I make no pretense about it–I want my writing to sell.  I am not ‘just writing for myself’, nor do I have pretensions of undying prose passed down through the ages.

I do write from my heart, mind and soul.  I of course hope that what I write will have lasting impact and value, but it is my desire that first and foremost I will reach a wide audience of paying readers.  I don’t think these goals are exclusive.  It’s my opinion that my writing can be of just as high quality as ‘literary’ fiction while being sold through commercial genres, if a bit faster paced than many literary works.

Given that goal of mine, I’ve spent some time thinking of what I should write.  It has to be speculative fiction, ’cause anything else wouldn’t hold my interest long enough to complete the book.  But should it be Fantasy?  Science Fiction, soft or hard?  Urban Fantasy?  Magic Realism? 

I have so many ideas, many of them fleshed out and ready for deeper exploration in writing, that I can pick which one I should give my time and energy now.  But which would be the quickest sell?  It may seem shallow to consider this, but I’ve made my goals quite clear.  When choosing between two or three equailly interesting magic systems, times, and worlds, it would be my preference to choose the one which the agent/editor is on the lookout for, not the one they reluctantly admit is a tough sell just now.

This is what I’ve heard so far:

• Everybody’s buying Urban Fantasy.  I’m paraphrasing, but I read this in a current Locus magazine interview of a top editor in a mega-publishing house.  So, great!  I should write urban fantasy, right?  The trouble is I’m not sure what she calls urban fantasy and I think of as urban fantasy are the same thing.  It’s a fairly new sub-genre and not terribly well defined.

 

• Science Fiction is a tough sell right now.  This was something Rachel said after reading a scifi hook on her site.  I don’t know that it’s true, but I see no reason to think she’s wrong.  What I don’t know is if she meant ‘out there in space futuristic scifi with lots of aliens’, or ‘set on earth or close to home, within the foreseeable future, softer scifi’.  My story concept would fall into the later category.

 

• I haven’t heard (from a good source in the field) either way on Fantasy.  People point to Robert Jordan and Tolkien, but the popularity of those stories doesn’t translate to a new fantasy series being snatched up, as we all know.  I have a unique world, and will keep honing my writing until it shines, but if editors/agents aren’t looking for fantasy I could find myself swimming upstream.

Of course I know that evaluating the market is much more difficult to do than gauging the current of a stream, but I still intend to give it a try.  If all else fails, at least I should have an in depth knowledge of the markets I’m trying to reach.