The February 2009 issue of Good Reading Magazine had an interview with author Margo Lanagan, who has since won a Ditmar for her novel Tender Morsels.

She had this to say about commercial success, or her relative lack of it:

I’d done five of my own books and I still didn’t have any money from the thing. I couldn’t see how I was going to get to the stage where I could give up my day job, and I thought ‘I really need to find a genre that’s going to travel overseas; Australia is just too small’.”

With its huge market reach in the US and the UK, and relative lack of localised content, fantasy fiction seemed the obvious choice. And so she set out to create (in the tradition of the genre), her very own fantasy trilogy. Unfortunately, all did not go as planned. For three years she attempted to construct this epic, but she couldn’t maintain control of the narrative and so kept hitting dead ends.

I believe her early works were short story collections (which rarely sell well now) and YA novels, while the acclaimed and award-winning Tender Morsels is literary fantasy (which means I will be very sure to seek it out).

I find the quote interesting because it illustrates one of the difficulties of writing: if you pick a genre to write in solely because you think it will sell, rather than because it’s what you enjoy, you will often have trouble writing something decent. This is for a number of reasons:

    1. You will not know the genre. The classic presumption that many people make is that certain genres – coughromancecough – are easy to write because they follow a formula. The presumption could not be more wrong. Every genre has its traditions and expectations and even if you’re going to break them, you have to know them first.
    2. You won’t really be enjoying yourself. Your heart won’t be in it, and you’ll run into the same kind of narrative issues Lanagan discusses above.
    3. Not even publishers and booksellers know what will be a commercial success – I refer you to the article I linked to earlier “93 percent of traditionally published books sell only 1,000 copies”.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t writers out there who don’t perfectly well manage to write in whatever genre necessary for them to sell books. But in general, the best way to approach commercial success seems to be to choose a genre you like and know, and then work within that to produce books you think will have mainstream appeal, based on research into current or emerging tastes and trends.

As an anecdotal example, I once read (on a messageboard from an unknown contributor, so caveat emptor) that George RR Martin deliberately set out to write a bestselling fantasy series by asking fantasy fans what they liked and did not about popular series like the Jordon Wheel of Time books (You know what we don’t like, Martin? Writers who stop halfway through).

And that obviously worked for him, because Song of Ice and Fire has done amazingly well (except for the, you know, stopping halfway through – which maybe just illustrates the point about following your heart, not your hip pocket). So, my advice to those seeking commercial success would be to do your research – but start with what you love.

Now, as I have said before, I personally do not think aiming for commercial success is necessarily the best path to take. I do not write for or even aspire to commercial success; I have long-since accepted that I am not a mainstream writer. I should probably point out that I’m not literary/highbrow either, since that’s usually taken as the opposite of mainstream. I’m just me (I take a little of Montaigne’s philosophy of being satisfied with what you are instead of stressing yourself to become what you are not).

Because of my philosophy, I like the upshot of the interview with Lanagan:

casting aside any hope of financial reward, she now wrote as pure escape for herself…this collection of short stories received critical acclaim and lots of awards…

Slightly damaging to my point, the collection still didn’t sell well – short stories, don’t, remember – but she has now published the award-winning Tender Morsels which is published internationally rather than just in Australia, so she’s getting there. Hooray for writing for pleasure not profit!

Anyone with a creative hobby knows the tension between enjoying it for its own sake and making money from it. And unfortunately, some people, both writers and buyers of writing, appear to have taken the common writerly refrain of “I enjoy it so much, I’d do it even if I wasn’t being paid for it” as an excuse as to why writers don’t need decent renumeration (or copyright protection, apparently).

The upshot is all writers need to find their own balance between love and money. I’ve found mine, blockbuster writers find theirs, you will find yours (and let’s hope in every case it’s love and money).