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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Dresdenus Prime on September 17, 2012, 02:58:44 PM
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This is sort of an expansion to my old post, "Are Readers Growing Tired of New Urban Fantasy?"
I thought I would make a new topic to discuss all fiction in general - what are people growing tired of? Is it time for aspiring writers to look past UF? What's the new "in" genre? Jim Butcher is currently working on a Steampunk novel, and tomorrow Jay Kristoff's "Stormdancer" is released (Which I am VERY excited about) so do you see Steampunk making a big push in the next year?
What do you think? Where is Sci-Fi currently sitting at? or Dystopian? While it's important for aspiring writers to write where they feel the most comfortable and what they love, I also think it's important to pay attention to the current and potential future trends in order to attract readers.
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I can't wait for the current popularity of dystopias to pass. Nor, indeed, steampunk - I would be a totally happy bunny had there been no further steampunk after The Anubis Gates.
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Well I think normal fantasy has been given a huge push from A Song of Fire and Ice. Between the book and the HBO show its a pretty big thing.
But I don't think UF is trending out at all, vampires seem to be plenty popular, although I have noticed a lot of people are finally starting to grasp that real vampires don't sparkle =P
I think people tend to switch between their few fav genres a lot. After a few UF books ill throw in a fantasy and then a few sci fi then back to UF.
I have noticed an epic increase in zombie novels and also end of the world type books.
I still think a writer should go with what they like the most, I mean if you have never read a sci fi book or don't like sci fi, you prob are not going to pen the next epic space opera.
my two cents
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I can't wait for the current popularity of dystopias to pass. Nor, indeed, steampunk - I would be a totally happy bunny had there been no further steampunk after The Anubis Gates.
What about the coming Jim Butcher steampunk series?
Once the revision of COLD DAYS is done, I will be writing the first book of my Steampunk series, which is called The Cinder Spires at the moment. The first book, (working title of 'The Aeronaut's Windlass') should be around the length of the first Alera book, and I'm planning to get it done by year's end, AT WHICH POINT I will then begin the next Dresden novel. :)
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What about the coming Jim Butcher steampunk series?
I know I will at least be giving it a try. I have never cared for steampunk, but Butcher has built enough credit as an author with me for me to give it a shot just because its his series.
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Dystopia certainly seems to be in vogue thanks to The Hunger Games, and teen romance has really exploded in the past five years. I think Urban Fantasy is riding that wave - while many readers will only want to read the Paranormal Romance sub-genre, I think a lot of people will be moving on to other forms of UF.
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What I think is interesting is that there seem to be two tracks for genre fiction right now. There are the slower trends going on in the main genres, like Fantasy and Sci Fi with their currently popular subgenres of low fantasy, urban fantasy and dsytopias. And then there's the stuff that's going on in sf/f YA, which cycles through trends a LOT faster than 'mainstream' genre publishing.
ex: I remember listening to a podcast from a big author, Patrick Rothfuss, I think, where he wondered if the next new, relatively unexplored Thing in genre fiction would be angels. But all I could think was, Really? Didn't angels cycle in and out of popularity 2-3 years ago?
And they did. It had just happened in YA sf/f. The current boom for dystopias started in YA, too. The first steampunk novel I saw with lots of presence in book stores was Leviathan, another YA.
What I wonder is if the mini cycles happening in YA correspond to the broader trends that will eventually happen in mainstream sf/f, just at a faster publishing pace.
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What about the coming Jim Butcher steampunk series?
I'll certainly be giving it a try, though with a mite of wistfulness about Jim having picked this project over other non-Dresden projects he has alluded to at one point or another that sounded more to my tastes. Fwiw, Codex Alera did not do much for me, particularly the later volumes.
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I'll certainly be giving it a try, though with a mite of wistfulness about Jim having picked this project over other non-Dresden projects he has alluded to at one point or another that sounded more to my tastes. Fwiw, Codex Alera did not do much for me, particularly the later volumes.
To each their own; Ive never actually read any Steampunk, but love it in concept. You seem to trend more towards the Sci-fi side of things if Im not mistaken, so I can see why youd have preferred the Space Marshall thing he'd mentioned. (Thats what you're referring to, correct?)
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To each their own; Ive never actually read any Steampunk, but love it in concept.
Most of it breaks my suspension of disbelief on perpetual-motion-machine grounds.
You seem to trend more towards the Sci-fi side of things if Im not mistaken, so I can see why youd have preferred the Space Marshall thing he'd mentioned. (Thats what you're referring to, correct?)
That or the other high fantasy he also mentioned at one point.
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That or the other high fantasy he also mentioned at one point.
