Who Is Writing That Trope You Love

Let me first state, before diving into this, that today's post is focusing on traditional print/published books. I am not looking at self-pubs, or digital only books here. These are the books we see on the shelves in the stores.

I hear a lot of authors doing what they should be doing. They are researching the stories being published. This is really one of the only ways to determine potential trends that are out there, and, more importantly, how your story might fit within that market (no, not what you should immediately start writing).  Unfortunately, for so many authors, they are missing an essential element to look at in the research.

Who wrote it?

Let's take the trope of a small town romance. Common theme. You find that these books seem to always be on the shelves, so clearly these books are hot themes and something you should be writing. But if you get out there and see who is writing those stories. If these are established authors, you need to understand that publishers know that this author already has the following. Pretty much, everything this author writes, they know the readers will buy it.

What you should be looking at are trends of new authors. What was it that publishers saw in these debut authors. What commonalities are you seeing in these new authors? This is going to tell you what the publishers are currently looking for. 

With this in mind, you will likely see a new trend. There aren't a lot of those debut authors out there. Why? If you saw latest sales figures from nearly all publishers, sales were down. They are sticking with those known authors for a while.