Writing For, Within, and Against the Market

Just some idle thoughts on the attitude authors should take toward their art

Aug 04, 2024

Novelist assembling a book from the latest trends

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the market. Or rather, the author’s relationship to it. This was spurred by Christian Lorentzen’s excellent essay “Literature Without Literature” that was critiquing Dan Sinykin’s also excellent book Big Fiction. I enjoyed Big Fiction and interviewed Sinykin last year for this blog and I think Lorentzen is one of our sharpest critics. Sinykin looks at the role conglomerate corporate publishing has taken in shaping fiction and Lorentzen counters with an argument against the sociological reading of literature and for the artist’s role in creating art. I think you always need both the sociological / systems view and the individual view to understand the world. I suggest everyone read both.

I don’t want to argue with these writers as much as pivot to general thoughts on writing for or against the market. Lorentzen’s article kicked off some interesting (at least to a dork like me) discussions about the possibilities and limits of art in the corporate marketplace. This is something I think about a lot, especially as a creative writing professor whose students ask about such things with different degrees of worry and interest.

How much authors pander to or push against the market varies. Here it might be useful to revive those old spectrums:

commercial—literary
formulaic—inventive
conforming to audience expectations—challenging audience expectations.

I know many rankle at the these in our current “poptimist” / “popularist” era. It’s common to hear only popular work matters and actually corporate franchise movies and generic pop songs are the new avant garde. Sure. Why not? But such spectrums contain enough truth to be useful. A lot of novels are intentionally formulaic and impersonal. In their most extreme form, you have tie-in novels for corporate TV and film franchises, book packagers, and brand-name authors who pay ghostwriters to put the meat on their skeletal outlines (James Patterson being the most famous). Even outside of such obvious market-driven works, many authors spend their time playing “trope Bingo” with the buzziest trends and studying guides titled like The 5-Step Bestseller: The Easy Guide to Writing a Novel in a Month. That’s fine. To each their own. It takes all kinds. Etc.

I do mean that. Writing effectively to formula is a skill. Most authors fail. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that most “commercial fiction” flops commercially. The majority of works aspiring to ride the buzziest trends disappear into the same dustbins of literary history as everything else: agent and editor rejection piles, remainder tables, and the dregs of Amazon rankings. Even when writing is easy, publishing is hard.

As a reader, I have little interest in commercially oriented work. Although as a writer, I understand one has to pay the bills. That includes writers of works I do enjoy. Many a James Patterson novel and video game tie-in novel has been written by an MFA grad or weirdo science fiction author trying to make rent. (I’ve done similar things myself, although so far only with nonfiction. Patterson, if you’re reading hmu.) This is less discussed since authors don’t typically brag about ghostwriting and, anyway, may have signed confidentiality agreements. But sometimes enough time passes that authors can admit it, such as when Tom Perrotta (The Leftovers, Election, etc.) confessed to writing for R.L Stine’s Fear Street early in his career: “It’s good to take the romance out of writing. That certainly did it for me!”

I’m going to assume most people reading this do want to keep some of the romance in writing. That you are less interested in ghostwriting commercial fiction series than in trying to write something artistic. (I’ll avoid the term “literary” given its association with literary fiction and to stress that artistic writing can be done in any genre, style, or mode.) That you want to be original or at least unique—to write the kind of books that no one else could write—and still be published. How, then, do you approach the market?

For better or worse, most writers approach the market with mystification. Many are unaware of P&Ls, internal comps, or even what imprints are owned by what conglomerates. They write what they write based on reading the kind of books they love. If they achieved success early, then they leave the business stuff to the agents and editors. If they haven’t succeeded yet, they leave it to hopes and prayers. I know some will argue such writers are just as controlled by the market as a commercial fiction ghostwriter. After all, what we are influenced by is what is published by the market, right? This seems too pat. For one thing, writers are often inspired by authors who wrote in entirely different landscapes and markets. Many lauded authors were failures in their day and achieved success only later, through fans and critics more than markets. Your influences might be from another century or a different continent. An MFA student who is inspired by, say, Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Mary Shelley is probably not going to produce something tailored to the American publishing landscape of 2024. But that doesn’t mean they won’t get published.

A common refrain from successful authors is they had no idea that book would be the one that took off. They might have published three strange speculative novellas on small presses to minimal sales and then the fourth one is picked up by a big publisher and becomes a hit. They may have published a dozen genre imprint works before having a breakout mainstream success.