Wha? What was that one? That would be cool as well. The only thing close I heard about the Alera sequel, and that was described as closer to steampunk than anything (furypunk in fact).
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It's hard to do any real math on what's hot, what's the next big thing, etc in sci fi/fantasy.
Because, IMHO, what's popular among regular readers of the genres had in the past been largely determined by what's available.
In the 70's and 80' and even 90's, many of us simply devoured what was available on the the meager SciFi/Fantasy tables or shelves at our local book stores. We were stuck with what some Suit Desk Thing thought would sell. I loved James H. Schmitz's Witches of Karres and Hub series, Keith Laumer's Bolos, and most everything Andre Norton set her pen too. But Those gems were crowded out by the mindlessly nihilistic "He dies, she dies, everybody dies because humanity sucks and will always suck" drek of the 70's, then by the gibbering swarm of David Eddings Mongoquintodekaologies and a flood of TSR Dragonlance derivatives. (I liked Eddings, for a while, and even the early dragonlance stuff, btw.)
The stuff I wanted was harder and harder to find, but even the Meh stuff was still more to my tastes than reading some artistic literature of our age! drama about a girl who drank a glass of water and was sad, then coped with her feelings about glasses, water, and feelings, which were a metaphor for something or other like the paralleled plight of polypedal Portlandian Pimento Pickers.
(And I confess, I have to this day not educated myself on Portland, pimentos, or the average number of feet per picker, much less their plight. I mean, I know a pimento is that little thing in the olive, but I don't like olives or drinks that involve olives, so pimentos and I have only a nodding acquaintance. And I think they really have no idea who I am and are just being polite. Plus, I don't think I know anybody from Portland).
So I'd hold my nose and buy the latest in some mega-serialized regurgitation of somebody's D&D campaign or whatever, and treasured the odd gem when I could find it. (Godstalk, I'm looking at you. That's right. Who's an amazing fantasy and brilliant bit of storytelling! Awww, that's it! You are! Good, book, Godstalk! Yes you are! Gooooood book!)
Between the Rise of the Indie Publishers and the E-Publishers, I think that "what's hot/next big thing" is really only going to matter to writers trying to get on board with a middle to major publishing house. Getting our books out, getting readers, and maybe even being able to buy a little people food once in a while is vastly more accessible to us now, without having to try to find the right star to hitch our wagons to.
I'm by no means denouncing the idea of pursuing publication with a big company, I'd love to hit that point someday. But in all likelyhood, if I ever do manage that, it'll be on the strength of what I e-publish.
The project I'm working on now started out an attempt to fit one of the "book gigs" Kristine The Wonderful kindly shared, where a small house was looking for dystopian/post apocalyptic YA submissions. About 20,00 words in, one of my betas pointed out that my Sciency Stuff was going to be above the YA novel. And a lot of "every day" stuff would be too. ("So I got out my monocular and shot a couple azimuths...") wouldn't fly with an audience looking for sparkleopyres and such. My protagonist doesn't have a mystic heritage, a quirky genetic ability, a mentalist cat, a birthmark, or even a boyfriend, and she's quite happy that way, thank you very much.
Then I realized that I'd missed the Dystopian bus too. The story unfolded in a way that it was about preventing a dystopia rather than coping with one. I did get the post-apocalypse part right, though.
I despaired of getting it published, because the publisher I was initially shooting for wasn't going to jump on this rascal. I started hitting the "Submission guidelines" of every book house I could think of, and I despaired some more when I realized I'd be in a process of submitting, waiting 4 months to a year on average before I could submit the same work to another publisher.
Lots of despair.
Tears of it. The really good stuff. Robert Smith wishes he could manage that level of despair. His hair is too bigbigbig for him to truly know despair. Fumes from the gel.
Buckets of despair, carried by sad, despairing workers off to the despair refinery where it would be refined into distilled despair that would make the Rainbow Unicorn go on an absinthe bender and kill itself at Edgar Allen Poe's grave.
I mean, who's going to jump on a far-future , frontier setting, pre-dystopical, post-apocalyptical book which combines hard science and some steampunk elements in a rational, reasonable function? (No Absurdium Powered Etherial Rays.) It's not going to fit any sub-genre tightly enough for a publisher to say "Ah! Steampunk!" or "Ah, Hard(ish) science!" sort of way. (By "Hard", I mean closer to B5/BSG tech base than it is to any thing Star Trek/Star Wars flavored.)
I did some more despairing when I realized that a small Indie publisher might, maybe, possibly consider it, but the thought of being found only on the shelves of exactly 4 stores in western Oregon didn't fill me with yah-yah juice.
