In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Temperance card to guide their discussion. They discuss how they find the balance between writing to market and writing for personal enjoyment.
Question of the week: how do you balance writing what you want and writing to market? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Transcript
Crys: Hello and welcome to The Write Away Podcast. It is Monday, July 4th, 2022, as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my co-host…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: We are recording a little bit ahead of time because I’m going to be in the states starting tomorrow through 10 days from then. I think I get home on the 16th, so this writing update will be a little bit out of date by the time it gets to you. And then come end of July we’ll have a lot to update you on hopefully.
JP: Yeah, absolutely.
Crys: How was your writing week?
JP: Okay. It was great. I had been going slow on edits for book two, and then I put myself in gear, and on Friday I think I edited like 40 plus pages, and then the next day it was like 30 plus pages. I now have 40 pages left with a goal of doing about 10ish pages a day once the day job starts back up tomorrow. I’ve been keeping to that, and I love the and part because the fact that there’s an and is awesome, I outlined the Publish in Six and I already started drafting it yesterday. And my goal is to have two chapters done this week.
I’m starting drafting chapter two, and then I’m gonna do edits throughout the week because I want to do this thing where I write and edit because I have outlined everything out. I’m gonna put the goal that like every week I’m gonna do it like it’s a Vella episode or a Serial Fiction episode. And that works well for me. So I don’t know, it’s been a good week. I’ve been really happy this past couple of days. That’s my update.
Crys: Yay. I haven’t written. Oh, wait. Before we move on away from you, something else big changed for you this week. You cut your hair.
JP: I did. I couldn’t donate it because it was dyed, which made me sad. But it went from being at the small of my back, to as short as I could possibly get it.
Crys: Oh, you could have buzz cut it. And you’re not buzz cut.
JP: I could have, I almost did. I was just like, do I just do this myself? I didn’t. The barber asked me like seven times if I was sure because he was freaking out and was like, I don’t, is a lot of hair. And I was like, I want it gone, please remove it.
Crys: We’ll have to get a picture and put it up on the website.
JP: Will we? Okay.
Crys: Yes. Yes. You can like block your face out. It’s just your hair. I don’t care.
JP: Here, you can snap this one from Riverside.
Crys: Let’s see if Riverside grabs it.
JP: We’ll find out. Wonderful.
Crys: For me, I did not get any new writing done. Thursday when we recorded last was a release day. Thursday, I basically binged Umbrella Academy and kept up to date messaging readers. Because of Susi dying, a lot of readers were responding to emails where they normally wouldn’t, they were responding to Facebook post, so I was responding back to them because I just felt like that was the right thing to do.
And that was the last day of my kiddo having school for the next two weeks. So Friday he was home. I did get a bunch of weird admin work done. I worked on some audio stuff, I worked on just a like a hodgepodge of things that needed to get done that were really good for a day when I didn’t want to spend creative brain space.
So that was very much Friday for me. Yesterday, absolutely nothing until it was bedtime. And then my brain wouldn’t shut up. So I read Zoe York’s Romance Your Goals. I haven’t read Romance Your Plan yet. She has three books, Romance Your Brand, which is about like who you are as a writer and what you write. Romance Your Plan, which is how you market. And Romance Your Goals which is how do you aim yourself and your particular style and goals and make sure that you keep moving forward.
And I really liked Romance Your Goals. I have a lot of notes on it. She asks a lot of good kind of overview questions that aren’t really new questions, but I needed something to push me into focus with those questions. Because those are things that I’m considering, like going through and reconsidering right now with all the upheaval. And so yeah, so I didn’t go to sleep until far too late last night doing a lot of thinky thoughts. But it was really good. I want to reflect on that and go through and start answering the questions that she posed and maybe I’ll pick up Romancing Your Brand and start working through that next. We’ll see.
JP: Yeah, it’s still a productive week, I would say.
Crys: I would say the next two weeks are iffy productivity wise because I just don’t know what they’re going to look like. I’ve got five days with my ex’s family and five days with my family and then one night in Panama which will just be lovely. We fly down to Panama, have an overnight there, and then we fly back to Costa Rica the next morning. It was strangely the cheapest flight I could find.
JP: Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be?
Crys: So our question this week is spinning off of the card of Temperance. Would you describe Temperance to us?
JP: Absolutely. Upright keywords are balance, moderation, patience, and purpose. Reversed keywords, our imbalance, self-healing, and realignment. So card-wise, it shows a large, winged angel who is both masculine and feminine, wearing light blue robes with a triangle enclosed in a square. This represents that humans, the triangles, are bound by earth and natural law, the square. And pouring water runs between two cups, symbolizing the flow of alchemy and life. So really this is all about finding that balance between two things. In the background, there’s a winding path up mountain range, reflecting the journey through life. So this is just about taking that balanced path.
