How To Deal With A Murdered Story

[Russ]

I do understand the general frustration however. It's like some of the hate shown for grimdark, with the assumption that GRRM's success is responsible for the failure of so many non-GRRM-esque stories. As if it's all a zero-sum game, so while some genres/subgenres/styles are on the ascent, others are cruelly forced down into untimely graves.

And while one can be frustrated by a powerful trend in the publishing industry (I don't see it that way in fantasy atm but that is a different story) a trend like that can also assist many people in their careers and offer opportunities for both works and writers that were not there before.

I have a friend who is a very successful writer now (all of his books will get into the top ten NYT list now) who a number of years ago was going along doing "well" as a writer but still doing his day job. One of these mega trends exploded in his field and his agent called him up and said "You remember that book about X that we couldn't sell when you wrote it...it is time to send it out again". And they did, they sold it for very good money and it became his breakout book, which likely would have remained unsold had that other author not had a massive industry impacting success with his book.

So a massive trend can have both a positive and negative impact, depending on the author.

The other good thing about trends is that they don't last forever.