On commerciality

Like many writers, I'm guilty of spending a little too much time on the internet. My time-wasting websites of choice have changed over the years, but a perennial favourite is Reddit, and specifically the excellent PubTips subreddit, which is a great place to learn the basics of trade publishing, querying, submissions and all the other hurdles you need to clear to get into this industry. It's where I workshopped my first query back in 2021, and I've answered questions and provided critiques of my own off-and-on there ever since.

Recently, someone asked a question over there that, shall we say, pushed my buttons. It felt like a near-perfect encapsulation of a conversation I've seen over and over again in online writer spaces about the importance (or regretful necessity) of the concept of 'commerciality'. I won't directly quote their question (you can go to the link above and read it if you're curious), but I'll paraphrase it. Essentially, they asked:

What will give me my best chance at getting published? Should I go for a really commercial idea that will maximise my odds? Or write the book I really want to write? And if I start off writing commercial things, will that stop me from writing the books I really want to write later?

I wrote a reply in the thread, which I'll be revising and extending at length in this post, because to my mind this question gives us a really handy guide to the common misconceptions about what 'commercial' means, how it affects the odds of getting published, how it plays a part in a writer's career and whether it is even a thing writers can fully engage with and wield in their favour.

I'm two books in (with three more under contract/due to be published), so I'm not coming at this from the point of view of a debut, but I'm also not a veteran writer with twenty books behind me. So, with due caveats set aside, let's dive into the commercial end of the publishing pool.

What is 'commercial' anyway?

Publishing is absolutely chock-full of terminology that people throw about while never quite agreeing on a common definition - high concept, hooky, upmarket, quiet, book club fiction, genre, mainstream. It's a sea of loosely-defined terms that can feel absolutely impenetrable as a novice writer.

Commercial is one of those terms - is it a genre? Is it a vibe? Is it a sales category?

At the most basic level, all it means is 'books that sell a lot of copies'. But as a visit to any bookshop will show you, that covers a lot of ground. There are genres and books that are definitely not commercial (currently), but what falls into the category/zone/vibe of 'commercial' is fuzzy to start with and changes constantly.

For some people, 'commercial' is a descriptive label, but it's also a synonym and, though they may deny it, a judgement. The thinking, I suppose, is that books that sell a lot of copies are inherently compromised, middlebrow and, dare I say it, a little bit trashy. With exceptions made for the nominees and winners of major literary awards and a vanishingly small cohort of literary authors who also sell like gangbusters, commercial is the very large bucket into which we put all those writers who are (gasp) doing it for the money.

It probably won't surprise anyone that the spy/SF writer who enjoys blowing things up in his books thinks that attitude is pompous snobbery of the first order.

You can also hear echoes of this in many discussions of prolific authors, where the word choices (you're 'churning out' the words etc) frequently betray an absolute conviction that slow processes = better words and fast, prolific writers who write books that sell a lot of copies are, by definition, hacks.

It will also not surprise you to think that I think this is bullshit too.

I can get a bit prickly about it, to be quite honest, because it is an extremely pervasive attitude and I sincerely believe it leads to a lot of really counterproductive anxiety for novice writers who a) enjoy what they're doing and b) write fast and c) are good at it. They internalise the message that it can't be any good because they wrote it fast, and it's a hooky, commercial idea. So they agonise over it and maybe they never even submit it. Because it's obviously trash.

Ugh. Anyway.

Let's get back to the original question - should you try to 'write commercially' in order to maximise your chances at being published? In fact, the specific wording used in the question was 'what kind of manuscript is optimal for a debut?'

I think this question and the way it's phrased contains at least three assumptions and sub-questions within it, which are more useful and illuminating than trying to determine the 'optimal' debut manuscript. Let's get into them.

Should you trend-chase in search of publishing success?

Unequivocally no, if you're a new writer trying to be traditionally published in the US, UK and other Anglophone markets. Acquisition and publishing cycles are slooooooow, with the absolute fastest I've ever heard of a book going from sale to shelf being about 9 months. The median is more like 12-18 months and I've seen some books in genres with smaller publishing houses take 2+ years.

What that means is that what's being published now (especially if it's part of a big, buzzy trend) was mostly acquired 12-24 months ago. By the time you've written a novel to capitalise on a visible, selling-big-right-now trend, the agents and editors who drove that trend will most likely have moved on. Of course, there's exceptions to this rule - some trends last multiple years (like dystopian YA in the 2010s), and some writers are very fast drafters and catch the wave at just the right time and get a book to market in time to be a part of it. But as a strategy for success for most novice, debut writers? It's very, very unlikely to pay off.

Indie publishing is an entirely different kettle of fish, because the lead times are down to how fast you can finish a book and do the work to get it online. But even then, you still need to be quick, consistent and have a really good grasp of why a particular subgenre is selling very well.

Should you deliberately write something 'highly commercial'?

This was the core of the Reddit question, and the part that made my eye twitch. At its core, in the way it was phrased, is an assumption that 'commerciality' is like a layer you can apply to an existing idea, or a dial you can turn up or down. And this isn't wrong per se, but it does mis-identify 'commerciality' as a single quality you can consciously focus on and optimise towards.

