So. Heated Rivalry, huh? ‘Nuff said.
I haven’t read the books, nor have I seen the show, so I can’t really comment much on whether it’s “good” or if I liked it or not or anything. And, at this point, I’m not sure I can stand to watch it—there’s a lot of, hmm, how shall we say? Feels going on for me there.
What kind of feels? Oh, you know … regret, for one.
I Started Out Writing Hockey Romance
Oops, there it is. Yeah, I’m a bit … I don’t want to say jealous. I’m upset, more at myself than anything.
You see, when I first launched Cherry Pickett, all the way back in the halcyon days of 2016, I was writing hockey romance.
I wasn’t the only one writing hockey romance, for sure. There were plenty of others, quite a few with a relatively big name in small press m/m romance publishing. So I can’t say I was being an innovator or the first one or anything like that.
I also can’t say my story would have ever taken off like a Heated Rivalry. But I do know that Reid’s books were published starting in 2019—a scant three years after I started my own publishing journey. It’s taken nearly ten years from that point for hockey romance to really explode, but it has. I personally was writing m/m OV hockey romance, so that’s where I’m doubtful that my work would have seen anything like mainstream success. Maybe—probably not.
So I’m not really begrudging Rachel Reid her success. I’m not really begrudging the other authors who have been writing hockey romance for a while their success or recognition either.
If all that’s true, then what’s with the regret? It’s that I walked away.
I Gave Up on It
I think my experience with publishing hockey romance showcases the old adage “good things come to those who wait.” But I gave up on Slapshot! and walked away because it really wasn’t getting any traction.
I spent a couple of years publishing in serial, for free on my website and on Wattpad (yeah, that’s one way to date myself there). The story didn’t gain much traction, and I pivoted to other things.
There are a lot of reasons my first foray into self-publishing didn’t work. One, I didn’t do much in the way of social media. That’s something I’ve had to learn over time, and I’m still really bad at it. Two, I was publishing in serial, in places where serial wasn’t necessarily looked for. While there are plenty of serials out there, recent platforms like KDP Vella and Raddish have actually shuttered their doors, because they can’t reach an American audience. It turns out that the market for original serial fiction is largely based in Asia, which means they’re not usually reading stories in English. (Big serial hits include The Grand Master of Demonic Cultivation, The Husky and His White Cat Shinzun, and The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, among others.)
That Wasn’t My Only Mistake
I made plenty of other missteps: I wasn’t doing SEO to promote my site, I didn’t invest in a good cover, I didn’t stick to a frequent update schedule. I knew original serial fiction was a harder sell than fanfic. People will tune in for fanfic dropped on an irregular basis, but that’s because they’re attached to characters, places, and stories already. Original fiction—you have to work to build your audience, because they don’t have those emotional ties. Why should they tune in? Why should they keep checking your website week after week if you’re not posting?
The other reality: most people are hitting Wattpad and similar sites to read fanfic. According to the lore, Rachel Reid turned the original draft of Heated Rivalry into Stucky fanfic and posted it to AO3, because she didn’t realize you could post original fiction to AO3—she thought it was fanfic only.
And, if you’ve ever looked at the stats, you could be forgiven for thinking that: AO3’s original fiction sections is pretty … sad. Almost no one I know of goes over there to peruse anything but fanfic. Most original fiction readers, oddly enough, are buying books or reading them through KU or a similar program, and it often seems like there’s little to no overlap between “original fiction readers” and “fanfic readers.” Obviously, there is overlap—otherwise Reid’s books probably wouldn’t have hit critical mass; the same thing can be argued of other recent titles, as well as the progenitor of the “scrub the serial numbers off,” E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Gray.
I Missed the Boat
My husband heard about Heated Rivalry—and this is a guy who doesn’t read romance, doesn’t really care about queer stuff, and definitely doesn’t like hockey. He asked me about it on our way to Christmas dinner with the in-laws. “Have you heard about it?”
When I told him what I knew, he proceeded to try to be encouraging: he told me that maybe I could do the Canadian version of it (Reid, I told him, is in fact Canadian, so nice try, my dear). I lost my temper with him; the fact of the matter is that the hockey romance genre is currently oversaturated. Everyone and their mother is writing one, it seems.
In other words, I lost my chance. And that’s why I’m not necessarily going to engage with Heated Rivalry or much else in the hockey romance genre. I was there, I was writing it, but the audience hadn’t caught up with me yet, and I gave up.
What would have happened if I’d stuck around a little longer? What if I had kept writing Slapshot? Probably nothing, in all likelihood.
