Author Thoughts

While I had fun writing the fairy story mash-up of The Frog Prince and Snow White, it reminded me of something really important: that is, as an Indy writer, I am free to write whatever I like.

In contrast, if I am trying to attract an agent, I have to write to market, in other words, write something which is currently red hot in the marketplace and the agent believes they can sell to a publisher. The same is true if I am trying to sell to a publisher directly. Both the agent and the publisher are in business; if they do not sell their products (my book), they go broke. Of course, trying to guess what will sell, or what the next big thing will be, is very difficult indeed.

To sell to an agent or a publisher, my story/product must also be recognisable. Is it a paranormal romance? A cozy mystery? A thriller? It is much harder to sell a story that is a sort of fantasy thriller set on Mars. It is like trying to sell an orapple. Lots of people love oranges; lots of people love apples; but what on earth is an orapple? Not sure if we want to try that one!  

Of course, saying that we Indy writers can write exactly what we want, is not totally true because it is so much easier to sell books if they clearly belong to one genre or another, or even better, clearly belong to a genre that is red hot.

When I realised my poems created a sort of spiritual story of my long trek into the Outback, I considered ignoring the development and sticking to my original plan of publishing them as a collection. After all, everyone knows what the genre of Poetry is but what have I now written? And to add to the complications, excerpts from my novels fitted into the story too.

Would a reader want to read this strange concoction? Or would the story end up as suspicious-looking as an orapple? I worried about the lack of genre label, which makes any book harder to find for readers. A search of the Internet revealed similar though not identical books but no clear genre label. Perhaps I will have to come up with my own, as I did with Deep Fantasy, when no label fitted my stories of the hero’s twin journeys. Time will tell.