There's advice; and then there's advice.

I was just reading an online article giving advice about what makes a financially successful author. Some of it made sense, such as having more than one book out and paying for a professionally designed cover, but I have to admit I didn't really find, "Write in a popular genre" very useful.

In one way, it's too obvious a statement and not really advice. It's a bit like saying, "If you like living, my advice is; don't step out onto the road in front of a bus."

Secondly, I'd say most novelists write what they want to. We'd all like to be a financial success and be able to earn enough money to do what we love full time, but not at the expense of our writing. If we started writing in a genre we have no interest in just because it was popular, the quality of the writing would suffer...and there'd be too much crime fiction out there to go around.

When I was trawling through the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook looking for agents for my first novel; desperately trying to find as many as I could that stated they looked at humorous fiction, I couldn't help thinking that I'd have been better off writing crime/mystery/thriller, as that seemed to always be on the list of what most of them were looking for; but I didn't go back and try and amend my first novel or write a new one. I knew humorous fiction was the right genre for me and perhaps I'd have to take a different path to get the novel published.

Of course I think I've mentioned before that humorous fiction can dip its toe into other genres and plans for my fourth novel does involve crime but it certainly wouldn't come under the heading of, "Crime fiction." I do have a detective as a secondary character but any references he makes to police procedure will be few and far between as I have no real knowledge of what those procedures are (apart from what I've learnt watching crime series on TV and I don't think I can rely on them for true accuracy). My plan is to shove a, "This is against the rules but..." before my detective reveals any information to the main character. Anyway, book 4 is a long way off yet.

So advice - there's loads out there; some useful, some not so useful; but in the end you just have to get down and get writing and you'll probably end up learning more through your own experiences. And then you can pass what you've learned onto the next generation of writers.