If I Had a Nickel for Every Time This Has Happened, I’d Have Two Nickels …
But it is weird that it’s happened twice.
I pivoted away from hockey romance because I wasn’t finding my audience or … well, any audience, really. I dabbled in a few things, and then, in late 2019, I had a discussion with another writer friend. She told me to “just go for it” and write whatever I really wanted to write.
That led to the Zodiac series, which is alien romance. I published the first of those books in early 2020; the most recent was published in 2022, and I haven’t revisited the series since (although, if you follow along here, you know I’ve been trying to get back to it).
I’ve written a few other things in the in-between, although I’ve written other alien romance as well. In fact, a non-Zodiac alien romance is my most popular book.
But it took a lot for that book to pick up steam. It’s doing numbers now, quietly, steadily, surely, but it’s taken a while for that to get there. (Never lose faith in your backlist, dears.) Other books I’ve released have completely tanked.
And now I’m seeing alien romance explode: it’s everywhere. It seems like everyone is writing alien romance—about five, six years after I was initially bitten by the bug to write it.
As for me? I’ve moved on again. I still like a good alien romance, don’t get me wrong, and I am still working on the Zodiac series, which I intend to see through to its conclusion. But I’m interested in other subject matter now. None of my upcoming series involve aliens. So as alien romance becomes one of the trends, I’m not writing it anymore.
Am I Missing Trends or Ahead of the Curve?
As I noted, I’m a little bummed out that I seem to have missed my “chance” with the hockey romance and alien romance trends, in some regards. And, as I said, I’m moving on to other things now, so I’m interested in seeing what happens with these other “genres” I’m exploring, so to speak. It feels like I “missed the boat” with both hockey romance and alien romance.
But maybe—just maybe—that isn’t actually what’s happening here. Maybe I’m actually ahead of the curve when it comes to trends. This is two instances where things I have been really excited by have blown up—unfortunately, after I’ve headed off to other genre pastures, so to speak.
Does this mean that, maybe, I’m getting to those “greener pastures” before the audience arrives? Am I somehow zeroing in on things that aren’t trends yet, but will be trends?
I wish I could say so, but unfortunately, it doesn’t really look that way. I’m out here writing what I want, in a sense vibe-writing my way through the indie landscape. The lag time between when I’m writing this stuff and when the audience is showing up really suggests that I’m not a trendsetter.
I would hesitate to call myself a trailblazer either. As I said, there were people writing m/m hockey romance before I got there. And there were certainly people writing alien romances too. So I’m not breaking new ground, and I’m not hitting this stuff on the right sort of timing to be called a trendsetter either.
That wraps me back around to the idea that maybe I am, in fact, just missing the boat.
Does It Matter?
At this point, I’m not sure it really matters. Alien romance has become a trend, which has benefited my books—some more than others. If I still had my hockey romance stuff up, then maybe I would have noticed a boost there too. (I think the early draft of Slapshot is still malingering on the internet somewhere.) Since I’d actually taken it down with the intent of rewriting it—and then never got to it—I don’t know if there would have been any interest in it to go along with the sudden influx of hockey romance readers. Maybe not, since it’s a decade old at this point, and likely buried. It’s also unfinished. And let’s just say there’s a reason I wanted to rework the story.
So, we’ll never know. What will be telling, I think, is if there’s rising interest in the stuff I’m working on now. I feel like there’s an undercurrent in the cultural zeitgeist at the moment, which is maybe what’s drawing me to some of these ideas. Whether or not that translates into trends or an audience or interest from readers is another story entirely.
The Take-Aways
At the end of it, I can be sad and beat myself up about being in the wrong place at the wrong time for most of my literary career. Or I can take the lessons I’ve learned—such as how to work on serials, how to build series, how to do social media and advertising and SEO and all that crap—and I can apply them to what I’m doing now.
I’m probably never going to be “right on” with trends. First off, I don’t believe that’s possible—if you’ve noticed there’s a trend, you’re already behind and then you really are “missing the boat,” because everyone else has the same idea. Second, I just don’t work like that. I never have. I write what appeals to me, where my inspiration takes me. That doesn’t always jive with what the market is doing or what readers are looking for at any given moment.
So while I’m interested to see if I keep ending up coming to trends “early” and then pivoting away before they’re really trends, I don’t think it’s going to change anything about my process or how I work.
I’m still going to write whatever I write, and I’m going to go where inspiration takes me.
Maybe that means I’ll circle back to hockey romance or alien romance—in some ways, I already have. Maybe it means I’ll break new ground (for me) by exploring new subjects or topics or mythologies.
At the end of the day, though, all I can do is keep writing.
