Uncommon Goods

When one "becomes" a writer the very idea of finding others in the craft is exciting. The online community is amazing for meeting those with this "affliction." We spend our days staring at computer screens and living in our imaginations. We create characters who become like family, friend or foe.

But we still think of ourselves as unique.

We write and write and write until one day it is time to find that agent. Find that publisher. Find that place in the world for our book to be born into the hands of the reader. Who will that lucky reader be? Which greedy hands will first turn our pages and smell the glue that binds our world of words?

And we still believe we are unique.

The more I delve into the writing community, the more people I meet online who write or want to write or have written, the more I realize I am not unique in this aspect. I thought this would be disheartening, but it is not. It is encouraging that there are others like me. But it does push me to distinguish myself from the crowd. So how do we do that?

What device to you use to make yourself marketable? What makes you an uncommon good? What makes your book unique, your character singular?