Follows “What is writing to trend?”
What Is Writing To Market?
The pros and cons of writing to market
This post contains affiliate links to products on Amazon. I may receive compensation if you buy using those links.Confusing trends and markets
I was tripped up here for a while thinking it sounded like a very bad idea to write to market, but what I actually found out is that writing to ‘market’ is not writing to ‘trend’, which is an elusive beast in itself.
This article has largely come about because I felt like a twit for confusing the two. I decided this was a gap in my knowledge that needed to be filled.
The trouble is when you look up writing to market and writing to trends people either tend to be very vague about the differences between the two, the people that do know often struggle to define it in a way that is clear, or there are books that delve in deeply to the topics.
This started out as a post about the basics of what I have been able to glean about what the differences between the two types are however, there’s a fair bit to cover and so to break things up a bit I separated the two posts out.
Even so, there’s still a lot more to it than I could cover here and I will link to the things I have seen that look helpful if you want to delve in further. If I’m missing the mark at any point, or you have something to add, please feel free to leave a comment.
What is writing to market
Information that distinguishes trends from markets often gets a bit blurry; not helped by the fact that there are overlaps because knowing your market is a good idea no matter whether you’re writing to market or trend.
When writing to market, rather than trend, there’s a very similar process on the face of it, but you start with knowing the genre that you want to write in and you generally stick with it and build your brand as an author around that genre.
You can niche down within your chosen genre, so if you’re writing unicorn fantasy you might write about them in hats when that’s in, and tutus when that’s popular, but you won’t then jump to a different genre altogether, say space opera ninja kittens, when that’s popular.
When writing to market you stick to your genre, whatever that is, and learn everything you can about it. It doesn’t matter what genre you write in, but it’s better if it’s something you enjoy writing.
If you write to market you’ll need to learn what people expect within that genre. For example, your murder mystery better have at least one murder in it, your Romance has to have a happy ending.
To analyze the market of what you’re writing is you need to analyze what readers are drawn to, and what they expect. I don’t mean that you copy what others have done, I mean that you know the feel of the genre.
I.e, does the writing tend to be flowery or descriptive? Does it need to start with a bang? Do plots tend to be fast-paced, or can they be a slow burn? What kinds of worlds are acceptable? What kind of cover do people expect to see, people or landscapes? It’s not about copying, it’s knowing what the parameters are, and there are a lot of parameters.
This is good practice even if you write to trend. It’s best to know the market you’re pitching too, and so the two disciplines are intertwined at some level.
As a writer no doubt you will also be a hungry reader, so give yourself the homework of reading some books in your chosen genre, and do a bit of research to find out what the dos and don’ts of your genre are. You may be able to break the rules later, but you need to know what those rules are first.
Pros and Cons of Writing to Market
Pros
- You have more time to craft your story because you’re not worrying about whether the trend will fizzle out before you get there.
- You can really get to know your genre well and you don’t have to constantly be looking around at every other genre to see what it’s doing.
- You can still write to trend to a certain extent within your genre. You can see what is likely to do well, and niche down and ride the waves of success.
- If you write to market you can submit to agents and then self publish if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason. It might take a lot longer, but the options are there. If you’ve previously self-published your book, you might struggle to get an agent to represent it if it’s not doing that well.
Cons
- The trouble is sometimes a genre is in vogue, sometimes it’s out and authors who stick to their genre will not have the flexibility to jump train if a particular genre isn’t popular at the moment. But, if you have been writing in one genre for a while hopefully, you’ll have built up a fan base who will be ready to buy and champion your books.
- It can take years and years to not only write your book, but also to find an agent who will find a publisher, and then the editing and the processing. And there’s no guarantee that your book won’t get dropped, there’s also no guarantee that your book will do well.
Tools
Below are affiliate links to products on Amazon. I may receive compensation if you buy using those links.For writing to market
There are a lot of aspects on how to dig into writing to market. There’s a whole book on it called Write to Market by Chris Fox, and I recommend it if you want to learn more. It’s one I’ve seen recommended repeatedly from multiple sources.
Sources that incorporate both trends and marketing tools
Books
This book looks like a pretty down to earth book and could really go under both trends and market: Masterclass: Write a Bestseller: How to plan, write and publish a bestselling work of fiction (Teach Yourself) by Jacq Burns
There are also plenty of writing groups you can join and learn from like 10 minute novelists, or 20 Books to 50k amongst a host of others. On these groups you can search previously asked questions, or ask your own.
You can also ask #WritingCommunity on Twitter or search #writetips
See also
My post on Writing To Trend
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