Best-Selling Genres

If you want to make a living from writing, this is what you should write next

With the average professional writer in the UK earning around only £7,000 a year from writing, most have other jobs, sometimes connected to writing (such as editing and proofreading) and sometimes entirely different (some of my writer friends are interior designers, teachers and yoga instructors).

I find that writers rarely talk about the money they earn from book sales; instead they skirt around the subject, chatting about 'finding readers', 'getting into book shops' and 'onto Amazon's best-seller charts'. It's as though talking about money - wanting to make a living - from doing something creative isn't allowed, despite most writers never ever clocking off at 5pm or having a weekend off.

All of which is to say that it was hugely refreshing to recently sit in on an author event and hear that author talk very openly about why she pivoted from writing YA fiction to penning Psychological Thrillers. 'Why did you make that switch?' someone in the audience asked. 'To make more money,' came the simple and honest answer.

Currently, Psychological Thrillers sell much better than YA novels and the author explained that much as she loved writing YA, which she was very successful at, she also wanted to make a decent living. So she changed direction, writing in this new genre under a different name and hasn't looked back. Her first Psychological Thriller is a huge bestseller and I imagine the next (she has a 3-book deal) will be too. She did the research and wrote something that she knew would be popular with readers. No wonder she couldn't stop smiling as she talked about her work.

Psychological Thrillers, Romantasy and Cosy Crime are the biggest-selling genres in the UK at the moment. Writing any of these types of novels increases your chances of making money from writing fiction. Which is a very good reason to write them. This doesn't, of course, mean you should all immediately cast aside your literary novel or your YA story, and give up writing your memoir or book of poetry. But it ought to give you something to think about if you are tired of doing five or six different jobs to pay the bills, and want to make a living from being a full-time writer. Who knows? Maybe you should have been writing Cosy Crime all along.