to gain exposure (unless you want to give them away, which kind of defeats the purpose).

The difference lies in how hard it is to break into this specific field. At the start of 2020, the overall unemployment rate was 3.5 percent. Now, a lot of people had to work two or more jobs to make ends meet, but that still leaves them in better shape than the typical author. According to the Authors Guild, that was $6,080 in 2017, or less than half the poverty level for a single person living alone.

To put it another way: If you worked half-time (20 hours a week) at $10 an hour, you’d still make one-third more than the median author’s salary.

And while other industries are seeing a slow but steady climb in wages, author earnings actually fell by 42 percent from 2009 to 2016.

Snowball effect

In this kind of environment, success stories from big-name authors are less than comforting. A successful author telling a struggling writer, “If I did it, you can too,” might as well be a lottery winner conveying the same message.

Unlike a winning lottery ticket, however, there’s often a snowball effect with writing a bestseller or two. Big-name authors who have been around any length of time have made the vast majority of their money off their reputations, not their talents – which is not to disparage their talents. It’s simply proof of my original premise: Familiarity is a goldmine. It may breed contempt in some quarters, but obscurity breeds indifference, which is far worse if you’re trying to sell books.

I like to write stories with happy endings, but I haven’t found one here. Not yet. I guess if I want that, I’ll have to go see another Disney movie.

On second thought, maybe I’ll see an indie film instead. If I can find one playing within 200 miles of where I live, that is.

Yes, the struggle is real.