But let's go with it, for the moment. Can you cold-bloodedly say 'I'm going to make this novel more commercial/I'm going to write a highly commercial novel', then set out to do it? Yes, you can, actually. A certain kind of commerciality is evident in books which use a combination of tropes, narrative structures, character archetypes and little brain hacks (like short chapters) to make them compelling, fast-moving reads. Those books are just one of several kinds of highly commercial novels. But a lot of people like to read familiar tropes, characters and settings, across many different genres, and there's a huge market for this kind of work.

But if you're a debut novelist, I wouldn't recommend setting out specifically to try and do this, because the competition at this end of the market is brutal. You're going to be up against veteran midlist and bestselling novelists, some with decades of experience, established readerships, excellent editors and significant marketing and publicity support.

As well as being tough on the competition front, writing this kind of book is also just plain hard to do. As I noted above, there's a common misconception that 'easy to read' or 'fast to write' also inherently means 'easy to write' and is the province of lazy, talentless hacks. But in my experience the opposite is true - it's a genuine and complex skill and it's a rare debut novelist who can turn out a well-structured, well-paced, compelling and commercial novel on their first attempt.

Setting out to 'write a bestseller' is not really a viable strategy, despite what your well-meaning relatives might say to you. Once again, it does happen, but it's not a great strategy as a general rule. And if it's a strategy you're adopting solely to optimise your chances of success, you're probably going to hate doing it and that will be obvious in the quality and viability of the work.

So do we need to care about 'commerciality' at all?

So what's a novice novelist to do? If chasing trends is a bad idea and trying to write a commercial novel for the sake of its commerciality alone will be a depressing and fruitless endeavour, then how do you figure out what to do?

The answer to that, in my experience, is to learn to speak the language of commerciality. Rather than given books being 'commercial' or 'niche' or 'unsellable', it's my belief that there's an audience out there for nearly every kind of writing. If you've written a good book (for whatever value of 'good' applies to the genre, age group, tropes, prose standards, originality and execution of what you're writing), someone out there will enjoy it.

Commerciality, when seen through that lens, is the art of connecting those people to the work that you've done. Or, more specifically, of knowing how to help or induce other people to see the possibility of that connection and then work to make it real.

How do you go about that? Here's some pointers:

• Know your market - You need to know what's going on, both in the short, medium and long term. So that means reading recent work, knowing the history and classics of your genre, looking with a critical eye to assess why books are working or not working and, frankly, recognising that taste is subjective and constantly changing. And just because you think a book from thirty years ago is an unimprovable masterpiece doesn't mean that the market will agree and instantly buy your version of it.
• Know how to describe your work in market terms - This is probably the hardest skill to attain, as evidenced by many of the queries posted on PubTips - it's really hard to succintly sum up your work! But it is a learnable skill. It's not a secret key that will unlock publishing for you if your book itself is mid. Queries and loglines and pitches need to be functional at minimum, but the book also needs to be excellent. However, learning to succinctly pitch your work is a skill you will use again and again and again over the course of your writing career, and it will eventually help you select and frame and structure your ideas (see below).
• Read widely - Don't just read in the area that you hope to publish in - that can create a myopia and heavily limit the unique aspects of execution, creativity and inspiration that will make your work stand out. If all you read is cyberpunk SF, or procedural crime novels, or college-set literary novels, you will end up writing pastiche. Broaden your horizons and you will also find yourself broadening your odds.
• Judge the viability of your ideas - Second only to knowing how to pitch, knowing how to semi-objectively assess the viability of an idea is just as important. The good news is that the two skills feed into one another. If you can quickly and succinctly and consistently pitch your ideas, you'll eventually learn which ideas will make agents and editors light up with interest and you'll be able to look at three or four potential projects and pick out the one that has the best odds of success. Each time you do that successfully, you'll strengthen those instincts.
• Write what you really want to write - I've just spent a couple of thousand words telling you that you need to figure out what makes a book sellable, but the flipside to that is that the biggest component of that is what you, yourself bring to the story. There's nothing quite like the passion and energy of a writer who really loves a story and wants to see it in the world to make something really compelling. And a cold, bloodless story produced because it 'might sell' is a sad thing indeed.

That last point is very, very important. I see novice writers talking a lot about their unusual, uncommercial, niche, weird or just unclassifiable books, often with a tone of despair and resignation that they couldn't possibly be successful. But that simply isn't true - even ‘weird’ or ‘niche’ books can be sold commercially. What stops that happening is a combination of factors - you can’t explain your book, you don't know where it fits in the current market, you don’t have a short, compelling hook to start the conversation or, quite often, the story is just not quite fully baked yet.

I often see genuine reluctance or even distaste for this simple reality of trade publishing and I am sometimes at a loss for what to say to writers who want the success without knowing (or being willing to learn) the route to get there. It’s a learnable skill and you really should focus on it.

Commerciality is not a dial you turn, or a dressing you apply to your word salad, or a layer of thick fondant you put on your story cake. It's a descriptor that is also sometimes a category and informs many genres, but as a writer you do yourself a disservice by pretending it’s some kind of unpleasant additive that you need to decide whether or not to sully your story with.

Write your story, make it as good as you can, then think carefully about the best way to present it to the people and organisations who can help you find your readers. It's not an easy task, but it is one you can learn to do.