I can't write something I'm not into, it just doesn't work. It's like attempting to approach serious painting with the mindset of "I'm going to paint a '9'." (I always felt sorry for that poor, sad bastard. Poor guy, in his little hat and smock, just wanted to paint his damn "9", but they never let him. Christ. Now I'm depressed.)
Maybe in years to come, if I'm able to master the basics of the craft and the mental discipline involved, I'll be able to pick a genre or theme, sit down and crank it out. But in the meantime, I'm following the Deposed King's lead into self e-publishing, to get my invisible friends out there to play with strangers and take their candy, get feedback on my storytelling, from average readers to professional critiques, and maybe, just maybe... be able to buy some people food, like a grape, with the proceeds.
So don't ignore the trends in genre and popularity, learn from them, ride them if you can and if it suits you, but don't let them limit you.
I'm not kidding about the grape.
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In general, while an author should be aware of current trends, trying to hop onto a particular bandwagon leads to the market being saturated, making it harder to get noticed. And if you force yourself to write something you're really not passionate about just because it seems like the current big thing, it'll show in your writing and you definitely won't be at your best.
It's a tricky balancing act of writing what you love, being aware of market trends, and simple luck.
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^^^ Agree.
That said, if you want to get in front of the trend then go to your news sources and market reports. Find the tech reports. Find the recent sociology findings. Find what is happening and trending in the world. That is where the trends will originate, not from the sales numbers at Amazon. If you keep following those numbers, you'll always be too far behind the trend by the time your work is ready.
Hunger Games is a wonderful book. In an interview, she said that she wrote it because she detested popular reality television. Also, this military brat may have been tuned into drone warfare where war, even though effective, was becoming a video game gone live. The reality of death was becoming obscure, no matter how effective it is. She may have been concerned that video games were deadening our youth to the realities of death.
Her writing took on a creative flare that tuned into the 99% vs the 1% before it was an idea in most people's, researcher's and public's mindset. This past week, a serious economic report was published that began, "May the odds be ever in your favor." Science twisted back on Art or Art that twisted back on Science?
Keep your butterfly net open at all times rather than worrying about trends. That's a quote from Connie Willis.
Your trend will be all around you. I propose that the genre may be trivial or unimportant--as long as the writing is solid and addresses issues that readers are facing today.
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I'm tuning in late so I will back track a bit. First of all I believe that the next big trend will be set by whatever the next big bestselling author wants to write. (Even while I write this, I am filled with fear of a thousand copies of 87 Tints of Periwinkle and Mauve flooding the store shelves.) I have no problem (usually) with good authors that choose to write within any chosen genre but I feel that most of the trends are started when a talented writer writes a book and others jump on the bandwagon. Would YA in general have attracted the number of talented writers that it now has if the Harry Potter books had not been so overwhelmingly popular?
As far as Steampunk goes, I like the idea but I seldom like the stories. Even when I find a story that I like, the sequels rarely are equal to initial book. I am eagerly looking forward to Jim's story for this reason (and of course because it's one of Jim's stories). I love the gears and steam alchemy of it all. I hate the bad science (the aforementioned perpetual motion machines being an especially egregious example of this. Mechanical systems such as springs that somehow manage to put more energy out than was ever put into them are another. )and the extremely heavy handed social commentary ( I read at least one editor that claimed that the social commentary is what makes true steampunk. If she's right then I would agree with those that hate steampunk.) I do like a magic angle but it needs to be well done. I consider Randall Garrett's Lord D'Arcy books to be brilliant steampunk. There are many elements of steampunk that I love but often these same elements exist in the stories that I despise as well. Much of it, like most stories, depends on the skill of the writer.
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^^^ Agree.
That said, if you want to get in front of the trend then go to your news sources and market reports. Find the tech reports. Find the recent sociology findings. Find what is happening and trending in the world. That is where the trends will originate, not from the sales numbers at Amazon. If you keep following those numbers, you'll always be too far behind the trend by the time your work is ready.
Hunger Games is a wonderful book. In an interview, she said that she wrote it because she detested popular reality television. Also, this military brat may have been tuned into drone warfare where war, even though effective, was becoming a video game gone live. The reality of death was becoming obscure, no matter how effective it is. She may have been concerned that video games were deadening our youth to the realities of death.
Her writing took on a creative flare that tuned into the 99% vs the 1% before it was an idea in most people's, researcher's and public's mindset. This past week, a serious economic report was published that began, "May the odds be ever in your favor." Science twisted back on Art or Art that twisted back on Science?
Keep your butterfly net open at all times rather than worrying about trends. That's a quote from Connie Willis.
