Hello, dreamers. We’re about halfway through April, and my current round of queries is winding down.

I’ll be honest; this round didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. After receiving encouraging feedback on my first round, I believed I was on the right track. Unfortunately, this one has me thinking many of the changes I made to my overall query were counterproductive. During my upcoming post mortem, I plan to review my original query letter, and look at how I can meld it with the more recent version.

However, as I’ve mentioned on my recent “Writer’s Desk” posts, this is the time of year when I begin looking forward: on to my next novel project. I’ve spent a lot of time with Seven Days on Samarkand. I still believe it’s an excellent story that readers will love. But even if I get a request from one of my remaining queries, or find one in my next round in autumn, there still has to be a next book. And over the past several years, deciding what that next book will be has gotten harder and harder. Because there’s more to consider than just what I feel like writing.

Thinking Strategically

As a writer, forward must always be your direction. No matter how much you love a story you’ve written, you can’t just sit and admire it. There has to be a next one. Even if it wins a contest, or gets published, that story is now in the past. If you’ve attracted readers, they’ll be hungry for more of your work. You have to keep going.

And if you’re a querying writer, you have to think about your overall career strategy. Where do you want this to go? If you’re just looking to publish a book, so you can say you’ve done it, that’s fine. You’ve got an attainable finish line. But for those of us who hope to transform writing into a full-time career, there is no finish line. Every time you make a field goal, the goalposts move.

I had a run of luck last year: I won a short fiction contest and got two stories picked up for publication. It felt good to receive recognition (and, you know, get paid) after toiling in obscurity for so long. But even though those stories haven’t been published yet, they’re behind me now.

So, what’s next?

Every round of queries leaves me feeling not pessimistic, but rather pragmatic. I don’t throw up my hands and decide it’s hopeless, that I’m never going to find an agent and publish a book. But I do start wondering if I’m going in the wrong direction.

Agility is the key for the modern writer. To succeed you must be capable of following multiple paths at once, navigating the shifting realities of the literary market.

Understanding Market Realities

I wrote an entire post a few weeks ago on literary industry trends, so there’s no point in rattling them all off again. As I said in that post, I don’t think writers should ever “write to the market”. Try too hard to write something marketable that’s well outside your comfort zone, and you won’t be selling your best work. But understanding the market can help you refine your writing (and querying) strategy.

If you’re a modern writer, odds are you’ve got at least three or four ideas for novels at any given time, often in various states of completion. I tend to have less than most, mainly because I periodically comb through my novel concepts and purge those I’m no longer interested in writing. If it was a good idea, I’ll remember it. More than likely whenever I get around to it I’d have to start from scratch anyway. And if I’m actually considering deleting it, I probably didn’t get very far to begin with.

So while I’m not going to try too hard to write something hyper-marketable, at any given time at least some of my active concepts are more marketable than others. As such, when selecting a new novel project I’m more likely to gravitate toward the ones that are more marketable in the current space.

But, how do you decide what’s marketable at the moment? Well, there are several indicators.

Agent Interest

The best way to know what’s currently selling is to see what agents are looking for. As I’ve mentioned before, most modern agents maintain a page on Manuscript Wishlist (MSWL). At minimum, these pages will list what agents are currently looking for, starting with genres, and they update them regularly. These pages give querying writers a glimpse into the current state of the market. Right now, for instance, there is moderate interest in space operas. There are a few agents looking for hard sci-fi, but their interest appears tepid, which means it’s probably still a hard sell.

Successful Books

Agents’ interests can provide part of the picture, but it’s important to remember that the publishing industry operates on a lag. Once a book sells heavily, agents will begin actively seeking similar books in hopes of cashing in on a new trend. But to know what the next trends will be, you have to look at what’s currently making waves.

I mentioned above that there’s currently little interest among agents in hard sci-fi. However, the success of the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary may lead to increased interest in hard sci-fi in the coming year or two. Already I’ve seen two agents saying they’re looking for the next Project Hail Mary. Hopefully there will be more by the autumn query window.

Industry Sources

There’s more to it than all that, however, as industry trends deal with more than just genres. To fill in the blanks, it’s helpful to understand how industry professionals are thinking. There are a lot of great resources out there, from podcasts like “The Shit No One Tells You about Writing” to blogs like the one written by Jane Friedman. Those sources can give querying writers a clearer picture of what’s selling and not selling.

In my genre, for a long time everyone was looking for long series of novels. Encouraged by the success of YASF series like Maze Runner and Divergent and adult series like The Expanse, publishers were looking to sign lengthy book deals, hoping to generate new marketable content for years to come. However, signing debut authors to multi-book deals is extremely risky. For this reason, few publishers are now looking for debut novels that are meant as the start of a series. Rather, they’re interested in either standalone novels or those with “series potential”: books that draw things to a satisfying close while clearly leaving the door open for more.

Putting It All Together

Drawing from all of these resources gives writers a clear snapshot of the current state of the publishing market…and their potential place within it. Whenever I find myself looking for my next novel project (as I am currently), I always take the pulse of the market. I also take into account the success, or lack thereof, of my most recent round of queries. If I haven’t garnered any interest with my querying novel, it might be time to write something different.

As I’ve said before, my overall career strategy led me to abandon plans to query my first novel. In that case it had less to do with market realities than my personal plan: I knew that novel was nothing like anything else I wanted to write. So I moved on, and wrote the first novel in my current overarching fictional universe. That novel became Seven Days on Samarkand.

Now, I’m faced with another choice. Though I love SDoS and still believe in it, I must accept the possibility that it’s not the right novel to land me an agent and get my foot in the door. So I’ve been looking instead at several concepts for standalone works that would play better in the current market.

It’s hard, realizing that no matter how good your novel is there may not be a clear path to publication, at least right now. But in the end, aspiring authors don’t have the luxury of magical thinking. We may not like the state of the market at any given time, but how we feel is immaterial. It’s all about what the readers want.

It’s their world. We all just have to live in it. — MK