This post is about publishing, art, and the smallest bit of whining that I can include without feeling like a total self-pitying jerk. It’s about our best intentions – and how that’s not enough to carry the day. We exist within walls of preconception and self-doubt. Sometimes there are outside stresses in our lives that just don’t make our goals attainable. This is when the adage ‘live to fight another day’ comes to mind.
New writers moan about focusing on trends, as if that’s the one Big Shiny Secret that can get them published. Once they’ve been in the trenches a while, they understand that trending ideas only help if you have already written something to match, and do it fairly early in the trend.
I was fortunate enough to read a roundabout success story yesterday on Miss Snark’s First Victim blog, about S.E. Lund.
Lund writes candidly: I decided on self-publication based on the feedback from agents that my genre was a hard sell (paranormal romance – aka vampires). I took Nathan Bransford’s advice to try self-publishing if I thought I had a novel that had an audience but that literary agents weren’t quite comfortable trying to sell because of market saturation. When I read a rumor that Sylvia Day had a finished vampire romance novel that her agent didn’t want to even try to sell, I figured if she couldn’t get her agent interested, who would ever consider a trilogy from an unpublished writer like me?
You read that right. Sylvia Day’s agent did not want to touch a vampire romance novel.
Lund self-published her first three novels, to more success than she’d expected. She’s writing more novels. If she’d kept on with the agent search, she might still be unpublished and unsure of herself. We can’t know for certain. For her, as for many other authors, self-publishing (done right) was not easy. But it was rewarding on several levels.
Cut to this month’s Phoenix Home & Garden Magazine, a go-to guide for commercial decor artists in the U.S. The front cover announces ‘Embracing Neutrals’, which made me do a full-on Dot Warner doubletake in the grocery store. After several years of rich colors and vibrant pastels, the local stylemakers have doubled down on neutral palettes. Just my luck, guess what I pulled out of a commercial design studio last month, after they had gone unsold for over two years? Yep. Two big neutral semi-abstracts. 
I roll my eyes about it now, and try to think of any other studios I can successfully pitch, but the take-home lesson here is that trends and information are only as good as your access to them, and your timing. In this case my timing sucked. I painted neutrals because I love them, and tried to sell them during a time when the market did not. Ten years ago, I sketched but did not paint a series of gorgeous semi-abstract bondage-inspired pieces, because I wasn’t sure if I could find a market in stuffy Arizona. (Then Fifty Shades of Grey came out. I’m still considering options. I really like those sketches.)
In both art and writing, there is an overwhelming temptation to cash in. To cobble something together quickly, in the hopes of snagging some of that lovely, hungry market. To settle for the lowest common denominator of a trend.
In art, frankly, that often leads to unsold pieces, or pieces that quickly get recycled to thrift and second-hand stores. In writing, especially in the erotic romance digital markets, it can seem to create flavor-of-the-month forgettable novels written to specific templates. Convention publishing-industry panels tout ways to ‘Publish Often!’ Certain publishers in the genre are noted for their proportion of what I’ve seen called ‘word barf’, generated by authors who manage a book a month or more.
It’s a great way to build backlists and followers, but I wonder how many of these authors might benefit from a little slower pace. They might come up with something remarkable, instead of just profitable. I know of several authors who’ve built strong backlists quickly, without sacrificing quality. They are my mentors and inspirations, and I hope to follow them.
Just as soon as life lets me. And just as soon as I can convince my inner marketing kitten to stop jumping at trends I cannot catch.