Your trend will be all around you. I propose that the genre may be trivial or unimportant--as long as the writing is solid and addresses issues that readers are facing today.
Another possible avenue is "what isn't everyone writing about, or getting ready to write about?" Don't worry about predicting a new trend, start your own. It might fly, you might come off as being startlingly original, a breath of fresh air, etc... but you'll also risk being overlooked by those looking for what's The Now Thing. "Eh, it's not about *Insert Current Trend Here*? I was really hoping to find more books where someone with a magic power parts shags the Elder Gods into submission, like that other series that's so popular..."
History is rich with plots, complications, conflicts and such. I'm not talking about re-writing the American Revolution, Viet Nam, or Thermopylae. Oh, look, Luna/Belters/Mars is rebelling over taxation. Been done. Sometimes quite well, other times not so much.
Rewriting old wars and conflicts has been done to death.
But we can mine for nuggets for components to mix with bits of other history we've turned inside out. There's a lot of history out there, neglected and crying under the stairs while popular culture, literature, and movies focus on Normandy, the Alamo, or the storming of the Bastille. Give that undervalued, unappreciated history some love, and it'll whisper secrets to you.
Athens started growing olives on a larger scale, which brought them into the Big Damn Merchant City stage, made them suddenly big players in the region. And this brought them a whole new set of complications even as it placed them on the road to greatness. Rome and Carthage, The Boer Wars... All examples of "underutlized" events we can borrow an element from here and there.
We can use the events when we're short on socio-political conflicts we need for a backdrop, or even just for flavoring our local history. What if the Voortrekers had become roaming nomads instead of settling the Transvaal? What if the Zulus had teamed with them against the British? What if Carthage held Rome in a stalemate, or if the two states had become allies, creating the base of a regional bloc which decided to conquer India? Or if India had joined them and they'd gone after China? Take a piece of history, tickle it until some possibilities leak out, freeze them, shatter them, then pick out some pieces to use for your worldbuilding or basic story elements.
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I think you have to be aware of the new trends, but as others have said don't rework your entire concept to reflect some other hot commodity. Keep your core concept for your magnus opus and if you want to dabble try a short story and see if the new thing flows. I am a strong advocate of exploring different genres, but use the experience to find your strengths not try to change everything you write to fit a particular niche you dislike.
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I think you have to be aware of the new trends, but as others have said don't rework your entire concept to reflect some other hot commodity. Keep your core concept for your magnus opus and if you want to dabble try a short story and see if the new thing flows. I am a strong advocate of exploring different genres, but use the experience to find your strengths not try to change everything you write to fit a particular niche you dislike.
Indeed, imhop the best stories are the ones the writer actually enjoys telling for their own sake.
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The thing that's always been interesting to me is the interplay among consumers and creators. The ones who sustain a trend, and the ones who kick a trend off.
Consumers will make something new a hit. They see it, they like it, they tell twenty friends, be it books, fashion, home decorating--whatever. Everyone buys it. It takes off like wildfire. And once that thing becomes a hit, they'll look for more, and buy up anything that gives them a little more of that fix while they wait for the original person to kicked off a trend to make more, which is how fads get going and business people will try to jump on that gravy train.
However, for that "consumption" to happen AT ALL, a creator somewhere has to come up with something first. Something awesome has to be created, without knowing if it'll be awesome or not. And you don't know what trick that new book/series/author will have, because, really, it's almost always something that's driven by the author having a keen talent, a keen nose for story potential, and a bit of luck. It's not predictable, per se. It's a risk.
If you chase fads as an author, you'll always be playing "me too!", and you'll be competing with all those other people doing "me too" too. Identifying a big thing once it's become big is EASY. And you'll also be AT LEAST a year behind the trend, from when you notice a fad and when you write your addition to the fad. And maybe that's ok--there are authors out there who are making ok livings playing "me too". You could even argue that the Dresden Files is a "me too!" following Anita Blake, albeit one of the earliest ones. But I think it's unwise to begin your plan with intending to play "me too" because you don't want to take that risk of starting your own fad or trend because there's a good chance you WON'T start a fad or trend. Yet if you DON'T take a risk, you'll totally bring what's maybe a 2% chance of hitting it big with something "original" to 0%. And who wants to play second fiddle forever?
I think there's a lot of value in just writing what you want to write, and damn the fads. Now, if what you want to write IS currently a fad...write your little heart out and make sure it reflects that your heart is in it, and ignore the part of you that may say "it's close but not exactly like XYZ, why not tweak it to be XYZ?" Because chances are, your little weirdnesses and oddities are what would make it stand out among the other "me, toos!" happening.
My two cents, as an unpublished wannabe author who has been studying the market like WHOA for forever.