But hold on...

In all fairness to the quote in my last post, I thought it might be useful to examine the current bestsellers and see if I could spot the trends suggested: I couldn't. There is a wonderful mix, with plenty of "my ilk," though granted many of them are quite established. I suspect the quote referred to breaking a new author in, but I am still salved to see that people want to read about the characters and genre I write in.

I did find this, however, at #8 on the Paperback Trade Fiction list:

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. (Quirk, $12.95.) The classic story, retold with “ultraviolent zombie mayhem.”

So that got me thinking....maybe I'll do Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except it will be two young lovers who go up the Mississippi in a canoe....(ok, he's super hot, has lost his shirt, and anyway, she's the protagonist here, he's just an accessory)...and they find an unknown tributary that leads to a world of vampires, zombies, ghouls, goblins...ooh, yeah, yeah...then I'll use Rossetti's Goblin Market as the guiding allegory...and if these two lovers can't navigate the backwaters they will never return and the Mississippi will drain like an unstopped toilet, taking towns and cities and people, oh the people, oh the madness, the madness...and there they will remain, doomed to wandering the swamps of UnkNOwnLaNd, hearing the lonesome voice of another girl who met a similar fate, her sad Rossetti song drifting on the haze:

MORNING and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--

Say it ain't so...

From November, over at Agent in the Middle:

However, it's become increasingly difficult to sell any genre fiction from a male protagonist's perspective, unless he's really hot. But even if he's a really hot teen vampire, it's better to tell the story from a female point of view. If you have a male character, I'd almost suggest that you change the gender of your main character to sell a novel in this climate.

So let's see...I'm white, straight, middle-aged and male, and I write mystery/suspense novels rather than YA, vampire, zombie, and my male protagonist's are not really hot in the classical sense. That's like nine strikes...if this was baseball I'd have struck out the side all by myself! Too bad for me that I will continue to write what I am  passionate about, published or not. Still...not exactly a cheery post....(read the whole thing here).