Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
– not Confucius

If you want to make a living writing, you no doubt have done searches as to what the best sellers are of your chosen genre. You might have even done research on what genres sell the best. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting to make a living writing or wanting to know what sells. What I do have a problem is when people decide they need to write billionaire romance novels until they are successful and then finally they can write their literary masterpiece.

In order to write anything worth reading you’re going to have to be passionate about it. Let’s start with the obvious thing which is that writing a story requires a certain amount of commitment. Fifty thousand plus words don’t just appear in a word processor, it takes time and work to even produce a bad novel. If you don’t love what you’re writing it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever finish what you start.

But lets say you persevere and produce your book—for which you really don’t feel. Now you have to promote the book. Sell is a tough job at the best of times.  It’s also hard work and it’s harder to do when you don’t really believe in the product you’re selling.

And then you finally convince someone to buy your book. Will they see that you wrote fan fiction of fan fiction or that you Frankensteined a handful of popular books to check off some genre boxes. Unless you’re a master counterfeiter, I think people will realize that who ever wrote this book wasn’t into it. I don’t think that’s a reputation that’s going to get you onto the NY Times best seller list.

Much easier is to just write what you like. Trends and tastes change and if you really want to make a living of writing then you need to think of the long game. Most of the successful modern authors didn’t catch fire until they had written a few books. This isn’t surprising as most writers get better the more they write. And you don’t write three books with minimal compensation unless you love writing and love what you write about.

There is a weird irony that maybe the only way to become rich and famous writing is to believe you may never make any money from it. (It might also be true, but…) Sure there are common themes in popular writing, but writing the stuff you want to read not only makes sure you’ll write it, but that your readers will feel it.