Manuscript Monday: Crazes

And so the bedraggled female has returned from her holiday to bring you the next Manuscript Monday post. The holiday was lovely, thank you for asking. (Even if you didn’t want to ask, that statement was aimed at the blog itself. It misses me so when I am away.)

This week, I won’t so much be writing about the writing process because I managed to not get any writing done when I was away.

I have been thinking recently, very much ahead of myself, about when to send manuscripts to publishers. Novel #2 in particular. I’ve seen several tweets about what certain agents want at the moment and what they are currently getting sick of. In its current state, Novel #2 is something that some agents have seen too much of in queries at the moment. This would pose a problem if it was anywhere near being a complete manuscript. Luckily for me, it’s not.

So, what should you do when your manuscript is ready but agents aren’t looking for what you’re ‘selling’? Wait. Follow people that are in the industry, see what’s popular and what’s not. You can either listen to that or discard it. I would probably listen but that doesn’t mean that you have to.

You could send out your manuscript and hope that one of the agents you query gets hooked onto it but it might take just as it would if you waited until agents were more susceptible to your idea. It might not. You might be the author that changes that agent’s opinion.

There will always be lulls in certain crazes in fiction. There will always be times when agents are saying ‘enough, no more vampires’ (vampires could be replaced with anything). On my twitter feed I saw my ‘craze’ appear in a list of things a certain agent didn’t want to see at the moment, there was, of course, a twinge of pain in there; a little bit of fear bubbled in my stomach, I may never get my writing out there purely because of what I am currently writing about.

But it’s OK. By the time Novel #2 is ready, it may well be in demand. It may not. I think I’ve said before that I’m not even sure if Novel #2 will ever materialise on bookshop-shelves; this is still true.

I don’t know what the future is for Novel #2.

Is this something you’ve experienced? Are you worried that your manuscript might fall into a genre that is ‘too popular’ or one which is ‘not popular enough’? Do you have a plan for when your manuscript is ready to fledge?