What is Write-to-Market? An Author's Fast-Track to Earnings

Bella Rose Emmorey

book editor, rogue behaviorist, digital marketer, writer, brand builder, plant aunt, and cheese enthusiast.

What is Write-to-Market?How to Write-to-Market by Analyzing & Using Trends 1. Analyzing Trends in Books 2. Trends in TV & Movies 3. Research & Find the Gap 4. Publishing Timely by Scheduling Writing A Word of Caution: Write-to-Market VS Writing What You Want

If you’ve been researching how to make money writing, you’ve probably come across this and now have the question of, "What is write-to-market?" There are mountains of advice out there to learn this strategy to make a full-time living with your writing.
And it’s true! Writing to market has plenty of benefits for earning an income, but it will never be a get-rich-quick scheme. Can it be faster than other methods of earning an income from books? Yes! But it still requires work and time.
So keep that in mind while we talk about what writing to market is, how to do it, plus a word of caution.
What is Write-to-Market?Writing to market is when an author notices a genre, topic, or trope that’s trending and they write a book to fit into the highly selling market. Normally, this allows authors to sell more books because the "market" is a guaranteed buyership.
A broad example of write-to-market is when authors of various genres write a holiday-themed book within their world or series and publish it during that time of year, because book sales of those types surge around that time.
But there are many other ways of writing to market, and we’ll cover plenty of them here.
How to Write-to-Market by Analyzing & Using TrendsWriting to market is not for those who like to live in the moment and write by the seat of their pants. The ones who find the most success analyze and plan for it. They’re the types of writers who can stick to their writing goals to publish within the trend window—the trendow, if you will.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. So let’s break this down.
A note about writing to market:
Firstly, I’m not going to tell you how to write the books. There are plenty of other articles out there to help you write and $ finish a good novel$ . What I will say is that if you use these methods, make sure you’re writing your books to meet reader expectations of the genre and market.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the process of analyzing trends.
﻿$ Do Self-Published Authors Make More Money?$ ﻿
1. Analyzing Trends in BooksThere are many ways to study book trends—it's a whole skill in itself.
What makes certain genres pop off while others don’t get the same attention?
It really depends, but I personally scroll Facebook reader groups to see what they're talking about and looking for.
For example, the Fourth Wing series recently blew up. And I saw it over and over and over again in these Facebook reader groups. But what was so special about this particular series?
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Firstly, it has dragons. There are plenty of dragon books out there, but this trend has slowed in recent years, to the point that all the dragon books (or so people thought) had been read. But that’s not the only element. It’s also a romance. And it takes place in a school.
Dragon riding school.
I would predict that we’ll see an influx of dragon books coming out because of the success of Fourth Wing. This is one tactic you can use to write to market. If people loved Fourth Wing, they’ll want something that has those elements, but a different world and characters and plot. This was also evident when reverse harem fantasy stories emerged.
First, there were a handful of authors who popped off. Now, authors include the term in their book titles to help readers in that market find their books. The stories range over many genres from fantasy, thriller, suspense, and even romantic comedy—but they capitalize on the successful trope of reverse harems.
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If you don’t want to just hop on a trend that another author started, think about how you can use the trend in a different subgenre.
Maybe you write a book not about dragon riding school, but about a hippogriff taming school. Or you write a book about dragons, but instead of a school to learn to ride them, you write about a culture in which one must leave to locate, capture, and then learn to command a dragon before they’re able to return home. 
The idea is to take a few elements of what’s trending, and shake them up to for a unique kind of similarity.
Take another example with the reverse harem genre. There are many different takes out there, including ones like:
Fated mates (including shifters, fae, and prophecy foretelling)
Military
Dark Mafia
Brothers
Paranormal (including demons, multiple realms, etc.)
There are many ways you can take a trend and spin it into something specific to a certain audience.
But this does require paying attention and reading many books. It can also require trying your hand at something new in the hopes of exposing a gap and being the trend-setter, but more on that below.
2. Trends in TV & MoviesStories come in more forms than just books. No, you don’t need to be a screenwriter to capitalize on trends in TV. You can take what’s trending on the screen and write books based on similar ideas. Readers are watchers, too!
You can find so many people in reading groups asking questions like, "What books are like this show?"
They see a movie or TV series and then it’s over, but they really enjoyed certain aspects of it they want to revisit. If you discover new or "promising" series or movies and plan to publish a book near the time it publishes, the answer to those questions could be your book.
Let’s take Bridgerton for example. While these are already books you can buy and read, it’s being adapted as a Netflix series. Every time a new season is published, there is a surge in Google searches for "books like Bridgerton". Because there are more people buying books of this sort, Amazon will put more effort into showcasing "regency romance" novels in that category. If your novel is slotted here, you could sell many more copies than if you published during a time of year where there’s a lull for this search term.
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But how do you find what will be trending?
Some of this is guesswork. Some is keeping tabs on shows or movies that are already being adapted from popular book series. The reason for the latter is because books adapted for the screen already have an audience. The larger the audience, the more likely it will trend on the streaming platforms and social media. 
The more people see this adaptation, the more people will be searching for something similar.
One way to do this is to follow the websites, social accounts, and even emails of production companies. They usually announce when they've bought certain rights or when projects are set to begin production, and even which actors have been hired for the role.