Crys: Now, this prompted the question that so many writers come to at some point, whether it’s before they start writing, for most people it’s after they’ve had a few unsuccessful books out, but how do you write what you love while also writing to market? And I feel like this is something that you’ve had in mind from before you started preparing to publish, whereas most writers don’t. And that’s part of your like analytical, futuristic brain, but also you have a lot of friends who are successful writers, so that’s what we talk about so that was influencing you. So how have you approached this as you’ve been publishing?
JP: I would say the series that Abe and I are coming out with is very marketable. There are pieces that are more passion-wise. So having a main Jewish character, I think that one’s like the biggest hit because if you are writing to a US market, having a main Jewish character is probably not the main market that you would hit. Let’s just be honest, it’s not gonna be the case.
We wanted to set up something that was marketable. Something that was held true to both of us but was still as marketable in the urban fantasy realm as possible. And I think that we hit that pretty hard, based on the feedback we’re getting from readers in that market. So I think there were pieces that we knew we had to up. Like I like to write really whimsy, but in the gaming realm, that’s not gonna fit.
Something I really want to do, and actually I’m working on a project right now that’s gonna do that and that may not be as marketable, and I know that, and that’s gonna be my own personal brand as this like weird funky stuff. Like that was our thing. First off is like, how can we make this marketable? How can we hit the expectations? And then do the subversions that we want to do as minimally as possible.
Crys: When I started publishing, it was this weird thing. So I’d written this like shifter romance novel two years before I started publishing. It was the first thing I’d finished that was like longer than 7,000 words. But I didn’t really know what to do with it. So I just left it on my computer.
And then when a friend was like, hey, I discovered this weird little shifter sub-genre on Amazon, we should write it. I was like, oh, I actually have a story that would fit that really easily if I change a few things. So like that was somewhat written to market. It was something that I’d written without very much idea of focusing on market and then added market things after the fact.
And then my first series, which I don’t really think anyone knows that I wrote because it’s under a pen name I don’t use anymore, was so chaotic. I did not know how to write a consistent series. It was like every book in that series was a different genre. Thankfully, they made money because the sub-genre at that point was hot and people were just reading whatever. And one of the books that I’m most proud of is in that series, but it doesn’t really relate well to the other books in theme or style, like it’s just related characters in the same town.
JP: Yeah, that makes sense.
Crys: So it was from that experience that, one, I realized that I needed to focus more. So my next series was very focused on what the genre wanted and keeping a consistent tone. And then when I co-wrote with Susi, like that was even easier because we had a mission. It was like kind of monster of the week, but it was just mission of the week. We had a team, they had a mission every book, and I really learned how to write a super consistent, focused series from that.
Then I promptly forgot about tat the next time I went on to write a solo series. Because when you have a mission of the week or a monster of the week, the formula is rather easy. And the second series I wrote did not have that. And so I felt very lost in learning this new way of telling a softer, gentler series. I go back and forth, like even though I’ve been doing this for five years, even though I have 60 plus books that I have written or co-written, I still occasionally F this up. And I do that when I’m under pressure and under deadlines and haven’t clearly set up expectations beforehand. So those are some things I’ve learned.
So I’m thinking about this a lot as I think about what I’m writing next, not under this romance pen, about writing what I want, which is queer fantasy. And there is a market for that. A lot of people like to say that it’s a really small, tight market. It’s been a mostly trad dominated market. And if you’re only advertising on AMS and Facebook, you’re going to miss the majority of the market because the majority of the market is like millennials to gen Z. And gen Z is buying paperbacks, not eBooks. They are on TikTok, basically nowhere else. It’s a different world.
So if you’re looking in the right place, it’s an active market. If you’re looking in the wrong place, you’re just gonna be dumbfounded. So queer fantasy, which will probably occasionally have romance plot lines, if not often romance plot lines, but then trying to figure out, okay, what does the market want? And so I have considered, because I find it much easier for me to write to expectations than to figure out from all the choices, from all the possible choices of the kinds of stories I can tell. I get choice paralysis.
I find that I just need more time to start crafting plot lines that maybe aren’t romance based because I don’t have the practice yet, so it’s gonna take me longer. So that’s something I’ve had to recognize. But I’ve also thought maybe I stick into like a lighter romance plot feel, like keep romance fairly prominent and just choose sub genres that more fit what I want to write. So like fade to black instead of explicit.
And thankfully right now, cozy fantasy is this up-and-coming sub-genre. And it’s not to say that books that are now being described as cozy fantasy didn’t exist before, they did. But now there is a particular focus on people who want cozy fantasy books.
