Thoughts on Writing and Selling Genre Fiction

For a long time now, I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a novel for a couple of roleplaying companies. I’ve completed a couple of overviews and started chapter outlines and drafts, but I hesitated. Why? It wasn’t because cracking those markets is hard—which it is, by the way. Cracking the traditional market for any kind of fiction is hard, with the chance of rejection high even if you are ‘good enough’. This rejection is something everyone has to face, no matter how well established they are in the industry, so, if rejection wasn’t it, why hesitate?

I had to think about that, but I guess it’s because anything I write for a specific already-published setting isn’t really mine. Yes, it’s a market with prestige; yes, it might draw readers to my other fantasy work; and, yes, there’s already a market out there so I wouldn’t have to work as hard to build the initial readership (maintaining and developing it, is another question entirely)… BUT, on the flip-side, the work would never be completely mine; the books would most likely have a limited shelf-life and availability to readers; I wouldn’t be totally free to follow the stories that might cross my mind, as they come from an intellectual property that isn’t mine; and I wouldn’t be able to re-publish the works once the publication life reached its end.

So, while planning how I’m going to approach this whole independent publishing thing, I’ve been taking a long hard look at what I’ve finished writing, what I’ve been writing and what I really want to write. It’s this last consideration that’s really made me re-think how I’ve been going about things.

For a long time, now, I’ve been paying attention to ‘The Market’, looking at what’s in the stores and what’s selling and tailoring my writing to that, but the playing field has changed. I *can* now write what I want to write and have some hope that it will find an audience. I can take risks that established publishing houses just can’t afford to, and I can now go back to writing the stories that really interest me.

And that kind of freedom is kind of terrifying and kind of awesome at the same time.