What to write next…

I was that kid who, at nine years old, said I wanted to be an author when I grew up. I wrote a mostly-finished sci-fi fantasy when I was fifteen (okay, I didn’t quite finish it, which probably says something about the psychology of writing). I wrote my first romcom at twenty-one (it has some redeeming features, but a lot of it is *bad*. Leave a comment if you’d like to read the dry humping scene and I’ll think about it).

At nine, I obviously had only the vaguest notion of what being an author involves and the publishing landscape has changed so much anyway, but I certainly thought you had to write a book, find a publisher (I did appreciate how difficult that is by the time I was writing the dry humping book), then sit in your writing cave and produce more books.

If that sounds about right to you, let me tell you, it’s not at all what an author’s life looks like. These days, that first publishing contract is almost guaranteed not to fund the writing of the next book (it probably won’t even fund your next computer purchase). That first contract also doesn’t guarantee another contract.

With a successful sales track record, you might find some stability in the industry, but it’s also not guaranteed, as trends shift and desperate publishers chase what little of the market they can reach and influence. In short, it’s never-ending query trenches – or self-publishing in an increasingly crowded market where paying for ads is becoming the only way to be seen.

Romance in the UK is a particularly difficult prospect, because retailers are quite hostile to the genre, making romance a risky bet for publishers. They’ve made a lot of bets over the past few years in the romance boom, but many titles have not sold well, because bookstores haven’t ordered them in and the online space is dominated by American titles with big audiences and matching marketing budgets.

All of this means that romance authors in the UK market are generally not making anywhere near a living, neither traditionally published nor indie. Even top-selling traditionally published authors might not be making minimum wage, because the UK is a small market and cut-price books are the norm in romance (a top-selling indie author probably is, because they don’t have to share their royalties with a publisher).

Most of us have day jobs. I’ve had my caring responsibilities, although those are slowly becoming less intense. I’d really like to develop my career to reach some kind of stability, where I’m regularly selling enough books (or being paid enough of an advance) that I can keep doing this full-time (I’m not expecting to get rich!).

Welcome to my moment of overthinking! I currently have a short window of time before I need to get started on my next contracted book (the last book in the Adventure Weddings series! I’m looking forward to it), so I’m taking a few weeks out to develop a project that might make more of an impact in a competitive market.

I’ve set myself an impossible goal, but at least I realise that and I’m muddling through. I want both a marketable book that publishers will want to pay me for, but I also want to retain my authenticity and creative independence. I want to write a trend-setting book, not a trend-following one, which means an immediate ‘no’ from some (if not most) publishers. I’m probably shooting myself in the foot.

The wisest course of action for an author in the current, saturated market is to follow trends (if you can write fast enough). Many commercial publishers commission books following trends, so they aren’t the only publisher without an orange autumn book with a building on the cover, when all the others have one. I should probably be writing cosy, small-town romance – or cowboys with dragons.

But I’m… not. Honestly, there are more than enough of those books for the average reader to get through. I know every story is derivative in some way, but I don’t think that should stop us searching for the spark of something new.

After in-depth discussions with my agent, I’m working on something really quite wild. Maybe it will never see the light of day, if it doesn’t find its champion in publishing. I might not even finish this manuscript, if we don’t find a publisher based on the partial (although I think it will be a pet project to self-publish anyway, if we don’t find anyone). But it’s a story that comes directly from the things I love, an angsty romance I’m desperate to write, with two big, dramatic flashpoints that have been living in my head for months and a female main character with rough edges who comes into her own under difficult circumstances and becomes a hero.

I only hope I can pull it off.