Write To Market - Or Be Original?

A recent post in a writers’ group on Facebook asked for “tips on marketing” and I wept.
 
The person making the post might as well have asked for tips on building a space rocket.
 
Yes, they would get a few tips from people with some knowledge of building space rockets, but they would not provide sufficient depth of information to allow the questioner to build an actual working space rocket.
 
Marketing is something you have to learn from the ground up. If you don’t understand the basics you are probably doomed to waste a lot of time (and possibly money) doing the wrong things, before you eventually discover the right thing to do.

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I’m not going to try to write a blog about the whole subject of book marketing. It would require a whole series of blogs to discuss that, and we have written them before (see our blog archives).

​No, this blog is about one small, but very important, part of book marketing.
 
One of the things that I have never seen anyone say in Facebook writers’ groups, when discussing book marketing, is that the very first marketing decision that has to be made is actually made before a word of the book has been written.
 
It may not seem like a conscious decision, but it is one that is being made anyway.
 
Each author decides whether they are going to (a) write to market or (b) write something truly original.

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This is a crucial decision when it comes to marketing a book. A book written to market has a far higher chance of finding an agent and, if self-published, of selling a lot of copies.
 
Writing to market is about riding the current trends in books.
 
For example, according to this article, a rising trend in 2024 was romantacy. This is a mix of fantasy and romance. So, if you like writing fantasy or you like writing romance, then conflating the two stands a good chance of success right now.
 
The author of the article talks about it as though it is a genre, but it isn’t. Romance is a genre, fantasy is a genre, but romantacy is a subgenre of the two. It will generally be listed under the fantasy heading.
 
But that is a technicality. If you want to make a quick buck out of writing, then that is one of the subgenres to head for.

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However, the book will only do well so long as it adheres to the norms for the subgenre. It must contain the sorts of tropes that the readers expect to see in a romantacy novel, or the readers are likely to post unfavourable reviews and that will kill the book.
 
Some people (not us) would describe that as “formulaic” and turn their noses up at the very idea of writing to market.
 
Many authors choose not to write to market. They don’t like their creativity being curtailed in that way. They want to be free to write their story their way.
 
So, many authors eschew writing to market and concentrate on trying to find something original to write about.
 
And there is a market for originality too. There always has been and always will be. But it isn’t quite as attractive to agents who want something they can take to publishers which the publishers are actively seeking.

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To use a metaphor, it’s difficult to sell fish to someone who wants to eat fowl. And it is even harder to sell a species of fish that no one has ever seen before, even to people who like eating fish.
 
But all trends start somewhere. No one had ever heard of romantacy until quite recently. The earliest articles discussing it that I have been able to find were in early 2024, it is that new. So, your new original novel may be the big “write to market” subgenre for next year.
 
But in marketing terms, the two approaches to writing are very different, so they require different marketing strategies.
 
Yet no one is mentioning that in social media posts about marketing. Which means the Indie author can spend a lot of time using an unsuitable marketing strategy to sell their books.
 
We are not advocating either approach to writing. If someone were to submit a written-to-market romantacy to us we would give it due consideration because we are a business and we like to make money.

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But part of our mission is also to discover new creativity, so we would also consider something that isn’t written to market and to give the author a start in the business.
 
But we would use different strategies to market the two different books.
 
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