Clare Furniss

If you try to follow a trend you’ll almost certainly end up writing something derivative. Not only that you’ll probably miss the trend anyway. Don’t forget it usually takes a while to sell a book and then a minimum of a year to go from getting a book deal to being published. Often it’s more like eighteen months. Write what you want to write with conviction and you’ll write it better than if you try to let the market lead you. When I wrote The Year of The Rat, realistic contemporary YA seemed like absolutely the wrong thing to be writing. By the time it came to sending it out to publishers it was just what they were looking for. If I’d tried to write yet another paranormal romance I’d have done it very badly and I don’t suppose it would ever have been finished, let alone published.