Anna here, with my monthly author post. My regular Sunday Crit group discussion sparked off today’s topic, when one of the members lamented about how she obviously wasn’t ‘writing to the market’ and how a reader had let her know it, sharpish, when telling her they weren’t going to read any more of her last novel because her hero was ‘too nice’. Apparently, writing to the market in the shifter romance genre requires that your MC be a complete raging arsehole, who is then redeemed by his mate’s blind and overwhelming love.
Well, colour me astonished. A man who is motivated by duty and honour; who is focused, dangerous and assertive when he needs to be but who lets inconsequential things slide with no more than a meh and a shrug, isn’t aggressive and bullying, domineering and misogynistic enough to please the romance market.
Okay then. I’m glad to be a Charlotte Lucas level of “not romantic” in that case.
The discussion, though, got me thinking about what it means to write to the market. Yes, I realise that there’s always the desire to see the books you’ve spent months crafting sell well and to some extent, we all want the ‘the market’ to like and buy our books. But for me, that desire is in tension with my need to write my books the way I want, with the sorts of characters and themes that spark my imagination—and they are not necessarily what the market wants to read.
At least, what some sections of the market, maybe the biggest sections, want to read.
My main series is a sci-fi m/m love story, and one that spans 5 years and dozens of light years. But it’s not a romance. The primary focus isn’t the love between my two MCs, but the war they’re fighting and the challenges they face. The fact is they’re soldiers first who just happen to be gay. They aren’t gay men who happen to be soldiers. And right there, that little shift in emphasis is why I’m not writing to the biggest portion of the m/m market, the romance readers. I’m writing to a niche of people who want to read sci fi where the romance isn’t the be-all and end-all of the story. Believe me, if I switched the emphasis, I’d have a lot more readers and better sales. But I wouldn’t be writing the story that’s in me, begging to be let out.
That said, there’s one sense where we can’t escape thinking about our market and our readers, where we can’t escape writing to please them. Each genre has a series of tropes built into it, that anyone reading in it will be looking for. Romance? Then you’re writing a HEA or HFN ending, and preferably your two MCs are loving and faithful. Crime Noir? Then there are corpses and serial killers to fit in. Thriller? You need to find room for the odd terrorist threat or two. My sci-fi series is set against those old-school tropes of aliens and war and space exploration, faster-than-light travel and nifty spaceships. It wouldn’t be space opera without them.
There are other expectations too. Take cover art. A corpse with a knife in its back doesn’t scream “sweet romance!”; or dark moody artwork of, say, a reflection of a sinister man in a raven’s eye, doesn’t suggest the book is a light screwball comedy. We’re all in the business of catching the reader’s attention with something appropriate for the genres we’re writing, in the hope they’re enticed to at least read the blurb and then hit the ‘Buy now’ button.
In one sense, that’s at least playing to your market.
So we can’t escape the idea that we’re aiming our writing at a specific set of book-buyers and readers. But that doesn’t mean you have to churn out something so cliched that there’s no room for creativity. A plot and characters you phone in because they’re total genre stereotypes would be boring as fu… very boring, even if it ticks every reader expectation box.
So. To avoid writing to a formula, to find a balance between writing to the market and your own creativity, what do you do?
Simple. You’re a writer. You’ve learned to put words down to evoke worlds and meaning and emotion. Bring all those skills to the table. Use them. Know the genre you’re writing in and how to use and manipulate its tropes to suit you; know when to break and subvert them. Create characters who live and breathe on that page and who invade your readers’ imaginations; characters who are individuals, well-rounded with flaws as well as virtues; characters who are people, not flat words on a page. Craft realistic and thoughtful plots, that take your characters and put them into challenging situations where they grow and change. Build worlds that are clear, bright, consistent and exciting, in which your characters can live and those plots unfold.
In other words, be the best writer you can be, writing the best book you can.
That way, even if you aren’t the next great literary phenomenon, you’re true to yourself. Personally, I don’t think you can do better than that, and you’ll find your market and that core of fans who agree.
About Anna
Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments on everything from marketing employment schemes to organizing conferences for 10,000 civil servants to running an internal TV service. These days, though, she is writing full time. She recently moved out of the ethnic and cultural melting pot of East London to the rather slower environs of a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside where she lives with her husband. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who’s assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is.
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Thanks for marketing your thoughts (sorry). It’s a tough sell, and it’s hard to separate critiques in term of the quality of your writing (not everyone can write well) vs. approach. I for one am one who likes m/m/ romance, but also appreciates when it’s not all about the gay romance and anything else is secondary. I respect those who like that, and authors who write for that audience. Listen to the audience who likes what you write for, and then see if they think it’s good. I for one love your soldier first approach as well as how well you deliver. My suspicions are that there are more out there that don’t realize that, until they’ve read something like what you write.
You have a very good point here: “My suspicions are that there are more out there that don’t realize that, until they’ve read something like what you write.” Taking my own work out of the picture (it was merely an example), what I’ve found is that it takes something exceptional to coax me-as-reader out of the genres I love and am used to. Once I was tempted into shifter romance through my crit group member’s work, I was much more open to reading other things in similar genres. I’ve since enjoyed the True Blood series, for example.
I think we all need that challenge sometimes. We get too comfortable reading in our preferred genres, and we need that little bit of sweet talking “come and try this” to get us to widen our horizons a bit. Word of mouth has been the strongest motivator for me, to get me to read something new.