Most profitable genre?

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Don7x

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With an eye toward self-publishing, what would you consider to be the most marketable genre/sub-genre/meme in the fiction novel-writing world with the highest potential for profit?
 

rwm4768

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The one you're passionate about writing. If you aren't passionate about your genre, readers won't be passionate about your books.
 

jcwriter

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Sounds like you're writing a business plan. How much do you figure on making?

(And "fiction novel" is a newbie no-no.)
 
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jjdebenedictis

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I delicately arch my eyebrow at your very first post being so mercenary, but okay. And my contribution to the thread is to note that writing is a bad way to try to get rich, regardless of your genre.

You might as well write the stuff you enjoy writing and keep your day job to make sure you've got food on the table. If your book sales take off, great, but even choosing your genre wisely will make only a tiny difference to the trajectory of your writing career.

A great book will find an audience, and a weak book will not -- even if the weak book had a larger potential audience than the strong book did. It's better to focus on the craft of writing than the statistics of the marketplace.
 
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Bufty

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Stop day-dreaming.
 

Nichelle

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I don't think self-publishing tends to be very profitable, for the most part. That probably changes if you've already got a few novels under your belt and an established fan base who will keep an eye out for your name, but otherwise... try writing for the love of it! Any genre can sell well, if you can write it well.
 

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I've heard that romance is the top selling genre in both trade and self publishing.

http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/which-5-book-genres-make-the-most-money/?view=all

http://www.lindsayburoker.com/amazon-kindle-sales/which-genres-sell-best-for-indie-ebook-authors/


But the overwhelming majority of self pubbed books get buried in the de-facto slushpile of not even being discovered by potential readers, let alone read and enjoyed. And the overwhelming majority of trade published books don't get published [edit--meant to write, don't sell more than a few thousand copies] either.

Writing is a labor of love. It takes a long time and a lot of skill to write and polish a good, marketable book. And then it takes a certain amount of luck. The "rules" for what it takes to promote and sell a good, self-pubbed book are constantly changing too, so any advice given now will likely be obsolete by the time any book you start now is ready to sell. Nothing wrong with wanting/hoping to make money from books you write, but writing is not a great profession for people who want to do it primarily to make money.
 
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mcv1986

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Romance/erotice from what I have read. I want to make a living writing, but ill be trying it through mostlu horror, a genera i enjoy. I like erotica, but I really need to be in the right mood to read/write it. Horror, not so much. Scifi too for that matter.
 

William Haskins

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With an eye toward self-publishing, what would you consider to be the most marketable genre/sub-genre/meme in the fiction novel-writing world with the highest potential for profit?

a pop-up book that, when opened, has a hand that picks the reader's pocket.
 

Unimportant

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With an eye toward self-publishing, what would you consider to be the most marketable genre/sub-genre/meme in the fiction novel-writing world with the highest potential for profit?

If you write fabulously well and/or write stuff that grabs an awful lot of readers for whatever reason, then genre doesn't matter. Blockbuster is blockbuster.

If you write competently and don't care what you write, well-written, well-researched non fiction is a lot easier to sell than fiction in any genre. (I speak from experience.)

If you write less than competently, you're pretty much out of luck, although (speaking from observational experience: google "dinosaur porn") badly written, self published erotica seems to sell better than one would expect.

At the moment, there seems to be a very large audience for well written erotica, so if you plan to self publish that seems to be the most lucrative genre.

Having said that, though, you mentioned "profit". There are incredibly long odds against becoming one of the few really huge-selling names (S King, D Steele, JK Rowlings, N Roberts, etc). So, you're looking at 'normal' writer income: in which case, profit has to be balanced against cost. What's a writer's time worth? To some people it's 'nothing', in that they'd just be watching TV or whatever if they weren't writing. To others, it's 'what I could earn elsewhere': if they could get a weekend job earning $20 per hour, then they'll only write if they can guarantee someone will pay enough for their prose for it to work out to >$20 per hour.

Where does 'profit' start for you?
 

Jamesaritchie

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If you're really after profit, self-publishing is not the way to go, whatever the genre.

And unless you can write a given genre extremely well, profit potential doesn't matter, anyway, self or commercially published.

Whatever and whenever and however you publish, you'd better write the genre you write better than anyone else around you, or there will be very little, or no, profit.
 

