Finding Your Niche

If, like me, you stalk the manuscript wish lists of various agents (here and here), then you may begin to see that certain patterns emerge.

One of them is, of course, diversity in all things (not just color, but sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic background, and disabilities — both physical and mental).  If you write from the perspective of your diverse character (#ownvoices), then you have a leg up, because this is the clarion call right now. Unfortunately for me, as a middle-class, middle-age, healthy white male, there is no special market for “my” voice.  Which means I have to focus on another trend I see.

A couple of months ago I wrote about the explosion of new genres and sub-genres in speculative fiction, these days.  Gone are the days of simply Westerns, Romances, Science Fiction, and Mainstream.  Science Fiction alone has fractured into Horror, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi.  And within those are dozens of sub-genres, each with their own rules and audience: Paranormal Romance, Steampunk, Space Opera, Military Futurism, Dystopian, Historical Fantasy, Fairy-tale Retelling, and on and on.  The trend I’m seeing in agent’s wish lists is to recombine and create something new.  Find the literary equivalent of a chocolate bar stuck in a jar of peanut butter, yielding the next great taste sensation.

A retelling of Cinderella, but with androids! Romeo and Juliet, but set during the Civil War.  You get the idea.  Waterworld was basically Mad Max but in the ocean instead of the desert.

If you can find that perfect but untried combination — and pitch it correctly — you have an enormous advantage over your competition in the slush pile.

 

 

I’m working on my own one of these.  Steampunk has taken on a life of its own.  It actually goes back to the days of Jules Verne and Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  And do you remember Wild Wild West, and all of the futuristic gadgets they had up their sleeves … and in their boots and on their train?  Steampunk + Western? That show was before its time, but it would fit right in today.

Steampunk is based on Verne’s worlds of Victorian England, but with modern devices cobbled together out of the technology of the day.  Like Doc Brown’s ice maker in 1885, from Back to the Future III.  However modern movies, television, and literature have taken the original idea of Steampunk and found a dozen new ways to define it: Cyberpunk (computers), Dieselpunk (1930’s, engines), Biopunk (biological experimentation), Mythpunk (post-modernized folklore and fairy tales), Stonepunk (think The Flintstones), and several others.

I have an idea for a world which is different from any of these, but still in the tradition of the original Steampunk idea.  And its for kids.  If I can find a way to define it and name it, I just may have a hook when I pitch it.  I’d rather not go into details just yet.  Not until I have a handle on it and flesh it out a bit more. Oh, and of course, I have to answer the most important question of all:

?????punk.

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