You should never write something just because you think it will sell, and you should never stop writing something just because you think there is no market out there for it. Markets change and what is hot today can be ice cold tomorrow and vice versa.
Last year when I started writing my WIP, I didn’t see sci-fi come up very often as a genre agents were looking for. Last week I was reading the most recent edition of Writer’s Digest and almost all of the agents they spotlighted are now looking for sci-fi. This is great news for me if I can keep to my schedule and get my darn book finished and start soliciting agents.
I won’t lie and say I didn’t see this trend coming. I suspected it might be on its way, following in the footsteps of some recent sci-fi-esque books and now with The Curiosity landing on Mars, space seems to be getting cool again. While my suspicion that this could become a trend wasn’t the reason I decided to write this book, it did push me to work harder. The worst thing would be to miss the trend because I couldn’t get my act together and write/edit faster.
So how do you know if what you are writing is going to become ‘hot?’
Sadly, you can’t always anticipate it. Sure, if you are keeping up with newly published works and seeing where the holes are and what genres are being touched on, you can start to anticipate where things are going, but you can never know for sure. The most important thing is to write what interests you. You will spend a long time with your WIP, so if you don’t find it interesting, it will feel like an even longer time.
