If you are an author struggling to find a place to get published, it might all be coming down to your genre selection. Yes, we want you to write what you like and feel a connection to, but that might be the thing standing in your way.
If, for example, you write stories that are on the smaller size, say 50-60 K in word count, you have single handedly eliminated all of the larger publishers who are looking for the larger single title houses. Now you are down to the publishers who do series or potentially digital only. If this is not something your genre fits with, then you are simply out of luck.
If you write inspirational romance, and it is pretty hard core inspirational romance, you have now limited yourself to obviously publishers who do this. Please understand, that these publishers often have a smaller number of books they produce each year because they simply do not have the extensive bookstores to send the books to.
I write poetry so you can fully understand that market is VERY limited.
Write short stories? You are limited to magazines and selling those on a story by story basis.
We see the same thing right now with the LGBTQ movement and authors. I want you to understand that it is not that the publishers are discriminating against these authors or this genre. It is simply an issue of supply and demand. It might seem like there are a lot of people who would want to buy the books, but if the demand really is not that real, then publishers are simply not going to invest in the writing.
I have heard this one a lot with women's fiction. "You know the quilting movement is really making a comeback and there are a huge number of women who would buy my women's fiction novel because it has quilting as a key element." Um, not necessarily. Just because they quilt does not mean they read quilting fiction. Just because there are quilting stores does not mean they will carry a full line of quilting fiction books.
Just something to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment