Because I really need to sell more books, I’ve been reading a lot about the business of publishing. And it seems that I’ve been doing one thing wrong if I want to make money. I’m apparently writing the wrong books.

My general way of deciding what books to write has started with the ideas I have, and that usually comes from me thinking of a kind of book I really want to read, trying to find it, not being able to find it, and then writing it myself. From a creative standpoint, that’s not a bad method. It means you love what you write, and it may mean you’re filling an unserved niche. I see people giving the advice to write the book you want to read but can’t find all the time.

From a sales and marketing standpoint, it doesn’t work so well. If you’re going the traditional publishing route, you run up against the problem of “comps” or comparable titles. When a publisher is trying to decide whether or not they want to publish a book, they want to get an idea of how well it might sell, and to do that, they look at other books that are similar. If there are no similar books, they can’t get the numbers to put in their spreadsheet. That’s when you get the “I love this but wouldn’t know how to market it” rejections. They have to really, really feel strongly about a book and have some other reason to think it might be successful to go for a book they can’t find comps for.

In independent publishing, all the advice is to look at the categories and make sure your book fits well within a category that sells well but that isn’t so crowded that your book will be lost. You try to find as narrow a category as possible, then hit all the expected tropes for that category and make sure that your cover makes it really obvious that it belongs in that category. There’s software to help you analyze the categories that tells you about how many books you need to sell a day to make the top ten of your category.

When you’re writing the book you want to read and can’t find, that gets difficult because your book doesn’t fit well in any one category, it doesn’t have the popular tropes readers are looking for, and the expected style of cover in that category doesn’t fit your book.

With that fantasy book I’ve been working on, the one with the journey that leads to romance, you’d think that would fit obviously into a category, but it doesn’t. The “fantasy—romantic” category isn’t really that thing at all. If I were to describe what’s there, I’d lure a lot of spambots (let’s just say there are a lot of covers with bare, sculpted male torsos). I kind of wish there were a separate category for books that aren’t quite as focused on the romance and that aren’t so steamy. I wouldn’t really consider it epic fantasy. It’s not based on fairy tales. It doesn’t have magical creatures (maybe I should throw in a dragon so I can go with that category). It’s got sorcery but no swords, so isn’t sword and sorcery. I’m not sure how they define “historical” fantasy. It’s secondary world and not based on any particular culture, period, or place in our world, though it does deal with the history of that world.

The problem for me is that I don’t seem to have story ideas in the obvious, strong categories. My ideas almost always come from the place of “I want to read this and I can’t find it.” I know there are a lot of other readers like me out there who want those books, too. The trick is finding them and making sure they can find my books. That’s where I have to rely on my readers telling other readers about them. That’s the best way for like-minded people to be able to find the books they want.

I do think that the Kindle Unlimited program skews the perception of the trends and tropes, though. Those are readers who are paying a set price per month for all the books they want to read, and I think when you’re not paying for each book individually but can read all you want of the sort of thing you like, you choose books differently. If you remove the KU books from the bestseller list, the remaining books look very different. The problem is that the KU books tend to fill the Amazon bestseller lists, so everything else gets buried. Maybe it looks different on other retailers, but their interfaces aren’t quite as easy to scroll through. This is part of why I keep my books on wide release instead of in KU. I don’t think I fit the niches that do well in KU, and I’d lose the readers who don’t buy books through Amazon.