What Makes a Market Tough?

And not in a cool way

Feb 20, 2024

Hi Friends,

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with writers and editors and other agents about how tough the market is right now. It’s tough for editors to get things through editorial board meetings. It’s tough for sales reps to get big bookstores to take lots of books. It’s tough for agents to get responses from editors, no less offers. It’s tough for writers to get responses to their queries. When I talk about this with publishing people, we all kinda nod our heads, talk about the last time it was tough, what genres were affected more then and what’s suffering now. What outside influences are wreaking havoc—economic downturn? election coverage suffocation? global pandemic? SHIP STUCK SIDEWAYS IN THE PANAMA CANAL?—and what interior shifts are making waves. Does so and so have a new CEO? Is that other publisher up for sale? Did those guys have big layoffs?

All of these things can create a “tough market.” The editors and agents I talk to generally know that this too shall pass. I mean, we’re all scared it won’t, that our personal business will take a disproportionate hit, that we’ll be the ones laid off. But we won’t know until we know. What can we do about it? Basically nothing. I mean, we can make small adjustments, look at what’s working and what we have, decide to take risks or not. But that’s about it. The market will cycle through whatever it’s going to cycle through, and we’ll hopefully be ok on the other end. Just like every other industry.

When writers ask about the market, especially writers newer to the scene, they think editors and agents have some kind of specialized knowledge to analyze and synthesize what we see in market trends to avoid the dips, to stay afloat, to come out the other end unscathed. And we do not! I mean, we have experience. We know what happened last time and what maybe worked or didn’t work. But very little of that can be extrapolated to predict future trends or outcomes. We can try! We can look back at the cycle paranormal romance took in the 2010s and see how long it’s taken to come back as romantacy and that might help you figure out if you should write that romance about weregophers this year or next. But that doesn’t mean I can definitely sell a romance, or your romance about weregophers. The market is going to do what the market is going to do, and we only know anything in hindsight.

I asked friends and colleagues why they thought things were tough right now and among the answers were: decreased media coverage/reviews for books, very high costs of paper and shipping for publishers leading to lower profits, higher cost of living eating into readers’ budgets, library funding cuts and book bans, publisher’s marketing missteps and inability to figure out how to harness online trends/platforms like TikTok, and more. The one that stuck with me the most is that everyone, and I mean everyone from the writer to the agent to the editor to the reader is just so damn TIRED. We’re tired and distracted and worn out and just do not have any extra ooomph left in us to focus on long-from tasks. We’re burned out. All of us.

If you’re a writer, it’s not so easy to just sit tight and wait it out. It takes an incredible amount of time and effort to write a book, and you can’t just say oh, ok. I’ll sit this one out and write something else. It makes perfect sense that you would want look at the market and make strategic moves. Some of those moves are easy to make, like looking at the current mystery novel shelf and seeing few are 300,000 words long. That’s useful market analysis. You can’t, however, see the books that aren’t out yet (and neither can agents or editors for the most part) and you can’t see into the heart of every one of those mysteries on the New Releases shelf to gather insights more than “not long.”

And even if you had the best analysis of all those reasons I mentioned above, there’s nothing you can do about it, yourself, as a writer. You can’t make paper cheaper and you can’t make make more newspapers run reviews. You can vote for candidates that support libraries and not book-banning whackjobs. You can get on TikTok and see for yourself what everyone is talking about. But that all takes time and creates slow change. It doesn’t tell you want kind of book to write and it won’t tell you if what you’re doing will. So what then?

You do the best you can do. You decide amongst the ideas you have what to write next. If you go chasing an idea to fit some kind of market fluctuation, there’s no telling where the market will be when you’re done. The things you’re seeing on the shelves now were sold a year or two ago, and written a year or two (or more!) before that. When I talk to my clients about the market, I prefer to talk to them about specific ideas, weregophers or nah, instead of what’s the hot genre right now. I feel like I can have a productive conversation with my client about the market because we can take into consideration their ideas, their track record, their relationships. But expanded out much farther than that, it’s too indistinct to generalize in a way that’s actually helpful. I’m sorry. I know it sucks. I wish I had better information to share.

What are the good signs I’m seeing these days? Abrams just started a new kids graphic novel imprint. Penguin Random House just started a new YA Romance imprint. There weren’t a bunch of layoffs after KKR bought Simon & Schuster. That doesn’t mean you should write a YA Romance graphic novel and send it to PRH, Abrams, and Simon & Schuster. But more imprints and fewer layoffs (at least in one place) is always better than the opposite.

My only real, unsatisfying, too-vague, not-reassuring advice I can give any writer is write the book you want. It may not work for any number of reasons, the market being one of them. But it also could work, despite the market. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You won’t know unless you try.

Agents and Books

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