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If you open up the newspaper on any given day, you will see various trends in the stock market. Things are popular one day, but then not popular the next. How can you ever keep up? Well, the same can be said for the writing business. Trends come and they go, but when you're not taking the time to keep up with them, you can miss out. Here are some of the best ways authors and other types of writers can stay current with the writing market.

Subscribe to Writing Publications

One of the best ways to make sure you're staying current with the writing market is to subscribe to magazines that focus on writing. Some of the best writing magazines include Publishers Weekly, The Writer, and Poets & Writers. These magazines will not only provide you with insightful articles about the process of writing, but you will also learn what is being published today. This way, you can compare ideas you have to trends which are emerging, helping you get into a certain market as it begins to grow or before it fades away. For example, those who kept up to date with publisher news saw that the vampire genre is slowly coming back into vogue. With this information, many fiction writers began to write vampire novels and they were more successful in finding publishers.

Subscribe to Email Updates

If you want to know about publisher news and writing trends on a daily basis, many of the aforementioned magazines also offer free email updates. These emails will give you a quick glimpse into changes in the writing market. You can also quickly look at the email title to see what it contains. This way, you can decide to quickly delete it as well if you're not interested – a more efficient system than reading an entire magazine. Try signing up for several email updates each day to keep yourself as informed as possible.

Go to Bookstores

When you're interested in being a part of the book market, you need to go to where the books are as well. By going to your local bookstore regularly, you can see what is selling and what is not. This will help you to ascertain what kinds of stories are popular on the market today and how you can tap into those genres. You can also get a good idea of what's popular in the writing market by going to online sellers like Amazon, but often being able to see the shelves and the displays at bookstores is much easier than scanning the web pages. Just like any other job or business, writing has trends it follows. And while many of the trends can repeat themselves, this doesn't mean you shouldn't try to be on top of what is popular with publishers. The truth is that publishers want to publish things which are nearly guaranteed to sell. By taking the time to look at what's selling, you can show a publisher you know your idea can make money. And that's a far more successful writing and marketing strategy than simply hoping for the best.