Episode Description:
In this thought-provoking episode of What If? For Authors, Claire Taylor explores the question, What if I don't write to market? Claire deconstructs the notion of market trends, breaking down how many assumptions about what sells are actually based on correlations rather than causations. She also addresses the fears and misconceptions many authors have about the necessity of writing to market for financial success.
Key Takeaways:
Defining "Writing to Market": Claire explores what writing to market actually means, challenging the idea that there is one clear definition of "the market" for any genre. She explains how commonalities between bestselling books don’t necessarily define the market, and that following trends doesn’t guarantee success.
Correlation vs. Causation: Claire discusses the importance of understanding the difference between correlation and causation when it comes to identifying what makes a book successful. Authors often mistake trends as being the cause of success when they might simply be coincidental.
Meeting Reader Expectations: While writing to market isn’t a guarantee of sales, meeting reader expectations in your genre is crucial. Claire talks about the importance of understanding the psychological appeal of tropes and delivering on the promises that your genre sets up for readers.
Flexibility and Creativity: Writing to market doesn’t mean you have to abandon your creative impulses. Claire encourages authors to find a balance between writing the stories they want to write and making them marketable. Sometimes adding a few familiar genre markers can help orient readers without compromising your unique vision.
Sitting with Uncertainty: Claire acknowledges that some books and series may not take off, despite an author's best efforts. She encourages listeners to accept the uncertainty of the publishing industry and to keep creating in a way that aligns with their true vision.
Why Listen? If you’ve ever wondered whether writing to market is the key to success, this episode will provide clarity and challenge some of the common assumptions in the industry. Claire offers a nuanced perspective on the balance between creative integrity and marketability, helping authors navigate the complex world of genre trends and reader expectations.
Join the Conversation: Have a question or topic you’d like Claire to explore? Send an email to contact@ffs.media.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors, as well as a humor and mystery writer. You can check out my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, by going to ffs. media forward slash sustain. Okay.
So today's topic feels long overdue. We're only at episode 15, but it always already, it feels overdue. So, , I would guess that's because it's one of the most frequently discussed topics in the industry. Today we're talking about writing to market. That's right. Today's question we're going to explore is, what if I don't write to market? Oh God, I have so much to say on this topic. So, so much. I'm really going to have to narrow it down. So I don't spend all day talking your ear off about this.
So I may not hit all of the points that I want to hit, but I'm going to go straight for the [00:01:00] heart of it. I think let's, let's get into asking the questions that not a lot of people are actually asking about this whole right to market thing. So if you're like, what if I don't write to market? What if I don't know what that means?
Oh my gosh. Will I ever have a career? I mean, spoiler alert. The answer is yes. That's fine. Right. That's kind of the point of this show. Um, but let's start with, , what the hell it even means to write to market. There are all kinds of misconceptions about what writing to market means, and we each bring a lot of connotation to the word market.
So it might be useful to look closer at what we're bringing to the conversation that doesn't necessarily exist in it organically. I want to be clear. First of all, Nobody really knows what the market is. Okay. There's never a clear definition. Just books that are selling? Like, what does that even mean? So let's take, for example, the genre of cozy mysteries and let's, , just absolutely tear this apart.
Okay. [00:02:00] So in the most general sense, cozy mysteries are clean mysteries with a sleuth solving some sort of crime. In the most general sense, you may look at what's selling and contemporary cozy mysteries and see that. Most of the books on the bestseller list have these things in common, female sleuths, small towns.
Maybe they're set in England. Does that mean that I've just defined the market? I don't think so. So commonalities between best selling books doesn't mean that the books with those commonalities will become best selling. Or that a book even needs to have those commonalities to be a best selling cozy mystery.
Classic red herring. That being said, if a reader loves cozy mysteries and has started to associate certain elements of them, then With books they enjoy reading, then the presence of those elements may subconsciously draw this particular reader in. And [00:03:00] yet, if you're an indie author, the market you want to look at is the indie market.
And if you're a trad published author, then you want to look at what's selling for trad publishers because that's probably what they'll pick up. And those two categories are almost always different. So let's go even more granular. We're going to deconstruct even more. Let's go even more granular here.
Not just cozy mysteries, but let's look at paranormal cozy mysteries. A sub genre of cozy mystery. So you've probably heard that witches Sell more books than psychics. And this is if you've done any, any research on what is selling in paranormal cozy mystery, which many, many people have, because the word really got around a few years ago that like, Oh, you can just publish one of these and make bank, um, which is not true.
