What genres are particuarly hot right now? someone said that chick lit is dead or dying, but what about romance in general? Mystery? Horror? Fantasy? YA?
What genres do most editors look for?
What genres do most editors look for?
Genres
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Different editors look for different things -- they specialize almost as much as we writers do.
Romance is always a big seller. Chick-lit is not dead, but it's a whole lot harder to crack into than it was a couple years ago when it was huge. YA is selling bigger than ever, but I have heard that the huge of influx of people trying to break into it has made it tough (similar to the chick-lit scenario).
In the end, I think, you have to figure out what you write best, figure out how to best align your talents with the market and go for it.
Romance is always a big seller. Chick-lit is not dead, but it's a whole lot harder to crack into than it was a couple years ago when it was huge. YA is selling bigger than ever, but I have heard that the huge of influx of people trying to break into it has made it tough (similar to the chick-lit scenario).
In the end, I think, you have to figure out what you write best, figure out how to best align your talents with the market and go for it.
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The problem is that the editors are buying books based on what they think the market will be in eighteen months. They are reading the submissions then dealing a TAROT hand for each one that they might like.
Marketing people have more clout than eidtors so even though an editor might fall in love with a book and hope that it will create its own market, the marketers are not willing to do that. They'd rather read their statistics (which are olready eighteen months old) and deal their own TAROT hand.
It's even harder to figure out what the market will be that way.
Regards,
Scott
Marketing people have more clout than eidtors so even though an editor might fall in love with a book and hope that it will create its own market, the marketers are not willing to do that. They'd rather read their statistics (which are olready eighteen months old) and deal their own TAROT hand.
It's even harder to figure out what the market will be that way.
Regards,
Scott
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Yup that's what I did.
The problem with trying to be ahead of the curve is that you never are.
It's an illusion.
If you want to see what's popular now follow Amazon top 100 and if you want to see what will be popular in 18 months read the deals on Publishers marketplace.
The problem with trying to be ahead of the curve is that you never are.
It's an illusion.
If you want to see what's popular now follow Amazon top 100 and if you want to see what will be popular in 18 months read the deals on Publishers marketplace.
Be careful in how you use the word "genre." It's bad enough that the publishing industry misuses it as a reflex. (There are only four genres... and all of prose fiction is one of them.) This topic concerns not genres, but marketing categories and strategies. That should be all of the hint you need: They are labels ordinarily applied after a given work has been completed and submitted, all too often by people who have not read the work.
In short, relax. Write what works. Let the publisher worry about how to finely categorize a work, particularly since as an author you have no way to know what the publisher already has in the eighteen-month-long pipeline between contract and publication of a first novel (that's a historical median — there are a lot of longer and shorter experiences, but it seems to have held fairly constant since the demise of the Copyright Act's Manufacturing Clause allowed publishers greater ability to use overseas printers).
That is not to say that you shouldn't do appropriate research to determine where to submit your finished work. It is only to say that the lead time is soooo long that you shouldn't try to write what seems hot today based on today's BookScan figures, or bestseller lists, or other similar data.
In short, relax. Write what works. Let the publisher worry about how to finely categorize a work, particularly since as an author you have no way to know what the publisher already has in the eighteen-month-long pipeline between contract and publication of a first novel (that's a historical median — there are a lot of longer and shorter experiences, but it seems to have held fairly constant since the demise of the Copyright Act's Manufacturing Clause allowed publishers greater ability to use overseas printers).
That is not to say that you shouldn't do appropriate research to determine where to submit your finished work. It is only to say that the lead time is soooo long that you shouldn't try to write what seems hot today based on today's BookScan figures, or bestseller lists, or other similar data.
I like to write horror/supernatural, but was told by someone that horror is a very soft market and would be non-existant if not for Stephen King or Dean Koontz.
I vary between fiction with a chick lit feel, supernatural suspense, and horror. that's also what i like to read.
I vary between fiction with a chick lit feel, supernatural suspense, and horror. that's also what i like to read.
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Write what turns you on, never write to a trend.
The trend of the month will be long over by the time your MS gets in front of an editor.
On the other hand, good writing is always needed.
The trend of the month will be long over by the time your MS gets in front of an editor.
On the other hand, good writing is always needed.
Remember, someone somewhere has to be ahead of the curve, or it's not a curve. ;-)
But trying to do it produces literary fiascos like the fifteen or twenty Da Vinci Code lookalike clunkers that nobody seems to be buying very much. Chances are if you chase what's hot, take a year to write it, another year or more before it hits the shelves, it will be as stale as two-day-old tortillas.
Anne Rice also comes to mind. The millions of copies these writers sell for each novel is proof that it is not the market that is soft; it is the writing community. Most horror/supernatural is just really badly written tripe. If another writer emerges who can capture the imagination like these two, then he or she will sell, and maybe very well.