Writing "to Market" Makes Me Shudder

 

 

At the urging of a fellow author, I joined a site for writers a month or so back. Though it’s interesting, I don’t feel that it fits my style—not for writing, not for publishing, and not for promoting.

The idea is writing books “to market” or “for market,” which means an author writes what will sell, not what she wants to write. Early on in my career I had an agent who tried to get me to do that. Her push was that I should write Amish romances, because they were big at that moment in time. Later, I had a publisher who wanted me to continue the Loser Mysteries, though I felt they'd reached a logical conclusion. At a conference once, I heard an editor for a big publishing company say that anyone who had anything…anything with vampires in it should send it to her. The market. The market. The market. Book industry people look for books that will "sell through," meaning they earn more than it cost to make them.

If you’ve read my work, you know I do pretty much the opposite. I write what interests me, what I feel passionate about. Sadly—or not—this means that my books are all over the place. I have women’s fiction titles that are serious stories about women in interesting situations, like Deceiving Elvera and Sister Saint, Sister Sinner. I have comedy suspense, less realistic but more fun, e.g. The Kidnap Capers and Cutest Little Killer. I've written traditional mysteries, cozy mysteries, historical mysteries, and supernatural mysteries, not because I planned to, but because I fell in love with a story idea and had fun writing it. I can't imagine writing any other way.

When I realized that the line between my humor and non-humor material was widening, I invented Maggie Pill to write the funny stuff, which worked out well. Her cozies, like the Sleuth Sisters Mysteries, really appeal to readers. (I guess everyone loves their sisters but would sometimes like to bop them one.)

Writing “for market” is  the idea is that whatever is hot right now, you write that. You write fast, you slap it up there, and then go back and write more, giving your audience what they’ll automatically snap up. You write more of the same for as long as readers will buy it. Think Sue Grafton's ABC books or the Alex Cross stories. As a reader, I almost automatically bought Grafton's Kinsey stories because I liked her and I liked Sue's writing. But how boring did it get to come up with yet another situation for her to cope with?

Observant readers notice the trends in book offerings: For historicals at the moment, it's WWII. For suspense, it's stories of women who lived through some great trauma at a young age and later unravel the lies they didn’t see through back then. They often have “girl” in the title, another “to market” idea that makes readers automatically pick up a book. Indie writers apparently sell books by making odd combinations, like zombies in space or fairy tale characters that live in modern Brooklyn. If you like the first one, those writers probably have three more they wrote during NaNoWriMo last year.

Authors can do as they like (well, if you have an agent and/or a publisher, maybe not), but I will continue to write what I’m feeling excited about at a given time. For me, it’s about enjoying what I market, not writing to appeal to the market.