The Next Big Thing

We’ve seen all these phenomenal books take off to best seller status – The Da Vinci Code, Gone Girl, Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Gray – and now there’s mutterings within the writing community about what the next “big thing” will be. Well, those mutterings never cease, but it’s a new year and therefore new mutterings.

We know it’s unwise to clone what’s already selling big at the moment because we’re told time and time again that manuscripts bought today won’t be on the shelves for another couple of years. We shouldn’t follow trends because they’re fickle. Most of us write according to our passion anyway, trends be damned. But still, it’s fun to speculate what the next big thing will be; what genre, what new idea will spark the reading consumer into buying more books?

Ideas come from everywhere. The next best seller is probably sitting on someone’s hard drive somewhere, the queries rejected left and right, partials getting turned down as often as bed sheets in a brothel, but it’s out there, waiting for its time. Could it be yours? Hmm…

It’s fun to speculate what people want to read in terms of fiction. What appeals to the American reader? We could look to television for our ideas. Not the shows so much as the themes. How about all the reality shows that are taking over primetime? Some authors have taken advantage of this craze by using it in their plots. It was popular for a while, got people’s attention, but never really broke out into anything newsworthy.

So if themes aren’t where the next big thing will spring from, how about genre? Genre mixing is THE topic of discussion at many writers’ conferences. A couple decades ago, authors tried to mix romance and suspense and mystery and horror together, and were told their manuscripts were unmarketable. That’s all changed. I think authors have a sixth sense about these things. Are publishers as tuned in as we are?

So if you were to take out your crystal ball and shine it up, what would it reveal to you about the next big thing? Could it be a style of writing, like what happened with the chicklit explosion when Bridget Jones’ Diary came out? Or an Internet chat/email format like a quirky YA novel? Or how about those graphic novels and manga? I’d never in a million years have imagined comic books coming back into fashion this way.

We can’t predict for certain, but it’s a lot of fun to think about. High concept literary fiction has always been a big deal. Same with up-market women’s fiction. Both have a wide audience, which is why it has such broad appeal. How about retro historical fiction, like high concept stories set in the fifties, sixties, seventies? Sex, drugs and rock and roll. What do you think? Care to take a stab at what will be the next big thing?

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Karen Duvall is an award-winning author with 4 published novels and 2 novellas. Harlequin Luna published her Knight’s Curse series in 2011 and 2012, and her post apocalyptic novella, Sun Storm, was released in Luna’s ‘Til The World Ends anthology in January 2013.

Karen lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and four incredibly spoiled pets. Writing under the pen name Cory Dale, she just released the first book in a new urban fantasy series, Demon Fare.

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