Does my taste run too lit?

I sometimes wonder if I've read a little too much of the odd stuff to make it easy to write something that can be a popular hit. I've been glancing at some of my Goodreads ratings, and some of the books I've enjoyed the most score relatively low for bestsellers.

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Like Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

I quite enjoyed it. For me, it's a 5. It's an irreverent near--parody of Narnia and Harry Potter, but it's also almost satire, and it's also genuinely a coming of age YA story.

But on goodreads, it's just a 3.46.

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And I actually really love the second Southern Reach book, Authority, but it just has a 3.68.

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Have my tastes gotten too jaded to tap into mainstream desires? Am I liking the oddball parts that others find distasteful or boring?

Obviously, it's ok to be a niche writer if you can get a small subset of fans to really love your work, but you probably have a bigger chance of earning good money as a writer if you can tap into the things that more people like.

Still, even when I was a kid, the parts of stories that some of my friends found boring where parts I quite liked--like the party scene at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring or all those comfortable homey eating scenes in The Wind in the Willows.

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One of the recurring themes of Bakuman (Bakuman: Complete Box Set) is that one has to tailor a work to the chosen audience, but balance it with what creators are good at and love to do. If your editors aren't letting you do the story you want to do, maybe you just aren't good enough to do it with that story yet.



Of course, the self-published writers who read Bakuman may rage at the gate-keeper function of the editors in the story and the implication that independents who hire editors on contracts produce inferior work, but that's a whole other thing .

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Anyway, well. Whatever. In the end, I can only work on the kind of books I can do, and make them as good as I can.

I wonder though. If I were writing romance instead of SF--would it be easier because there are established formulas, or would it be harder because of having to work in the relatively tighter framework for it?

I guess I am what I am though.