You Want Fries With That?

Over at FFF, Jill Myles asks: is cliché ever a writer’s friend? In this case, her point is that many the vampire writers on the list kind of have to play along to get along – in other words, it’s the cliché vampire that sells. Conversely, when an author proposes something truly original they run the risk of an editor or an agent rejecting them on the grounds of being “too weird.”

I remember many years ago at a science fiction convention being on a panel called “McFiction.” The question was basically the same, although we were looking at it from the point of view of readers and fans: do readers really want more of the same or do editors just assume they do?

I don’t really know the answer to this because I think it’s one of the big conundrums of the publishing industry. I can only offer contradictory anecdotal information. First, I wrote a book that I thought never would sell to a New York publishing house: it was a whacked out combination of cyberpunk, hardboiled, religious, and romantic elements. But it sold. And people bought it. Some people thought it was “original,” and, in fact, my agent used to pitch it as “weird, but compelling.”

Given that experience, I’ve always told my writing students not to worry about whether or not they thought they’re idea was “marketable.” I always say, “Write what you love, and let the editors decide what’s marketable or not.” I still stand by that.

However, when my editor for Archangel Protocol and I negotiated what I would write next (they’d bought a second book based on the fact that I was writing something at the time, but they hadn’t committed to that novel, “To Catch a Gene Thief.”) I pitched a whole lot of stand-alone novels, but at the end of my long, well-thought out note, I said, “Or I suppose I could write a sequel.” The immediate response was, “Yeah, do that.” Thus, my sense was that publishing houses WANT series. Certainly, when I changed genres my editor specifically asked for a multi-book series. It certainly seemed to me as though they wanted to be able to give the reader “more of the same.”

This can be very frustrating to a writer who wants to write new and innovative things every time. Readers at conventions, too, often lament the fact that they’d like to see something more than “McFiction.” Plus, when I consciously tried to play the market and proposed an urban fantasy police procedural to an editor recently, my agent got the rejection: “We’ve got too much like that already.” So it’s not true that publishers are ONLY on the look out for more of the same, no matter how glutted the market might seem right now with paranormal romances/urban fantasy.

So I don’t know. As a reader I want to eat my cake and have it too, because while I love stumbling across something I’ve never seen before, I also have to admit that when I find a book I love the very first thing I crave is more, more, more of the same.

What’s your take on it? As a reader do you want more of the same? What about as a writer?