With St. Paddy’s Day just past, I’ve been thinking about the idea of luck, especially in publishing. A lot of this business is really about luck—right place, right time, right subgenre, right trope, right mood, right trend, etc.—all of those things that make books really blow up and go viral on TikTok or Twitter and race up the charts.
Luck isn’t just about virality, of course; it can also be about getting an agent or a publishing contract, or getting connected to people who can support your writing career, or any number of things that could be considered lucky, because luck is pretty subjective. But the frustrating thing about luck is that it’s unpredictable. Getting lucky is the bonus, the cherry on top—but you can’t expect luck or sit around waiting for it to strike.
So what’s an author to do? If you can’t predict luck, you can at least set yourself up to be ready if luck shows up. And in the process, you’ll build your career at the same time.
1) DEVELOP YOUR CRAFT
I don’t care how viral something goes—if it’s not actually good, it’s not sustainable. (“Good” is subjective, obviously, but weak storytelling, poor editing, and a lack of understanding of genre conventions isn’t going to keep people coming back even if they write fire sex scenes, for example.) So know your craft and know the romance genre—how do you create a tightly written story with interesting characters, compelling plots, and everything else expected in a romance? Devour craft books (I have some recs here and here if you need them), educate yourself through workshops and/or courses from reputable people, exchange work with other romance writers and learn how to critique and get used to your own work being critiqued to continue to grow as an author.
2) STUDY THE TRENDS
What’s hot right now in romance? What kind of tropes, situations, sub-genres are trending right now? What’s in the cultural zeitgeist that people are just starting to pick up on and infuse into romance? What cyclical trends do we see coming back or falling out of fashion? Are there differences in trends in trad publishing vs in self-publishing? (Self-publishing can generally pivot much faster than trad so their trends can come and go quickly.) These are all things to be aware of so that you can potentially tap into them in your own writing and ride a lucky wave.
So, paranormal/fantasy is back, but in self-publishing, it’s manifesting as monster romance, and in trad, I’m seeing more witches lately. Dark romance and their graphic sex scenes have TikTok by the throat, but dark romance is virtually absent in trad. Forced proximity is a perennial favourite trope that never really goes out of style, but could we use a break from it after two years of a pandemic? Will we ever escape the stranglehold that illustrated covers have on rom-coms? Whither historical romance these days? I’m hoping that the Bridgerton-Sanditon double-punch this month, plus a desire for an escape from modernity (’cause we could use one, yes?), will bring it roaring back (hopefully while also moving away from the idea that only straight, rich, white people get an HEA).
3) STAY TRUE TO YOU AND KEEP WRITING
Notice in the previous point that I didn’t say “write to trend.” As much as it may be tempting to do so, if you don’t love the trend itself, you’re probably not going to love writing it, and readers will pick up on that. However, if a trend happens to intersect with your interests, that’s luck showing up already for you! If a trend isn’t intersecting with your interests, that’s okay too—your readers are still out there; it just means you’ll need to do different marketing to find them.
Stay true to you and what you’re good at. Write the book of your heart—I am very sure that there are readers for every book, so even if it feels like no one will ever want to read it, someone out there is waiting for your book. If you’re not ready to write the book of your heart yet, cool—you know what your skills and your limits are right now, and you can get ready for the book of your heart by writing your way up to it. Get your backlist prepped so that when luck hits, readers will have a ton of older stuff from you to discover. Just keep writing and getting better, and that will serve you well.
Luck is really just a by-product of hard work. Without that work already in place and developing the skills that got you there, you won’t be able to take advantage of luck if/when it does come by. So make sure you get yourself ready to accept luck on its travels!