You have to do other things and you may still not , make bank. But, , if you have done the research, you probably have heard that witches sell more books than psychics as you know, main characters. Does that mean That writing to market in a paranormal cozy space means [00:04:00] writing witches and not psychics?
I think that's the question to ask. We're trained to believe so, right? But what if you write psychics and make them a kind of witch? Ooh, now we're getting into some gray area. And that's what I did with my paranormal cozy, uh, series. And that series sells better than a lot of what you would call witch cozies.
And it's a psychic. I actually now have three series under that pen name that have psychic witches, sneaky sneaky, um, as the main characters. So what does that even mean? That it seems like that shouldn't be right. If we follow the logic of writing to market means writing main characters that are witches.
And if you don't write to market, you won't make money. I can tell you this series has. Done well. Okay, so meanwhile, there's also a historical cozy subgenre too. Historical when? The 1920s? The 1980s? Yeah, sorry, that's historical, y'all. [00:05:00] The 1860s? And historical where? The U. S., England, India. So you may look and see some commonalities around the bestsellers of female sleuths in the U.
S. in the 1920s, right? Maybe that's , what a lot of the top sellers in historical cozy have in common. But does that mean that you have to check those boxes to be writing to the market of historical cozies? I don't know. I don't know. And if paranormal cozies sell more on the whole than contemporary or historical cozies, let's just say, uh, does that mean that if you want to write to market in cozy mystery, you must write paranormal cozies about a female witch sleuth?
Okay. You get where I'm going. Am I destabilizing your ideas about what the market even means enough here? Can I, can I give it a rest? Actually, no, I can't. Let's keep going. So, all of that being said, I'm not saying that you should throw out the idea. Some tropes [00:06:00] and characters may help you sell books more easily than others in general.
For instance, I've only seen authors struggle to sell paranormal cozies that star mermaids. Right? So that doesn't mean that there will never be a breakout success with a mermaid sleuth. It just means that there's some appeal about mermaids isn't catching the subconscious attention of readers when they look for their next book.
At least not right now. I don't know what it is. Do we not like fins? Do we not like water? Is it just not something that we think about? Are a lot of people scared of swimming? I don't know. I don't know what it is. Is it just that it's not a witch? And people are looking for witches, and psychics, and witches.
To be honest though, we're only ever one major box office hit away from all the books that are a little like that box office hit suddenly selling. Right? It's only going to take one Mermaid sleuth hitting the box office and doing well [00:07:00] before all of the cozy authors who have written mermaids are going to be like, cha ching.
Um, so I mean, think about what Harry Potter and the Magicians did for the Magic Academy genre. Or what Fifty Shades did for the Grumpy Boss subgenre and like the alpha holes and that sort of thing. It sort of opened the public's mind to the fact that this thing exists and they kind of like it. So then they're going to go look for more.
So what we're really doing when we browse bestsellers in a genre we want to write in, and we find the commonalities between those books that are bestselling, what we're doing is to gather up a whole lot of correlations and hope that a few of them turn out to also be causations. Sometimes they do, most of the times they don't.
It's very uncomfortable for some people to hear what I just said. Writing to market often looks like a bad idea. Gathering up as many correlations as possible and just hoping to [00:08:00] God or whoever, the universe, Flying Spaghetti Monster, that a few of them are causations for the success of those books. So the main reason I see that authors and people subconsciously jump from correlations to causations without the logic actually following, um, and we know those two things aren't the same thing, right?
It's because assuming it's a causation creates a sense of control for us. When things are simply correlations, we don't feel the same power rush of thinking, then if I just do X, I can expect Y to happen. That same power rush, which is what we get when we believe we're working with a causation.
We don't get that with correlations. So we will very subtly assume or function upon the belief that the are causations because it gives us more sense of power over the world. So [00:09:00] this is why authors can write a book perfectly quote unquote to market and it doesn't sell. The things you thought were causations were actually just correlations that you were picking up on.
So maybe the top selling books all have three main features in common. But those are just correlations. And the reason why those particular books are selling us that they're published by Penguin Random House, and they have a massive marketing budget behind them, right? Maybe that's the actual causation.
