You Do You, Part II

And Watch the Market Come to You

When the title rhymes and then the subtitle also rhymes you know it’s going to be a good Shelf Life.

Welcome to part two of two on the subject of writing to market. Before we begin, I’d like to wish a very happy birthday to devoted Shelf Life reader and longtime parent My Dad. As this hits your inbox, I am in my car journeying away from his Tennessee Mountain Home where I have been visiting these past several days. I’m writing this in the past tense but I haven’t even journeyed there yet, let alone back again. As you know, I am writing this in advance to make sure you are not deprived of Shelf Life for even one day. I know how much you look forward to it.

On Thursday, which is in your past but my future, we talked about writing to market and how to balance market considerations with your own creative drive to create manuscripts that come from your own original ideas but take gentle inspiration from their market to help them go on to be commercially successful. Why would you want to do this? Why not just write what’s in your heart and let the chips fall where they may?

For a lot of reasons, but a big one is that you’d like to sell your writing. There are as many reasons to write as there are writers, and not everyone who writes is interested in doing so in exchange for money. There are those among us for whom writing is pure form of artistic expression and publication, let alone publication in exchange for cash money, is a perk or a bonus and not a goal. There are also those among us for whom writing is a means to an end and that end is income; these are the folks who would not write a manuscript if they knew in advance that it would not sell. Neither of these approaches is good or bad, wrong or right, or better than the other.

Many or most of us, I think, are walking some middle path where we write to express ourselves creatively and we also would like our work to go on to be commercially successful. I think the dream that many of us have is that we can have both things: Total freedom of creative expression to write whatever we want, and then commercial success for whatever that product is. But if you’ve ever found yourself with an unsalable manuscript in the trunk—or even many of them, like I’ve got—you might wish you had some ideas about how to guide your manuscript toward marketability even as you write it.

This article contains those ideas. Last Thursday I had two “Do”s and a “Don’t” for you, and today I have two more “Don’t”s and another “Do” to help you down the path of moderation.

Don’t: Set Your Heart on One Agent or Market

I left off last week with advice to consider #MSWL and calls for submissions to help generate marketable ideas, flesh out ideas you already have that don’t want to come together into a plot, or give your projects a little extra oomph to rise above the rest. But there can be danger down this road when you set your sights on the agent who tweeted the #MSWL that inspired your novel or the anthology whose call for subs prompted your latest short.

That’s why I cautioned you to take these types of calls as prompts and not instructions: Let them inspire you, but don’t set yourself on the task of writing to the particular person’s or market’s specifications with the expectation that you’ll land a contract with them for sure.

When a magazine or anthology puts out a call for subs, or an agent or editor shares their #MSWL, they get a lot of responses. Submissions and queries are always part numbers game and part exercise in absolute subjectivity. You could have written the exact manuscript the agent is looking for, to a T, but they might receive hundreds of queries that speak to their particular wish and if yours is their second favorite, that can be all it takes not to receive an offer of rep. Even if this is exactly the book the agent is looking for, they can probably only rep one of that exact book at a time. If your query arrives the day after they’ve signed that one, you might get that completely unexpected and unexplained “thanks but no thanks” form reject even though your project looked like a perfect fit.

And then the complete subjectivity comes into it. Your manuscript might have every element the agent mentioned in their #MSWL, but if your writing style doesn’t do it for them, or the synopsis in your query doesn’t suck them in—or any of hundreds, or thousands, of other tiny things aren’t quite right—then it just won’t be a match.

Likewise with magazines and anthologies, when they put out a call for submissions on a topic or theme, they’re certain to receive more subs than they can hope to include in the final issue or anthology. No matter how closely your work fits the theme, there are any number of reasons it might not be selected.

But even if the agent, editor, publisher, magazine, or anthology whose call inspired you says no, that doesn’t mean there aren’t others out there who would love to publish your manuscript now that it’s written. Don’t give up if your first choice declines your piece. 

