Writing Your Way, No Matter What

I recently read a blog post from another author who was frustrated by the lack of sales of her first book in comparison to her second one. The author offered up a lot of theories, one of which is quite provocative and I’ll address in a future blog post.

You can definitely feel the author’s frustration, and it’s understandable. Authors put their hearts and souls into their writing. We spend a lot of time, effort and money to produce and promote our work and often don’t see an equitable return in our investment reflected in sales and reviews. There is no way to adequately explain what goes on behind the scenes of writing a book. You just have to take my word when I say that it can be a soul crushing process.

One of the less controversial theories the author put forth was that readers just weren’t interested in sports romances. She went on to point out that there are plenty of best-selling books about billionaire CEOs, MMA fighters and even pregnant men who can shift into animals. This really struck a chord with me, and I found myself doing an emphatic head nod in agreement.

When I first started out as a writer, I wanted to write young adult novels with disabled characters as romantic leads. I can’t tell you how many agents, publishers and editors told me that would never sell. The industry wanted fantasy novels. Readers wanted vampires and werewolves and fairies. Books were about escaping reality.

I floundered for a while. I’m ashamed to admit, I threw my hat in the vampire ring. Guess what? It didn’t make a difference. Even that wasn’t good enough. I was told I’d never compete with Twilight or True Blood. As much as that hurt, I could live with it because that’s not what I wanted. I’m going to date myself here, but I grew up reading Judy Blume and Lurlene McDaniel. These women were writing stories about kids my age that were dealing with sobering realities and we devoured those novels. Those were my heroes and who I aspired to be.

It took a lot of soul searching and trial and error and some growth and change in the publishing industry for me to find my way. Now, I write what I want. While all of my books are romance, I don’t let myself be penned in. If I want to write new adult or young adult or anything in between, I write it. I don’t care if the story is m/f or m/m. I give my characters the love interest that I think fits best for them. It’s amazing the amount of stress that I took off myself when I accepted this was the approach I wanted to take as a writer.

So, if you write about pregnant omega wolf males or billionaire oil tycoons or up and coming MMA fighters, that’s great. It doesn’t make you better or worse than your peers who choose to write in a different genre. You have to write what makes you and your readers happy. It might not make you rich or a best seller, but writing your way doesn't make you a failure either.