Penguin maybe just happens to like to publish books with those three main features in them. And that got you thinking that the three main features were the reason for the rankings and not all that big publisher money. Are those books profitable just because they're bestsellers? We don't know.
Okay, I know I'm really taking away some people's toys with that deconstruction, but let's look at how the confusion between correlation and causation leads to some ideas about writing to market that aren't necessarily true. [00:10:00] So you may think if I write to market, I can't write what I want to write. You may think if I write to market, I'll make more money.
You may think the only way to make money is to write to market. You may say the reason I'm not making money is because I'm not writing to market. And you may say writing to market means blending in with every other book in the genre. So false down the list. If you've been feeling that resistance to writing to market or writing to market, And if you're not writing to it, then there you go.
Okay. Now there is something to be said for meeting reader expectations. Not many authors are particularly talented at sussing out what those expectations really are deep down though. And even fewer are aware that they're missing the target completely. Take for example, grumpy sunshine romances. So trope where one partner, usually the man in hetero [00:11:00] couples, is.
Grumpy. Then he meets the ray of sunshine, usually the woman in hetero couples. Okay. So let's say an author recognizes that there's a so called market for this term. , Grumpy Sunshine, meaning a lot of readers seem interested in books that have this as the central trope. As I mentioned before, it could be a matter of maybe one author who's very popular, writes a lot of these and is skewing the market because her readers would read anything she wrote.
But let's just say that Grumpy Sunshine is something a lot of readers are proven to be clamoring for. That doesn't mean that this author, this hypothetical author, really understands who Why? What is the psychology behind this appeal? If you jump into a space like this and you don't understand the underlying psychological appeal of the trope or the subgenre, it's entirely possible to write a grumpy sunshine pairing that does not, in fact, Satisfy the reader's desire.
So what is it that has these readers by the throat [00:12:00] metaphorically? I have to specify that with romance. Uh, what like, is it watching the grumpy man slowly start to soften? Is that the appeal? Is it the friction between the man and the sunshiny woman? Do readers like it when she annoys him? Do they like it when he falls for her instantly and is fighting it?
Is it both? What is at the heart of this? And of course you knew this was coming. Uh, what Enneagram types are they actually hungry to see in this dynamic? Is there a preference? Do they like more of the grumpy type 8 who is kind of a bully when he's grumpy? Or more of the one who has high standards for everyone and is grumpy because he's taken on too much responsibility for everyone?
Or maybe a grumpy 5 who thinks everyone is acting irrationally and just wants to be kind of left alone to do what he needs to do. Which flavor of appeal is there? And are we looking at a sunshiny Enneagram 7 who just wants to have [00:13:00] fun, or a 2 who always wants to care and nurture those around her? Or maybe even a 3 who can, you know, Never be held down and feels like there's always a good path forward.
I belabored this point to show you that you can quote, unquote, write to market and still fail to meet the reader expectations. And also like readers are notoriously bad at explaining the appeal of the thing to them. They have no reason to know the language to describe the appeal. They just know what they like, and that's fine.
That's their job to just know what they like. However, if you market something as a rom com, um, And the couple doesn't end up together at the end. You're really steppin in it. And if you write a cozy mystery and forget to add in a mystery, or fail to solve the mystery by the end of it, which I have seen happen, you're also steppin in it.
So there are some bendable rules, but pretty firm rules for each genre insofar as what makes it [00:14:00] that genre, and not some other genre. So undermine these rules. At your own risk. This is really where I start to put my foot down with authors I work with on story. If you want a lot of readers mad at you, like if you have an expensive and time consuming punishment kink, then by all means, write a romance without a happily ever after or a happily for now ending.
Go for it. If that's a story you absolutely must write though, a lot of romance, but they don't end up together, they decide it's better not to, uh, then maybe Maybe don't market it as romance. Unless you have that punishment kink, then go for it. But instead consider whether it would maybe fit into literary fiction or women's fiction instead.
And I'm not telling you to write a different story. I'm telling you once the story is written, Decide the best way to convey it to the readers so that you are meeting their expectations, so that what they expect to find when they [00:15:00] open the cover and look at that first page is what they get. So if you have a story that comes to you and doesn't quite fit into any of the genres you know about, that's okay.
No need to panic here. So there might be an established genre for it that you just don't know about yet. Or maybe you can create your own. So paranormal women's fiction authors did this very intentionally through a group effort, right? And then there's romanticy as a recently sort of branded genre that's entered the parlance.