And these are books that are often high fantasy. So you have the castles and the royalty and the wars all exist in the world, but you’re focusing on a smaller story. Maybe an herbalist in a cottage like Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes is an orc who starts a coffee shop. So you’re focusing on kind of the same things that cozy mysteries focus on. It has like these small-town vibes and feels where nothing really bad is going to happen, but with fantasy characters and settings.
And so I’m like, okay, thankfully, I fucking love that. I’ve made big lists of what I’ve seen readers really enjoying about cozy fantasy so that I can make sure that I don’t go off track in my writing, because I’m used to writing a bit more, not dark, but a little bit more violent because of the team mission things. And I just want to get a really clear idea on what that is and let myself just run at that for a while because I have enthusiasm for it.
And I think one of the important things, regardless of how much your personal mixture of write-to-market to personal enjoyment is, is that you still need to have enthusiasm for your work. And actually I mentioned this our personal updates, I just read Romancing Your Goals by Zoe York. And one of the things York said was that regardless of what you write, whether it is your write-to-market, or you’re just writing what you enjoy, you have to have enthusiasm for it or you’re not gonna be able to carry it forward.
She’s like, and some people get enthusiasm out of writing to market. They get enthusiasm out of writing what they know readers are gonna read. And I do, I often get that enthusiasm. So it’s just finding the overlap with the guidance of the write-to-market for me.
JP: Definitely. Yeah. I was thinking about this as we were talking, and when Abe and I first started drafting what is to be Dark Pond, which is like a young adult urban fantasy, we were like, this is horror. And we were starting to think about it, and the more we started plotting out, we started to realize, no, this is urban fantasy. And then we’re like, we obviously have a very young character, this is clearly young adult.
And each time that we took those steps, like it inferred what expectations were to be made out of the story from the grain of story that we had. So we were like, okay, this is urban fantasy, so clearly we need to put it in a more urban setting, have a magic system, blah, blah, blah, like less horror related. YA needed to include some form of a romance, not necessarily, but YA does better in that sense, and there was space for it so we added it.
But I think that’s what my process is more or less, is I’ll have an idea, a wild crazy idea. I’ll be like, I have this story I want to tell. But then I look around me and I look at like, where does my story fit? How can I play with the expectations in that realm to make my story an interest to that audience? Because I think that’s the stopping point one can make is they’re like, I have the story to tell, I don’t care who reads it. It’s gonna be my story, my way. It doesn’t have a genre. It doesn’t fit anywhere.
Or, and this is the route I like to go, I have this crazy idea, where’s my audience? Okay, the expectations that they have that I can shoe into my story without ruining the integrity of the story I want to tell. And that’s where I ended up for the Publish in Six project. It’s a cozy fantasy, more or less. It really aligns with a lot of the funny sitcomy fantasyish stories that I used to watch as a kid and some of the stuff that I used to read as well. So I know that there’s an audience for it because I’m that audience. So I know what materials to look at to look for templates and ideas.
Crys: I find that the stories that are more like the ‘just for me’ without the specific focus of writing to a market, like, yes, they will have market conventions and everything that they need to hold to, but more when they’re in a wide genre, like epic fantasy. So I have the epic fantasy idea that I’ve been playing around with for two years that at first I was like, oh, I’ll put it on Vella. And then that just didn’t happen because I’m not ready to write that. It takes me longer to figure out what that story is going to be because something like epic fantasy has so many options.
Readers in that genre, one, like long. That’s about the only rule for epic fantasy, because then there’s sub genres in epic fantasy. You can have no magic, you can have magic. Like there’s too many options. So I have to sit with that for longer to figure out what it is that I want it to be. But when I’m writing to market, for me, it actually goes backwards. I’m like, ooh, I really like this genre. This is working for me. This is exciting for me.
So like cozy fantasy, I’m very excited about cozy fantasy. How do I write a cozy fantasy story? And then I come up with the idea. I start writing my Id list, so all the things that really excite me, the kinds of characters I like, the kinds of situations I like, and then and then I start pulling out those pieces to create my unique story to that market. But I do it a little backwards from how you do it.
JP: Yeah. That’s interesting. I like both ways. I think I’ve done it that way too. I don’t know.
Crys: My question for our listeners this week is: how do you balance the two, writing what you want and writing to market? It’s a unique answer for everyone, so I’m really curious what everyone’s balance is.
JP: Absolutely.
Crys: All right. Now, we are going to go record our Patreon special episode, which is a focus on business inspired by our card of the week, Temperance. And this one we’ve actually had planned for a while based on some stuff that has happened in the last year quite a while ago, not pointing at any specific instances, but how do you navigate drama in the writing community?
So I hope that you will come on over to patreon.com/writeawaypodcast. We’d love to have you over there. Thank you.
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