In some previous blog post, I blathered on about my dislike for folks who were on the soap box ranting about the idea of writing to market.
I can’t quite recall what I wrote (and am too lazy to search around on my own website) but the general gist was: Meh, I want to write what I want to write.
I abhorred the idea of doing research to determine what genre of story I was going to write. It didn’t feel like writing. It felt like cheating.
But then I got swayed.
I listened to folks talking about this on podcasts.
I read a book on the idea of writing to market.
I bought a market research report for my genre.
And the funny thing was that for a long time lover of letters it was the numbers that convinced me. (This probably makes sense since my day job involves a fair deal of number crunching and data analyzing to figure out what makes a good email.)
You might be asking at this point…
what is writing to market?
In a nutshell, it’s writing what readers want to read but can’t find enough of.
The basic idea is that:
- You start with researching a type of genre that you are interested in writing. So, in my case, that is fantasy or science fiction.
- Then you analyze the market for various subgenres (for example, fantasy and dragons or fantasy based on Arthurian legends). What you are looking for is genres that sell decent numbers of books and that do not have a lot of books being sold. This tells you essentially that readers want to read these types of books and can’t find enough of them.
- Finally you read, research, and write a book in that genre. (Ideally pretty quickly since market trends do shift.)
So, that’s writing to market in a nutshell.
I’ll be releasing a book using this model in early 2017 to test how well this idea works and how well I can execute it.
Want to learn more about writing to market? Then check out Chris Fox’s book Write to Market.
