Writing is a very personal thing, we often think of our stories as our babies, regarding them as something special which we hope others will equally enjoy. I don’t want to discourage you from this ethos, it’s both a solid and sound view. However, I want to encourage you to give a moment’s thought to your audience.
Your audience aren’t merely passengers, they can, if considered correctly, become your strongest advocates, heralding your work and echoing your tweets. But to gain an audience, you first need to understand them. By that I mean, understand what they want to read, not what you want to write. I’ve written plenty of projects I felt was for me, that resonated solely with me. I hoped (somewhat naively) that if I wrote it, then they would come. But audiences don’t work like that, and certainly not without the backing of a large amount of self-generated PR -and even then it may not have the impact you desired.
Agents and publishers generally look for two main things in new material; How good is the story? Will it resonate with their audience and sell? There will be other considerations of course that help them decide if they publish your work or not, but ultimately it will boil down to these two main questions. If you’ve written your Magnum Opus and answered only half the question, then you’re going to find the path to publishing is as long as it is steep. Now, you may believe that writing for a set genre and submitting it to an agent (that is interested in the said same) is all the research you need. But you’d be wrong, these guys will be reviewing a huge number of submissions from likeminded writers — what is going to make your work stand out from the crowd? Why should they consider your baby over another?
Think of your project as you would a new film, these days movies are released with a projection of sales in mind. Studios will have a good understanding of their target audience, and can project a comparable ROI. This is all part of the green-light process, if the figures and outlay don’t align, the film doesn’t get made. Simple as that. Publisher/agents work the same way, they want stories they feel they can sell — This is why it pays to write for your audience.
What can you do to get ahead? You can start by looking for movie/TV/book trends (check out Deadline/Variety/Hollywood Reporter), see what is being picked up by studios, make an educated guess where the market is heading — and write for the distant wave that’s gradually building on the horizon. It may feel a little mercenary, but it doesn’t have to be, you can still pen the next Cult Monster Rom-Com, just keep in mind your audience may have moved on from Vampires to Were-Zombies.
In 2016, I spotted a distant rise in a genre that had yet to peak, so I drafted a spec script for a book with this firmly in mind. It was only sixty pages long, which didn’t even complete the first arc — but it was enough of a hook to capture a studio’s imagination and was picked up within three months of submission. It hadn’t even been published, yet someone saw enough potential to take a chance with it. Now, I’m not suggesting that will work for everyone, but I do believe this happened because I stopped writing for myself and studied what audiences were engaging with. In contrast nearly everything I’ve written with the audience of one in mind (i.e. myself) has been turned down for one reason alone —namely, the lack of an audience.
By all means keep writing for yourself, because ultimately that’s the Holy Grail of writing, but do step outside of your own universe from time-to-time and think about what others would want to read.
Remember, the trick is to retain your own identity while creating a story your audience needs, master this and you’ll be well on your way to publishing success.