Writing to the Market
Last time I talked about platforms for comics and how the majority are written and marketed for teenage children - shojo/shonen. With the comics aimed at boys being super heroes and magic schools and sports, while the girls comics are romance and romance and romance. That’s what the platforms promote because that’s what sells. It’s what the majority of readers want and are willing to pay for on a regular basis. Totally makes sense in a commercial media transaction. If you want to make money you have to sell things people want to buy.
So what happens when you want to write stuff that people don’t want to buy? What if it’s not in the popular genre? What if it’s not aimed at the mass market demographics? Well, the obvious answer is that you won’t be able to sell it too easily and if it’s too far out of sync with contemporary tastes you’ll have to self pub it.
And contemporary tastes are where things are getting tricky. This past week folks talked about using TikTok influencers to find out what to read next. One gal made it sound like if you weren’t on TikTok writing content for the readers there then you hated money and just wanted an excuse to be miserable. Obvious engagement farming aside, it is true that if you want to sell to people who use a specific platform you’ll have to cook what they want to eat.
Say I want to write a one shot romance novel that will - according to the market - do well. Aside from going to BookTok and watching what the readers are demanding of books, I’d also need to read a few of the best sellers out there to see what the style and format looks like. I know from the commercial fiction discord I’m in that strict genres like romance have rules that must be followed. The biggest one is that it must end “happily ever after” or “happily for now”. Others include the characters getting together in the beginning of the story, losing each other, then getting back together at the end. Then there are character archetypes and tropes that are specific to the genre that readers will expect to see when they open the book.
Aiming for that niche market is key here because there is a wall of different books in 400 flavors, colors, shapes, and sizes in the bookstore. Each one has its own set of reader expectations and rules. Some want hardcore erotica while others want YA. There were some folks on twitter this week arguing about the level of adult content in movies and shows being too intense for them. And I get it, if you’re watching Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Game of Thrones, then yeah that’s probably more “lights on” adult than you are accustomed to compared to movies made during the Hays Code.
You know good and well that an MA rating on Netflix and HBO means. But in books? You’d have to already understand who the publisher or author is before hand. During the Hays Code years of film everyone was subjected to the strict rules of a handful of people, resulting in contemporary literature and plays that couldn’t be made into a film due to the content or theme. Regulating book content is a topic for another post but let’s just agree that being too strict with what can and can’t be published isn’t healthy for the literature market.
Back to writing a book that readers want, once you’ve picked the target audience and have researched other works in that genre you start outlining the thing. Once that makes sense you get to work on the first few drafts and get your beta readers to comb through it. If it meshes with them you go on to an editor for a final draft then on to your agent or publish it yourself. Your cover needs to match the style and look of others in your niche and your online presence needs to engage with other writers/readers in that niche. That might require a pen name and all new persona/accounts if you already have an audience in another genre. You send out ARC’s and hope for good early reviews and decent preorder numbers, after all - you are launching a commercial product to a pre-existing audience.
So you can see how writing a 80k book following someone who gets lost in IKEA for three hours and has a crisis over cold meatballs in the cafeteria because their girlfriend left them is going to be harder to sell than say - a romance novel where a couple keep running into each other in IKEA and reach for the same bag of frozen meatballs then leave together after getting fake plants and hot dogs.
The thing is, I want to sit and write the crisis IKEA story to vent frustrations and all that but do I - as the reader - want to sit through it? No, I want to sit through the IKEA romance story. One is written for entertainment value, and the other is a more serious introspective art piece. In a perfect world both would be sitting equally on the shelf, but the reality is one will be on a center display twenty deep while the other might not be in the shop at all.
I think it’s important to give commercial and artistic writing a fair chance. (I’m using the term artistic writing in place of “literary” because that’s a bigger argument beyond market value.) I could also swap the romance example for YA fantasy and still get this point across. Have I even made a point? I don’t know anymore. Just thinking out loud.