Readers' tastes are changing. Are you changing with them?
Here's what agents, editors, audiences, Hollywood types, and just about everyone wants to see more of right now--and how to offer them that value, no matter what you're writing.
When she tweeted this yesterday, Lisa Lucas, the SVP and Publisher of both Pantheon and Schocken books, echoed something I’ve recently been hearing across the board in meetings with acquisitions types:
Other colleagues I’ve talked to have put it differently. “People just seem to be sick of all this DEATH,” one editor said to me during a phone call last week. “Studios really want sweet and hopeful—Ted Lasso vibes,” said a book-to-film agent.
Meanwhile, Sarah Weinman (hi Sarah) tweeted something ingenious about the resurgence of cozy mysteries and how Agatha Christie first became popular in the bombed-out aftermath of WWII. Traumatized readers want the weighted blanket, you know?
However we phrase this development, one thing is certain: editors’ (and audiences’) tastes are shifting; they want something different from the books they buy than they have in the recent past. What they want is books that are the opposite of traumatizing. And based on the replies to Lisa’s tweet and others, I get the sense there is widespread confusion among writers about what this means.
“The opposite of traumatizing” isn’t a genre or aesthetic. It isn’t humor, craft books, short novels, long novels, wacky facts, or even Ted Lasso vibes—at least not per se.
Whether or not a book is the opposite of traumatizing depends entirely on how it makes its readers feel. It is a process, not a genre—and it requires radical empathy.
In order to effect the opposite of traumatization in your reader, you really, really have to know first who your reader is. You have to listen to them and serve their real needs vs. the ones you imagine they have (or your want them to believe they have).
The good news? You can do this with just about any kind of book: sad, happy, fiction, nonfiction. Even a trauma memoir!
Remember: this isn’t a matter of what your book is about; it’s a matter of what feelings it effects in your reader, of whether the read is the opposite of traumatizing for them.
Nothing about this shift in the market is going to “kill your chances” in itself, no matter what kind of book you are writing. It just raises the standard on the emotional maturity required on the page.
The bad news, of course, is that leveling up in emotional maturity is super hard to do. I can’t just tell you how to do it in a newsletter. Trying to do so from this platform is like trying to point out distant galaxy in the night sky from a random suburban street while we’re on a walk together. With our naked and inexpert eyes, we will at best be able to glimpse a faint smudge in our peripheral vision. Examining things more closely will require with a powerful telescope called A GOOD THERAPIST or YEARS OF MEDITATION AND SELF-INVENTORY.
For now, though, let’s just try and look at the galactic smudge together here. Hopefully that will inspire you toward some telescope time!
Here’s what emotionally mature writing DOES NOT DO
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