Vitamin or Painkiller?
Applying a marketing lesson to my new novel
I spent the last weekend of January in Austin, Texas at the Novel Marketing conference, where one idea stuck with me because it sits right at the intersection of business and creativity: is your book a vitamin or a painkiller?
A painkiller solves an urgent problem. A vitamin provides general improvement or enrichment. If you’re writing fiction, it’s usually better to aim for painkillers:
• A thriller that promises edge-of-your-seat escape when someone is stressed and overwhelmed
• A romance that offers emotional comfort and hope
• A cozy mystery that reassures the reader that the world ultimately makes sense
It took me a long time to understand what I consistently offer my readers, whether I’m writing cozy golden retriever mysteries, the darker Mahu and Angus Green books, or romance. I’m writing emotional painkillers: stories that pull readers into a world where they care deeply about the characters and can step outside their own worries for a while.
The conference pushed me to look hard at whether I was delivering that promise as clearly as I could. That realization came at exactly the right moment, because I was deep in final revisions on Driven Together.
When I first started writing this book, I fell hard for the world of Formula 1 racing. The strategy, the engineering, the split-second decisions—it’s fascinating, and I put a lot of that on the page. But thinking about serving the reader forced me to ask a simple question: what emotional experience am I promising here?
The answer was clear. Driven Together isn’t a technical guide to F1. It’s a romance.
I went back and tightened racing scenes that I loved but didn’t directly serve the emotional story. I sharpened the focus on Wally and Jonathan: their history, their chemistry, and the impossible position they’re in when a journalist has to cover the championship run of the man he never stopped loving.
Driven Together is about two men chasing career-defining dreams under the brightest spotlight in sports and discovering that their unfinished love story is still very much alive. The international races and glamour of Formula 1 are the stage. The heart of the book is the second-chance romance unfolding in the middle of all that pressure.
After a long road, the novel is finally up for pre-order on Amazon. I’m proud of how it balances adrenaline and emotion, and especially proud that the final version reflects what I relearned in Austin: every scene should earn its place by deepening the reader’s experience.
If a high-stakes second-chance romance set in the fast world of Formula 1 sounds like the kind of escape you could use right now, I’d love for you to take a look at the pre-order.
With love and gratitude,
Neil
Very interesting, Terry. The best books often work as:
painkiller on the surface, vitamin underneath
They hook with urgency and deliver enrichment as a bonus.
Readers come for escape and stay for meaning.
For me, this is a really important metaphor. It's essential to have painkillers when they're needed, and I agree that it's easier to find a market for books that are painkillers than those that are vitamins. There's a lot more paracetamol and ibuprofen on the shelves than there is decent probiotic. As someone who deliberately writes vitamin stories, I've come to understand that this is not an either/or question, but a matter of intent.
Thanks for posting this.