I like to have other people do the work for me. Try Googling things like "book to movie adaptations being made" to get a list of what’s coming, which you can judge by the book’s popularity. You can also Google "TV shows to anticipate" and choose ones recently published. Even include the year so you can plan effectively.
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Depending on the dates of those premiers, you may have enough time to wrap on a book to publish when they go live.
3. Research & Find the GapSometimes, what’s more valuable than noticing the trends is discovering them before they happen. I like to think of this as empty space. Most people don’t notice something that’s not there. In fact, this skill set is often what traditional publishing houses look for in the agents they work with.
I’d start with the genre of your preference and go searching. Researching.
What’s missing? What archetypes or tropes are not here yet? What setting or plot type is lacking?
Sometimes this starts by observing what there is too much of in a genre.
You can also pose the question: What used to be popular, got over saturated, and has been in a lull for a long time?
There’s almost always a resurgence of trends. Clothing fashion teaches us that. The same is true for books, especially considering Fourth Wing and its ability to make dragon books trend again.
One of my favorite things to do is hop into Facebook groups for readers, and ask them their biggest pet peeve or what they wish certain genres had more of.
If you can believe it, many fantasy readers who are women want more middle-aged women in fantasy. There are too many young men as the main characters in fantasy. Which means there is a gap in the market for this (one I intend to fill, personally).
After some time reading in a certain genre, you’ll also recognize elements you wish were present, or plot or character scenarios you’d enjoy. For example, what I’m seeing more and more of in these fantasy Facebook groups are people who want more magic use as the norm in fantasy. There are too many books where magic is rare, special, or can’t be used often.
Instead, these readers want a world in which magic is everywhere and used frequently, and it’s not something to be withheld.
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If you want to know what readers want, and therefore buy, just ask them!
These are some Facebook groups that I’ve found to be quality:
﻿$ Bitchy Bookworms:$  great for romance, spicey, woman audience
﻿$ Fantasy Faction:$  great for serious and epic fantasy, less romance/spice$ ﻿$ ﻿
﻿$ Classic Literature Book Club:$  great for exactly as it sounds, plus this one has a monthly read so you can consume books with people.
I would recommend searching for a group that’s specific to your genre. You can do this by logging into Facebook and going to the search bar, then typing in "your genre readers". Hit enter and then navigate to the "groups" option to filter.
Here’s an example of this for the mystery genre:
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Remember to look at the information for posts per day, as well as member count. More posts per day means you’ll likely get more engagement on your own posts with questions, and more content to review for analysis.
A word on groups: don’t go here to try to sell your book. You’ll get kicked out, and it's a weak $ book marketing strategy$  anyway.
4. Publishing Timely by Scheduling WritingYou’ll want a writing routine to use the write-to-market strategy. Timing matters. Getting too far behind a trend means your book will have more competition, so I always recommend setting a goal date and working backward.
﻿$ How To Create a Book Publishing Schedule$ ﻿
This is most easily done if you have a software that can do the work for you. That at least removes decision fatigue. You know what to write and when.
Plus, if you’re trying to self-publish a book by the time the TV show or movie premieres, then having something you can plug in a specific finish date and have it calculate your daily goals (depending on your specific schedule) takes out a lot of the guesswork.
﻿$ NovelPad$  is a software that does this really well.
Let’s say I want to write a regency romance by the time the next Bridgerton series is out on Netflix. Currently, information for the release date says 2024, but unspecified. I'm writing this post in October 2023. If we can assume the show won’t release until after the first quarter of 2024 (or else we’d see press for it by now), then let’s make March 31, 2024 the deadline to finish the book.
Log into NovelPad and navigate to the Goals tab.
Input all the fields like my example below and hit "save" to generate your writing schedule.
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This has you writing less than 1,000 words each writing day (4 days per week) in order to complete a 90,000 word draft by the end of March. This kind of control over your writing process makes a write-to-market strategy possible.
A Word of Caution: Write-to-Market VS Writing What You WantWriting to market can make you money. If you’re diligent and determined to make a living writing books, it’s possible. But what I have to say after being around those who have done this for years is that it can get draining.
There seems to always be a plan for "one day I will write for myself," and that day takes a while to come to fruition. Not everybody has such a strong need to write a book that’s outside of what’s trending in market, so this strategy works for many.
But if you want to write something different or unique or just not "trending" and have no passion for the process of analyzing trends, this can be a slippery slope to being shoved in a genre corner you don’t want to be in.
It might be trendy to write reverse harem romances right now, but is that what you truly want to be writing?
It might be trendy to write werewolf shifters, but is that what you want to write about?
What you want to write and what makes you happy to write about as an author matters, and you can make a living writing that if given time and the $ right publishing advice$ .
Some authors write exactly what they'd like, then sit on the manuscript until they can grab a wave of popularity in the sea of book trend cycles—like Lex Croucher writing $ her first regency romance$  before Bridgerton rose to popularity. There's a decent chance your genre or niche will resurface in the market, so this isn't a bad strategy to get the best of both worlds!

Writing to market takes time. You still have to write a good book, edit it, create the cover and promotional images, gather a launch team, and publish! But if you can nail your process, writing to market can give you a decent shot to make a true living off of your writing. Might as well give it a shot!