Hi Reader,

What makes a book truly excellent?

What sets it apart from all the rest? What do the most beloved books do that’s truly exceptional?

Is excellence defined by hitting bestseller lists? Filling seats at every book tour stop? Being selected for “Best Books of 2025” lists?

Is excellence defined by getting gatekeeper approval? Getting agent representation? Landing a book deal? Winning awards?

Is excellence defined by earning money? Getting a big advance? Earning out the advance and bringing in royalties?

It’s a tough question, right?

I’ve been saying a lot lately that my goal is to help writers create excellent novels. Which sounds fantastic!

. . . In theory. Until I tried to define it, and I started landing on things like:

“It fulfills your creative vision”

“It does what you want it to do”

“You’ll know it when you see it”

. . . all of those boil down to: “I know a book is excellent when I have a gut feeling that it’s really, really good.”

And I know that writing is a creative process with so much subjectivity. But I have never been satisfied with any measurement of story that is based on gut feeling alone.

Don’t get me wrong—our guts are pointing to something true. They’re trustworthy guides. We’ve absorbed an enormous volume of story, and we’ve developed highly attuned intuitive pattern recognition, and our guts tell us when we encounter the “excellent novel” pattern again.

In other words, we do, in fact, know it when we see it.

But when our guts recognize a pattern in story, I set out to decode it—to translate the subjective into objective, the implicit into explicit, so we can see it and use it consciously and intentionally.

In this case, that means defining what an excellent novel actually is.

Because once we know what we’re working towards, we can set out intentionally to create that thing, and we can measure when we’ve succeeded.

So in today’s brand-new episode of Your Next Draft, I’m unpacking what I’ve found. You’ll hear:

• My current working definition of an excellent novel
• Why I am not actually the arbiter of excellence (even though I have really good taste)
• Why excellent books don’t always receive industry validation . . . and whether all books the industry promotes are excellent (spoiler: no)
• What readers WANT from stories
• Why stories have been essential to human survival since the beginning of storytelling
• 5 questions to ask yourself to define YOUR OWN standard of excellence

​Read or listen to What Makes a Story Excellent? (And How to Know When You've Reached It) »​

Once you’ve heard how I’m defining excellence, I’d love to hear your definition! Head to the comments on the blog post and let me know what makes a story excellent to you.

​Share your standard of excellence in the comments »​

Here’s to creating more of the stories we love best!

Happy editing,

Alice

​
​