What's Hot, What's Not

I've been reading online (so what else is new) several blogs, articles, and otherwise of well-known authors, agents, and publishing houses telling us what the market is looking for these days. The "hot" picks. The ones that go snap, crackle, and pop in the eyes of those doing the buying and bidding.

Young Adult is hot for some, not for others ... Chick-lit is all but dead ... Erotica is on the rise ... Hmmm. It seems to me no one really agrees with all this. There's so many opinions on the matter of what is selling and what just lingers backstage, that authors have to ignore it ... for the most part. By the time you write and sell something for what's hot in the market, it'll be lukewarm if not down the drain.

Of course, if you write erotica now, then you have to be a bit excited to see the sales bubble for your genre getting attention. I think the internet has a great deal to do with the increase in sales of erotic books. People go online and read reviews, see what's available, then buy the book without leaving the comforts of home. Like buying those magazines that come delivered in plain brown wrappers. Or do they do that anymore?

I think TV has something to do with it, as well. Prime time TV is coated with sexually explicit shows, comments, scripts, lines, words, themes, plots ... you nor your kids can get away from it. My suggestion ... if you want to keep little Johnny sheltered, better turn off the TV after 7 pm or keep it on the Disney channel.

I suppose the evangelicals could hop right on here and claim it's this kind of stuff that has American going to hell in a handbasket, and that we shouldn't buy it, watch it, read it, sell it, or keep it under our beds. Don't start with me on this ... I know some of the biggest users of ponography are evangelicals.

I suppose all this talk about what's hot in the book market has got me thinking as to why it's hot. Erotica, if dispensed in small doses ... most people can handle it. It sells, obviously. Advertisers have always known that. I think it's here to stay a while.

I write Southern fiction ... (giggle) I wonder where I can fit it in to my work? Oh ... the movie Deliverence comes to mind ... how do you write trash that's really not? Guess I better get busy reading Erotica.

Maybe the next writer's conference I attend will give a class ... How To Write Sexually Explicit Material in Six Easy Steps. Or How To Write Material Your Mother Would Never Read.

Somehow, I doubt the Bible Belt would stand for it.

Blessings to you and yours.