Looks like I picked the wrong week to start pitching a YA vampire book…

(“Tales From the Slush Pile” is by Ed Briant, and you can find it on the Publishers Weekly children’s page.  Cartoons from Feb. 7 and 14, 2013)

Seven things that will doom your novel and how to avoid them. Plus vampires.

This got dropped in my e-mail from Writers Digest.  I thought it was pretty good.

I’m not that sure about number five, about writing for a market. Where do you draw the line? Where’s the border between “writing for the market” and “market conscious?”

“There’s a saying in publishing that the moment you spot a trend, it’s too late to join it.”

Maybe. But some trends seem to have a long half-life. Supernatural romance, often involving vampires and/or werewolves, doesn’t look like it’s run its course yet. Not my style, unfortunately. Girls and women in my books are more likely to pop you in the nose than get all moon-eyed over somebody with unusually pointy teeth.

I get a daily e-mail as part of my Publishers Marketplace subscription. It lists new deals for books. For a while, just for fun, I kept track of the new book deals that involved vampires in some way. I’d cut and paste them to a Word document. I got bored after the second page, but I got the idea that the trend was still pretty healthy.

A couple of days ago I was tracking Kindle best-sellers out of curiosity, and the “Fifty Shades of Grey” series occupied the top three slots. Haven’t read them, and don’t plan on it, but I looked up the author and background. I was surprised, but only a little, to find out that this series had its genesis as Twilight fan fiction.