Everyone knows romanticy now. Well, readers of romanticy know romanticy. Um, and who knew fairy smut would be this big 10 years ago, right? So new genres do occasionally occur. And sometimes if you really want to put the effort into it, you can, you can make it happen. So you can write the story how it wants to be written.
But you're gonna want to be extra savvy when it comes to marketing, if you just write the story exactly as it comes out, right? And you don't, you just let it flow and you don't think about any of these [00:16:00] marketing concerns. When it comes to marketing, you're going to have to be extra savvy.
So don't market your book as something it's not, and if you find that you can't put words to what it is that you wrote, not even like a clear genre mashup comparison, then you're just going to learn real quick why people say stick to a genre, right? You're going to learn the lesson.
They're trying to save you the frustration of trying to explain your book a million times over without having a clear shared definition to start with.
So there is the option. A little bit of compromise to be had here that will save you the frustration in the long run of trying to explain what your book is. Cause you have to explain it to people before they even will consider buying it. So you could draft the book the way you want to draft it, then try to describe it.
Try to describe it as if you're telling the person who's meant to read it, okay? If you can't really describe it or if that description goes on and on and on, then [00:17:00] maybe it's time. To add some more familiar genre markers that won't affect the underlying message and feeling of the story, but will make your life easier by helping convey to the right readers what they can expect between the covers.
And yes, this is a recommendation that I usually find myself making to type fours, the individualists. If you're a type four, I urge you to remember that the most creative people are those who can be creative within some constraints. That takes the most creativity. Now, if you're someone who's here just to make as much money as you can with each book, I want to warn you that you may run out of steam soon.
And that's because some books will never hit. They won't. Can you take that? Can you sit with not knowing why, instead of assigning made up reasons that lead you down the wrong path? So some books, some series, simply will not take off like others, and that goes back to the correlation [00:18:00] causation trap. What you thought was causation was actually correlation, and then sometimes there's just no clear explanation.
For why it didn't hit, why it didn't take off. There are usually too many factors at play in publishing to isolate a single one with any sort of warranted confidence.
So, if you're wondering, what if I don't write to market, and this is causing you some level of anxiety, some level of angst, actually, I heard it pronounced angst recently, and it sounds, that sounds nice in Germanic, angst, , whatever. I'm from Texas, angst, it's angst, ain't it? Anyway, I don't know how I got here.
If you're wondering, what if I don't write to market, my answer is this. What market? What market? What is your definition of a market based on? How can you be sure you're not mistaking correlation with causation when you are defining that market? So [00:19:00] writing to quote unquote market is also no guarantee of money anyway.
As long as you can clearly explain what your book delivers to the audience who will enjoy it, you're on a pretty smart path. So just keep doing that. And if you find that your book is too hard to explain to people through, like, the visual image of a cover or a short headline and sales page, then it might be time to get some help on those things, including possibly tweaking the book itself to hit more familiar, Character plot theme and genre signposts for readers so that they have something to hold on to as they dive into your unique story.
Just a little bit of familiarity can go a long way towards orienting the reader and letting them know what they're in for. So writing to market, whatever that means, doesn't guarantee sales. And writing what you want to write doesn't doom your career. So you might as well start by writing something true and build and adjust from [00:20:00] there, right? That's what revisions are for. That's what beta reads and editor feedback are for. Then do that over and over and over again. Until someday you have a catalog that you're really proud to call your own.
So that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Um, I do offer story consulting services for authors. I don't talk about it much, uh, because I'm doing all this other career stuff, but if there's one thing I'm really good at in this life. It's that. It's the story consulting. Um, I was an editor for years.
I studied this stuff in college and I just kind of have a knack for assessing where things are falling apart in your plot and character development. So anyway, I call it the story alignment and if you want to read about it, You can go to storyalignment.com and read more or schedule some time with me. I would love to chat more about your story and help you kind of figure out what is the market, where am I trying to hit market, where, [00:21:00] what's causation correlation?
You know, I can help you guess on that. And then really, like, what genre is my story? What is this missing that readers will expect from a story that I market this way? All of those things we can talk about in a story alignment. So. I hope you'll come see me. Anyway, I'm Claire Taylor, and this has been another episode of the What If For Authors podcast.
Thank you so much for joining me, and I'll see you in the next episode.