The market really is random in this way. Big 5 publishers can force a few big books onto readers with marketing dollars and big publicity pushes. But for the most part, what takes off is unpredictable for publishers and authors alike. The frequency of big advance flops and small advance breakouts demonstrates that. You can also find plenty of articles on famous, bestselling books that were rejected over and over again.

(Sure, it’s a good bet that an author with a huge social media following, mainstream media connections, and enough wealth to shell out their own money on marketing and publicity will always triumph. But I’m discussing the content of the books here.)

It’s hard for even the most avant garde writers to entirely ignore the market. A common epiphany for MFA graduates and emerging writers in general is that short stories are nearly impossible to sell and they probably need to pivot to novels. We all learn or intuit that it is hard to publish a novel that’s under 50k or over 150k. And so on. Yet beyond such generalities, the market is thankfully hard to game. Being a published author is largely the luck of finding the right agent and the right editor to champion your work. And it only takes one of each.

Outside of franchise spin-off books, trying to write for the market is dangerous artistically and perhaps even professionally. I mentioned a primary skill of commercial fiction authors is speed because the market moves quickly. What’s hot gets quickly saturated, the bubble bursts, and then something else starts to buzz. A couple years ago, there were articles about how trauma-focused new adult literature set in the real world was going to save publishing. Now those articles are written about dragon-filled Romantasy books. Many editors I know think the Romantasy bubble is poised to deflate and no one quite knows what will be hyped next. The point is just that the market is a moving target. If you write at a normal pace, it will probably take you several years to finish a book, find an agent, and sell to an editor. It will then take another year or two for the book to then appear in stores. If you’re writing to trends in 2024, there’s a good chance those trends will have fizzled out by the time your book hypothetically appears in 2030. (Self-publishing has a much shorter path to publishing, but that’s outside the scope of this post.)

Success aside, the best writers tend to write against the market. They look at what’s published and instead of saying “what are people doing that I can also do?” they think “what can I do that no one else is doing?” They look at what is being published and say, I can do this better/weirder/differently, just watch me. They may fail, of course. But as I mentioned, most formulaic work fails. At least this way you write something unique to you, instead of failing as yet another imitator.

Surely it’s often delusional to think you are writing against or outside the market. Novelists with this attitude frequently write books that aren’t terribly different than others on the new release tables. Great and innovative books are always rare. Still, the attitude is the healthier one and more likely to produce the (rare) genius work. This seems especially true to me when you achieve some success. Are you going to tread water, and repeat what worked in the market once over and over? Or are you going to push yourself to try new forms, styles, and ideas?

This I can do what no one else is doing attitude—no matter how narcissistic or delusional it may be—can work. Many editors and publishers are looking for something different, both because they love literature and because (again) the market is random so they take a throw-it-all-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. Editors and agents get thousands and thousands of submissions. They are, or at least many of them are, looking for work that stands out. If you’re writing to market trends, you can bet a million other writers in the submission queue are writing to them too.

If you’re an artist with a real aesthetic vision, you might also have no choice but to write against the market. Ottessa Moshfegh caused a minor controversy when her novel Eileen came out by saying she wrote it to prove “how easy [it] is” to write a popular thriller: “[I] went out and bought a book called The 90-Day Novel, by Alan Watt. It’s ridiculous, claiming that anybody can write a great book, and quickly too. And I thought if I were to do this, what would happen, would my head explode? So I followed it for 60 days – it was so boring. But it ended up as an Oulipian thing, struggling with a limitation, and it was actually interesting to conform to the rules.” I imagine Mosfegh was trolling a bit here, but in any event Eileen—which was shortlisted for the Booker prize—hardly reads like a generic thriller. Moshfegh couldn’t help but write against the formula even when writing toward it.

This is not to say that I think writers should ignore the business side of publishing at all. A lot of this newsletter is about publishing demystification because I think understanding how publishing works is useful for myself and for other writers. I think writers should learn what they can about querying, comp titles, contract structures, and the rest. It never hurts to be smart about the business side of the equation. Still, as much as possible it is best to try and separate the art from the business. Create the art that is the most personal and interesting and unique to you without thinking about the market, comps, query letters, and the rest. Focus on those things only later, when the book is done.

For what it’s worth, I do try to practice what I’m preaching. In the dull and dark days of COVID lockdown, I started writing a novel that was by far the most personal and unpublishable novel I’d worked on. A weird genre-hybrid book that was comic in a market that doesn’t like comic novels, straddling the fence of science fiction and “literary fiction” in a market that tells you to pick a side, and in general was a book I wasn’t sure would ever sell. It comes out next year:

If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”

Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).