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With an eye toward self-publishing, what would you consider to be the most marketable genre/sub-genre/meme in the fiction novel-writing world with the highest potential for profit?
Welcome to Absolute Write. Learn to do research and this question is easy to answer. But all the research you do won't help because, if you're asking this question, you're not yet capable of writing marketable or profitable fiction.

You might be capable of writing though. You ought to try.

Jeff
 

jjdebenedictis

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a pop-up book that, when opened, has a hand that picks the reader's pocket.

"a pop-up book that, when opened, has a hand that picks the reader's pocket"....does something else.
...

Ahem. That would make rather a lot of money, wouldn't it?

The book would need to be large enough to protect public decency, of course.
 

job

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Looking at writing as a business --
and there is no reason on earth you shouldn't look at it as a business. There's nothing about writing that makes it intrinsically different from operating a bakery or repairing bicycles --

I'd say non-fiction is the most reliable money maker. Most of the paying work is corporate work.

For fiction. Look at what you read -- and it doesn't matter what this is unless you're a poetry fiend. Write a few short versions of what you enjoy. Put them up as e-books. Do the promo for the books. Write some more, very quickly, very consistently. Keep this up for a couple years.
 

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If you're dead set on self-publishing, and you read and write so widely that you feel that you could write well in any genre, then romance or erotica is probably your best bet. My understanding is that small or self publishers can do well in these genres because the readers are very good at advertising via word of mouth. Thus, if you write a good romance novel and one person reads it, she might tell her romance-reading friends to read it, who tell their romance-reading friends and so on.

This of course, assumes that you can write a good romance novel.

ETA: Oh, job has a point. Non-fiction is great for self-publishing because if you have a niche where there aren't a lot of books written about the subject, anyone who wants a book on that subject will find yours. That kind of search works for NF, but not very well for fiction.
 
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Laer Carroll

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The best money-making strategy: write a lot.

It's a rare writer whose first book or three is a huge success, allowing them to retire. Odds are, don't know, but maybe one in 100,000. In the last hundred years, you can probably count them on the fingers of your hands. Out of many thousands of writers.

Most writers of bestsellers start small and build over many years. The more we write the more chances readers will find us, then go back and get all our books from the library and used book stores, or buy the latest reissue with a new cover and new marketing strategies.

And if anyone has found a formula for get-rich-quick they've been keeping it a secret. Publishers sure don't have it, which is why they take so many chances on new writers, hoping one will become a blockbuster generator. Meanwhile bankrolling their newbies on the backs of the successes.
 

Polenth

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Checking out the self-publishing forum here would be a good start. You can see which genres tend to sell and which are a struggle. There are some discussions going on at the moment on those lines, as well as specific examples in the diary threads. http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=47

Though it isn't a good idea to write what you hate, I don't agree with the advice to ignore it completely. It's something I take into account when it comes to choosing which project to focus on next. A self-publisher has to do the marketing stuff too, so considering the market is sensible.
 

Dennis E. Taylor

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Most writers of bestsellers start small and build over many years. The more we write the more chances readers will find us, then go back and get all our books from the library and used book stores, or buy the latest reissue with a new cover and new marketing strategies.

That's how I ended up reading every single Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Niven, etc in existence...
 

EricJames

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My gut instinct tells me women's lit, YA, paranormal romance and anything to do with sex in general won't lack for readers if it's good. Then again there's tons of writers in genres that popular so the competition is stiff, I'd think it's better to stand out in something less oversaturated unless you have some kind of gift for those specifically.

You're better off writing what you love. Like others said, readers can tell when your heart isn't in it, the world doesn't need any more generic books. Anything with enough skill and enough soul will do alright no matter what, but then that's easier said than done.
 

Cwright

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There are best selling, triple-figure deals on at least one book within each genre. What it comes down to is yourself as a writer. As mentioned before, if you're passionate about the story, everything else follows. Because there are readers for every genre, your story will sell.... assuming you care enough about the genre to put your heart into it. And with self-publishing... that is a long, hard road for the intent of earning money. Unless you have time, money and a ton of experience marketing a product that is not likely new and revolutionary, then you should save yourself the trouble. It would just become an excruciating chore.
 
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