Now that we’ve got a newly expanded team - Saturdays will be days for guest blog spots and also some fun industry type stuff. Today’s entry is a bit of question and answer from Laura Bradford herself.

Question: Do you think it’s important for an author to be flexible and adapt easily to the changes in our genre or to stick to one sub genre and master it?

Laura Bradford:  Well, in a perfect world I think everybody should get to write what they want but since when is this a perfect world? Some subgenres are more popular than others–all you have to do is go to a bookstore to see that this is true. I think we can all understand that it would probably be easier to sell a historical romance set in London than one set in Warsaw and that the market for romantic suspense is probably bigger than the market for futuristic romance. With that said, sometimes an author’s voice doesn’t always translate well across certain subgenres and themes.

If you naturally write material that is dark and gritty and intense, maybe it isn’t a great fit for you to write breezy, light romantic comedy. Just because your preferred subgenre isn’t the “it” thing at the moment doesn’t mean that you should necessarily write something else. Certainly you can try on other subgenres for size, but I don’t think anybody should change their writing universe if it isn’t a good fit for them personally.

Flexibility can be a great thing but so is being a real master of your subgenre.

Question: Any tips or valuable advice she can give us?

Laura Bradford: Educate yourself as best you can about your targeted genre or subgenre…

Know who your competition is. In a non-fiction proposal, one of the elements an author is required to include is a “competitive analysis” and I think that this can be a helpful exercise to do for fiction writers, too. What kinds of books are hitting the bestseller lists, the light and frothy ones or the gritty and intense ones? Understanding that the big authors like Nora Roberts and Linda Howard will almost always hit the lists, which NEW authors are hitting the Borders top 20 Mass Market list or the USA Today top 150 list? Are there any surprises? Where do you see your voice and style sitting amidst the rest of the marketplace? Is your material full of classic themes and tried and true favorites or does it have a never-before-seen plot element? What is your strength? Is it voice? Characterization? Unusual plot twists? Once you have looked around, taken a serious inventory of the market, evaluated your place in it, I think the next step is to know what you want and to have a plan.

Set goals, be resolute, know what kind of trajectory you want your career to take.