Writing Mistakes Writers Make: Writing Like a Publisher
This might be my debut novel so it should only be 80,000 words. What genre am I writing? Is it horror? Fantasy? Romance? What are publishers buying? Will this be easy for a publisher to market and promote? I probably shouldn’t make this too complicated so it’s easy to categorize.
These are just some of the thoughts I’ve had before I’ve even started the writing process—a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Or, more truthfully, getting in my own way.
Being in the business of writing and publishing, it’s all-too easy to conflate writing advice with marketing advice, to start altering how you write to appease this possible-future publisher in the hopes of making your work more attractive to them—i.e., easier to sell. It is important to have a pulse on what readers are enjoying, but by focusing too much on trends and salability you’re forfeiting the only thing we have complete control over in this publishing business—writing whatever the hell you want to write.
Why do we do this? I can only speak for myself and say for me, it comes directly from self-doubt. The moment I start thinking Would any publisher buy this? it’s because I’ve reached a creative stall in the story I’m working on. I tell myself that my need to problem-solve a story is evidence that a publisher won’t know what to do with it. I didn’t say it made sense, OK?
But then when I switch my brain to reader moder and I look at the books I most naturally gravitate toward, they are books that don’t have a simple home; their books that when you look them up on Bookshop are categorized under multiple genres. If our goal is to be traditionally published, then it’s not our job to figure out how to get our stories into the hands of readers. Our job is to write the story that a publisher will have to figure out how to get into the hands of readers.
Writing whatever we want is our right as creative people, and the moment we allow the business of publish to intervene on our creativity, we’ve given some of that right to someone else. Don’t write for a publisher. Don’t write for public relations. Write for one reader, and that reader is you.
