You may have heard the phrase “writing to market” before. The term has generated a lot of buzz the last five years or so. There are even a series of books on the subject that have helped popularize the phrase. We recommend them actually. They are written by a man named Chris Fox, who should not be confused with our own Chris ‘Fox’ Wallace. They are two different people entirely.
What does ‘write to market’ mean?
The essence of writing to market is writing books with a target audience in mind. Hopefully you have identified an audience that you think is clamoring for more books and learned enough about what they want to deliver a product they will love. Writing to market means that you aren’t just writing whatever comes to mind, you are writing with intention, and with a goal of selling books. You are applying your creative mind to a specific situation where you must use certain plot points, character types, settings, or tropes to make your audience happy.
Check out our article on Where To Begin Writing To Market for a better understanding of how it all works.
Market Research (Before You Write)
You can’t write to a market that you don’t understand. Assuming that you chose a niche in the previous lesson, now it’s time to attack that market. Learn everything about it and master the form. Genres and subgenres aren’t that complex, it won’t take long.
Chris’s Video Market Research Like A Fox shows what market research on Amazon looks like as he takes you through the process of learning about a niche.
Our article on Keyword Interest and Bestseller Lists will also help you understand how to research your target market.
Another article on using tropes to signal your genre is worth reading too.
The Two Pieces Of Writing To Market
In order to make money as an independent author, you must sell a significant quantity of books. That means you need two things. A big enough market, meaning enough people who want to read that type of book, and market penetration, meaning that you can get enough of those people to read your book to make it a success. You want a big slice of a big pie.
Market Size
If your market is too small, then getting everyone in the market to read it won’t earn you enough money to make it worthwhile. Selling a book to every person on earth who is interested in an obscure topic won’t net you enough cash to quit your job. If you sold a book to every reader on the planet who is interested in 1994 Saab sedans, you would still be broke. And cornering the market on books about an obscure cartoon character who loves to knit just isn’t going to work by itself.
Of course, an obscure subject can appeal to a wider audience. Maybe your knitting cartoon character will appeal to more people because of other aspects of the story. Maybe your book about Saabs will capture the interest of car people in general because it talks about the biggest debacle in automotive history. The key is that you pay attention to the market for your book and make sure that it is big enough.
Choosing an overly wide market can also be a problem. Writing a generic thriller is tough these days. It’s hard for a self-published author to crack the top 100 on Amazon with a regular old thriller when you are competing with the big boys and all their advertising money. But this is a much smaller problem, and it can be overcome by narrowing down your subgenre a bit and using the right keywords and categories. A book that targets a very small market is just crippled and there is usually no saving it.
Market Penetration
When most people talk about writing to market, they are usually referring to market penetration. Most markets are big enough if you can get a large enough percentage of people in them to buy your book. If it’s a standard romance, then even a fraction of a percentage can be enough. If it’s a steampunk thriller, then you’ll need a larger percentage of that smaller (but still big enough) pie.
Achieving market penetration requires all kinds of things that we talk about in other places here on the site. A good cover, blurb, effective ad spend, etc. But all of those things are wasted if the members of that market, your potential customers, don’t like your book. Try writing a thriller that plods along, with no ticking clock and a hero who isn’t an expert at anything, and the low review will kill your book.
That plodding thriller might be an otherwise excellent book, but the audience for thrillers will completely ignore it. Why?
“If you ignore your audience, they will ignore you.”
You absolutely must know what your audience wants. You are still being creative, but within a set of parameters set by your potential audience. Consider the art of writing Haiku. It is very constrained. The audience will ignore you if you don’t use the right number of syllables in each line. But this does not prevent the writers of Haiku from being creative. The constraints of writing within your genre and including the things that appeal to your audience are much the same. It is not selling out your creativity, it is putting your creativity to work in an environment where it can reach a large audience.
Writing to market and pleasing your audience is the essence of our genre guides. They offer you a set of tropes that your audience wants, clichés they don’t want, and important things that must be included in your story. Remember, your audience typically wants more of the same thing, but a little different each time. It doesn’t matter what you want, they don’t care. They want another book like that one they liked last summer. In fact they want ten more books like that, but slightly different.
We’ve put a lot of work into finding out what the market wants for different genres. Don’t ignore all that research. Use it. This doesn’t mean you have to write to an exact formula, though you can if you want, it just means that you have to pick some things to include in your book if you want to be a success. The genre guide can be your roadmap to writing to market, but it shouldn’t be the only thing you use. You’ll want to learn to research your market on your own, which will be covered extensively in one of the other lessons in this course.
Use the tropes and story beats the same way. Try to see them as inspiration rather than constraints. The creativity is not in how you write a thriller without a ticking clock or a brilliant villain, but rather how you write those things into your story. You wouldn’t try to write a short story that is 120,000 words; it doesn’t fit the description. Take the same approach with all aspects of your genre.
If you want to write for a genre, do the things that your audience wants. That is how you get sales. We can’t say this enough times. If you ignore your market, they will ignore you. You can not force them to like something new.
How To Research Your Market
Start by choosing a market. This may require some research too. Learn about the genres that you are considering, or what genre makes sense for the stories you want to tell. Then pick one. Because writing in a series is so helpful for self-published authors, you’ll want to pick a genre that you can stick with for a while. Switching genres leaves behind most of the value you built up with previous books and is basically a restart on your publishing career, so you don’t want to do it unless you have to.
Once you have chosen a genre, learn it inside and out. Who are the best writers in the genre? How big is the market? What are the tropes and clichés? How long are the books? What are the story beats like? What do the bestsellers all have in common? You should do all of this before you begin any serious writing. Know what you are going to need to include before you start and the writing will be so much easier. Adding in a ticking clock later will require a complete rewrite of your thriller and it would have been easier to start with one.
Make liberal use of our genre guides and other tools here on the site. Watch the market research videos to get a feel for how we do market research for ourselves and other authors. Become an expert on how the genre works and what sells. Then you can start writing and you’ll be “writing to market.”