Thursday 21 April 2016

The price of being a bestseller?

On Wednesday night I listened to a talk from a successful women's magazine short story writer.  But the interesting thing was that when she talked about her real writing passion, it wasn't women's fiction.  It was crime.  Another writing friend who knows her work says that her crime is quite dark.

This raised the question of writing for the market just to earn money.  Our guest had decided that the women's magazine market offered her the best chance to earn a living.  I did toy with that idea myself a few years back, but my heart wasn't in that market.  My stories were about single women rejoicing about being out of constricting marriages, or women making great successes out of their careers.

But our speaker created a career for herself writing stories that aren't her real passion.  She is churning them out to pay the bills.  And that got me thinking about the price of success.

Publishers want novelists to establish their 'brand' right at the start of their careers.  They also love series with the same characters.  But I don't know if new authors think in terms of being trapped by their series when they get their first contract.  I'm sure that many are just so grateful to stop banging their heads against the publishing brick wall they accept the first contract offered.

But we need to have the vision to think about the long game of our career right from the start.  So our first published book or story needs to be in a genre and about a subject we're passionate about.  So if it's successful, we're happy to write many more using similar themes.  And if we have characters we love and want to develop through several books, so much the better.

If I applied that speaker's logic to writing novels, I should be writing crime or thrillers, or romance, for a shot at the bestseller lists.  But here's the thing: all these books are about humans doing things to other humans.  They're not my passion.  My passion is wildlife, and examining the way that humans use, misuse, and destroy it.

The price of havIng to write about humans murdering other humans would be too high for me.  My writing serves a higher purpose than mere entertainment, if murder can be called such a thing.  And SF  is the best route to explore the issues I'm interested in.  So I'll remain an SF writer, thank you, and take the longer and harder route to bestsellerdom.

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