Writing: Balancing Personal Interests with Market Appeal

 

There are certain issues writers always struggle with. 

When do I show versus tell?
Am I using too much passive voice?
Should I write to please the market or to please myself?

It's always a struggle to find that balance between "write what appeals to a large audience" vs "write what appeals to me even if I'm the only one who gets a kick out of it." 

I don't write anything I don't have some interest in, but since I want to earn a living... or at least enough money to support my crippling book addiction... I need to sell books that people want to read.

And, to be honest, I want to write books that please a large number of readers. I write partly for the joy of knowing that I've shared a story that touched another soul, whether to entertain with a light, sprightly tale or with a deeper, more complex epic. I love it when readers write to me and tell me, to paraphrase one letter I particularly cherish: "Something in your book helped me deal with something that I was facing in my own life." 

Another thing I love is when readers tell me they can't stop thinking about, say, Dindi and Kavio, because they have become like real friends. Or even when writers get furious at the villains in my stories for being such jerks! 

That's awesome. 

But I also let myself write stories that I know are likely to have a much smaller readership. For instance, for a long time now (on and off), I've been working on a hard science fiction story set one billion years in the future. I wanted to hypothesize how a future with certain specific parameters would impact the evolution of life and humankind. Although I've clothed the story story in a space opera adventure so it's not tedious, I still know that it's not going to have the same widespread appeal as Paranormal Romance series. 

(Hey, if I'm wrong and it turns out to be break-out series, that's great.)

The point is that I spend a lot of time reading books about biology, ecology, sociobiology and evolution, so I want to write a story that explores those themes. I'm sure there are a few other readers who will enjoy it on that level, and hopefully a few more who will tolerate the hard science as long as the adventure story in the foreground is fun as well. 

One reason there will (very likely) be less readers of a hard science fiction series than a paranormal romance series is that, whether you like it or not, more male readers will be attracted to read hard sf, and more female writers will be interested in paranormal romance. 

Are there exceptions? Obviously--I'm one myself. I like both. But statistically, that's how breaks down.

I was visiting Writing in the Crosshairs blog, who wrote a post entitled What Do Women Want? which is really about writing to market. Roland Yeomans points out that women account for 80% of fiction sales. (Females actually drive many consumer markets.)  That translates into a tide of money that floods toward genres aimed at giving female readers what they want.

No wonder, according to Fortune, "The romance novel sales boom continues":

Unit sales for romance books topped 47 million in the 12 months ending March 2021 (including print and e-book sales combined), representing an increase of 24% from the previous year, according to NPD BookScan. Romance accounted for 18% of adult fiction unit sales in the 12 months ending March 2021, making it the second most popular fiction genre overall—second only to general adult fiction—which accounted for 30% of adult fiction sales in the same time frame.

Now you can tell me that gender is a construct with no objective existence and blah blah blah. My response is: great, sign up to get alerted when my hard science fiction trilogy comes out (Monad, Haplad, Polyad) because you may be among one of the select readers who isn't put off that the hero of the first book in that series is a Hermaphrodite Cyborg!

But, if that's not your cup of tea, I'm not offended or hurt. I get it. It's okay to read what you like, to read for pleasure, and to enjoy, through the literary imagination, situations that you wouldn't necessarily want to live, whether that's a marriage to an overbearing duke or waking up from cryogenic sleep and discovering you're the last of your kind. (Or are you?)

There's another point that Roland makes which is worth repeating. We writers can try to write to please as many readers as we can and still fail. Sometimes we just don't hit that chord. I agonize over "getting it right," delivering a story that really satisfied the reader. But I know that sometimes even stories I love don't always land the same way with every reader. It happens, because we are all individuals.

So, ultimately, every writer has to write a novel that at the very least pleases the writer herself. The book will be loved by at least one reader.

Better than none!

Interested in hard science fiction adventure set in the far future? Email me: tara at taramayastales dot com, and ask to be alerted when the trilogy comes out.

If a paranormal romance is more your style, grab the books in the Arcana Glen series.