That’s so fetch.

Posted July 2, 2013 by Jennifer Ellision in blog, Uncategorized / 2 Comments

Stop trying to make fetch happen, Jen.

Okay but really, this post was supposed to be about trends– specifically writing to trends. So you can see where I veered off a little because I believe that one should always seize the opportunity to work in a Mean Girls quote where one can.

ikr

Ahem. But moving on.

So a couple of things happened recently that brought this topic to mind for me as a blog post.

The first that I’ll mention is the #MSWL or Manuscript Wishlist Twitter tag. Because a few writers that I saw in the tag were trying to jump on writing things that the agents and editors tweeting requested. If they were simply inspired, nbd, writers, do yo thang. But if they’re specifically trying to address a trend, we’ve got a problem.

And that brings me to the next “thing that happened,” wherein I interviewed a few authors, Leigh Bardugo among them, and she said THIS:

The worst advice I ever heard given was to look at the market and try to find out what it wants. Essentially, to watch trends and then write to the trends. That is the best possible way to end up with a book that won’t sell. Because anything that’s happening– that’s on the shelves– by the time you finish that book, it will be over.
yes
Four for you, Leigh Bardugo. You go, Leigh Bardugo.
(If you’re interested, the interview in its entirety is on my book blog)
Look, I’m not trying to tell you not to pay attention to trends. You should know the market that you’re in. But I think it would be sad for someone to write a book to try and fill a gap.
This is another instance where I tell you to write the book you want to write. Because trend or no trend, there is no guarantee of a book’s success. There are no guarantees in this business at all.
My current draft is a YA historical. Just yesterday, I heard the genre described as a “hard sell.” But knowing that doesn’t mean I stop. It doesn’t mean I don’t write the book. It means I do my damnedest to make it the best I can. That is the only thing that I can control.
A well-timed trend can help your book along OR saturate the market so that you have a hard time pitching and/or selling it. But the only way to tell is to try.
doyourthangloveya

2 responses to “That’s so fetch.

  1. This is so true. I’m cataloguing all of the MSWLs to Tumblr right now, and I keep on seeing people who tweeted about how they were going to start writing X thing, because agents and editors keep on mentioning it, and all I want to do is scream.
    Writing a book to try to hop on the trend train of whatever is a terrible idea if you wouldn’t have written the book regardless.

    But mostly I loved this post because of Mean Girls. 😉

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