BearBear
Archmage
I am not planning on sales so it's a moot point for me, but in your business, to what degree do things get cut or steered by what sells over what you consider fun to write?
I write the stuff that interests me, and I want to aspire to a degree of professionalism in my craft. One does not preclude the other.
That's called survivorship bias.My base philosophy is to write what I enjoy and hope/assume there are others like me, heh heh. The trick is then finding those others and convincing them to give it a shot. Writing to market is an oddball piece of advice. If 1000 people write to market X, Y% will succeed, and therefore those people will call the advice good and pass along the advice to another thousand people who write to market A and B% of people succeed, and they pass along the advice. This is the basis for a helluva lot of Guru success stories, heh heh. The 90% who piledrive their faces into the concrete of failure aren't the ones making the Testimonials. "What sells" is a moving target. Star Wars barely got made. Harry Potter barely got published. The zeitgeist is a mystery, otherwise Hollywood would only produce hits, not the shit they do.
That's not nearly as fun to type.That's called survivorship bias.
At your point of experience, the divide between enjoying writing and selling it is finishing. You won't finish a project you don't love and believe in, so write the books you want to read and worry about writing to market later.
All in all, I agree with @pmmg that it's a false dichotomy.
Sorry Bear,You and the dragon:
![]()
I’ve started getting my stuff online recently and I’ve had some good feedback, but my stories probably aren’t going to appeal to the masses. But do I enjoy thinking about and writing my stories? Yeah! So does it matter to me at this stage? No.
The main thing people forget about book sales is that even best-sellers don't sell all that well (a few rare unicorns excepted). To make it onto the NY Times best-seller list, you only need to sell between 4,000 and 8,000 books in a week (yes, there are a lot of ifs and buts about the list, they're not relevant in this discussion). As in, to be one of the best selling fiction books in a given week, you don't have to appeal to the masses. There are highschools with more students than that.Appealing to the masses might be great, but I can appeal to far less than them and still have great success.
If just .00001% of the people on earth read my story, that is still 80,000 people.