Do: Consider Your Readers

The customer is always right—not when it comes to how a business owner should run their shop or how a manufacturer should make their product, but when it comes to what the customer’s taste is, what the customer likes and wishes to purchase, the customer is always right. You can surprise a customer with something they didn’t know they wanted, you can even sell a customer something they don’t want if you’re a good enough salesperson, but you can’t make the customer like something they don’t like.

This is true for readers, too. The reader is always right when it comes to what they like to read. The good news is, there are hundreds of millions of readers who read books and stories written in English, so there’s a truly wide and broad range of tastes and your work is going to appeal to someone. I don’t believe there’s any writing out there that has no reader anywhere.

But when it comes to readers in groups, there are considerations. Are there readers of YA who love graphic sex and violence? Sure. But readers of YA as a group do not want to read that in their YA selections. Conventions are usually conventions for some reason. It’s not always the reason you think, but there’s usually or always a reason somewhere. Sometimes the convention doesn’t come from the readers—sometimes the convention comes from what editors and publishers think readers want. When that goes on too long is when you usually have a surprise breakout hit that defies what we thought the readers wanted—we left them hungry for something too long and they fell on it, ravenous, as soon as they saw it.

This is all to say, there is always room for convention-breaking manuscripts—but most of the manuscripts that get selected for publication are not convention-breaking, rule-defying manuscripts. Generally speaking, readers want to be delighted and surprised by what they read but within the boundaries and guidelines of what they are expecting to get. They want to be surprised but they don’t really want their expectations to be confounded. When you pick up a book from the YA shelf in the bookstore, you have some expectations for what you’re getting.

When you’re writing, do know your shelf. Do know your audience, and what they like, and what they want from the books they read (generally speaking). Do know who your competition is—the books that would be situated all around yours on the endcap at Barnes & Noble under the sign that says “New and Hot in [Your Genre Here].”

Don’t: Shoehorn Trendy Tropes Into Your Story

You’re studying the competition, you know the market inside and out, and you’ve got your thumb on the pulse of what’s hot and what’s not. You definitely know what tropes everybody’s TikToking about right now.

When I use the term tropes I mean literary themes or devices that get used often—even overused—in stories. If they’re truly overused, they can be considered clichés, especially if they’re not done in a fresh way or with any twist of originality. 

Different genres have their own tropes. For instance, horror has things like “found footage,” “conjuring gone wrong,” and “let me just step out of my house into the darkness to see what that noise was.” Chances are, if you read or watch horror, you’ve seen dozens of variations on these. How about romance? “Love triangle,” “marriage of convenience,” and “oh no this hotel room only has one bed” come to mind.

When you see similar books in one genre all becoming successful at the same time or in succession, part of that usually comes down to sharing the same trendy tropes. For instance, think about how Twilight was massively successful and everyone was out there trying to write the next vampire/werewolf fantasy romance but then the next big thing was futuristic dystopian sci-fi series The Hunger Games, and then next after that was Divergent. You know what they all had in common? A love triangle.

It’s not bad to use tropes in your writing. Tropes appear in writing so much because readers like them—especially when they’re subverted or done in a fresh, interesting way. I’m definitely not saying you should not use tropes. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t attempt to fit a specific trope (or tropes) into your story just because it’s the one that everybody on BookTok is going bananas over right now. 

For one thing, as I discussed in last Thursday’s installment, by the time yours is written and published the market will be on to something else. But more importantly, using tropes for their own sake is going to ring hollow and feel derivative and that is what makes a trope a cliché. In conclusion, do use a trope if it’s right for your characters and your plot, but don’t stick a popular trope in there just so you can market your book as “enemies to lovers” or “locked room mystery” because that’s what’s in fashion right now.

At the end of the day, everything you write should be true to you and the story you want to tell. But there’s no harm in taking inspiration and guidance where you can find it to shape your story into one that has readers clamoring for more. Inspiration is all around you. Plus, remember, nothing good ever came out of a vacuum. 

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