Jane Cousins - AUTHOR

People in the industry have advised me 'ad nauseam' of late that if I want to sell more books / become a name brand author, then I need to start writing what is trendy.
Problem is - I can't write to a formula.  My muse tends to be eclectic and often the characters I write bully or sashay their way to the front of the line (in my imagination) insisting they be the next story I must write.  And they can be pretty tenacious too.

But it got me to thinking about trends and how we as readers tend to get bombarded by authors jumping on trending bandwagons - to the extent - that your favourite niche genre becomes bogged down with a plethora of writers banging out similar formulaic books. And it becomes kind of difficult to sift the good from the bad.

Think the Twilight books. How many books flooded the market following their success that had human/vampire/shifter triangles at their centre? 

Alphas - Just do a search on the word and you get thousands of books with this reader bait word in the title.

Shifters - are huge.  Wolves have become a little passé I think.  Bears seem to be the new shifter animal du jour.

And who can resist a Billionaire?  Filthy rich men always make great lead characters. 

And kudos to the authors who combine trends to create the double whammy - billionaire bears anyone?

Trends are good - especially if you have a hankering for alpha bear billionaires with a sparkly vampire as a rival.
But does anyone else feel their favourite genre is being flooded by hacks just jumping on the bandwagon and weighing it down?  Authors who can write a great book blurb but can't deliver on the execution?
When I love a genre - I like the feel of it, the flavour of it - what I don't want, is to read the same book over and over again.  Pale imitations that have no fresh view, that limp along a tried and true formula that the best selling authors in that niche have already carved into my imagination and claimed as their own.

Trends are great.  They can be the muse, the spark, the idea, that really inspire some authors.

I'm not saying I'll never write to a trend - as I don't know what will inspire me in the future.  I'm just saying - for right now - I'm writing stories that I love.  Books that 'I' as a reader would like to stumble across.

And who knows - someone has to start a trend - maybe I'm just really, really ahead of the pack.