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Family photo! Me, Blueberry, and Josh last winter <3

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “write to market” bandied around the indie author community quite a bit. It’s a popular phrase, and while there’s a bit of fuzziness in how it’s defined, it generally means: understanding the currently popular genres and tropes, and then writing books that reflect the currently popular genres and tropes.

Essentially, you’re analyzing market trends and trying to guess what direction readers want to go in, and then producing a product that aligns with your analysis. Do they want more fantasy romance with enemies-to-lovers tropes and lovable characters? Or do they want more gritty fantasy romance with love triangle tropes and dark themes?

Writing to market is a difficult and challenging endeavor, and the authors who do it well tend to have a solid, excited, devoted audience of readers who are always looking for the next best thing.

Despite many well-known author-influencers in the industry swearing by this method and technique, it definitely doesn’t work for everyone. I’ve met many an excellent writer who has done in-depth analyses of the market, written books that align with the most popular tropes and themes, and still not been a huge success.

Recently, I was watching a Master Class with Bob Iger, who is the CEO of Disney, and he said something that really stuck out to me. In his segment on anticipating what your audience wants, he said, “One of the most interesting and perhaps challenging aspects of creative storytelling is that you’re often giving consumers what they want before they actually know they want it, and certainly before they express the fact that they want it. That takes a lot of instinct; it also takes a lot of courage, because you’re telling a story to an audience hoping that they want it, but not knowing going in whether they do or not.”

He followed this up by saying that while there’s real value in understanding a marketplace, collecting that information in order to decide what story to tell is a waste of time. “I don’t think you ever learn enough from data about what a marketplace would want in terms of story, or how a marketplace would even react to a story. That decision needs to be based more on a gut instinct and on a confidence you have in the creative entity that’s telling the story.” [Any quotation errors are mine; I scribbled it out in pencil.]

In his case, the “creative entity that’s telling the story” might be Pixar or Marvel or whomever. But in our case, that’s us. We are the creative entity that’s telling the story.

So sure, doing market research is great. Read books in your genre. Read books out of your genre. Read books that haven’t been printed in a hundred years. Read stories that only exist in digital form, on Wattpad or Tumblr or whatever. Watch TV, watch movies, play video games.

But I truly do not believe that writing to market is the key to success. Writing something that’s amazingly unique and new and never-before-seen is also not the key to success.

The key to success is learning to trust in your gut and to have confidence in the entity that’s telling the story (that’s you).

If you look back through history at the writers and authors who were most lauded for their time, the writers who are considered literary geniuses, the writers who have made a ton of money, the writers who are still read by kids in school today—even the writers who aren’t read in school, but made a steady, reliable income from their work. They read a lot, and they wrote a lot (for the most part)—but most of all, they focused on being the best writer they could, and staying authentic to their own voice and their own art.

Is that a guaranteed path to success? Nah.

But there isn’t a guaranteed path to success as an author. We work in a speculative industry. So that’s what we have to do: speculate.

So if you think that writing to market sounds like the best thing ever—do it. And if it sounds awful and miserable and like you’d rather jump off a bridge in the middle of winter in Antarctica, then forget about it.

And for me: I plan to continue leaning into writing things that I love, and focusing my creative energies on producing work that makes me happy. And I’ll hope that one day, eventually, I’ll write something that will make a lot of other people happy too.