Do you consider yourself a Niche Author?

[Deleted member 45782]

I consider myself a procrastinating author.

Same ???

 

[KUWABARA]

I think I'm niche in my own rather niche genre of space opera, even on my home platform on Royalroad. I've thought about posting on r/HFY and the r/webserial but I've been sleeping on it for the time being. I think I'm just reluctant on posting a 80+ backlog on those reddits.

I think my ideas and themes revolve around bleak situations where sometimes things don't go right for the protags. I've always have a love for history, and look back at battles and imagine how a battle would've panned out if a commander went with another decision than what they did historically did. And apply those in my fiction, which might leave the guilt-ridden protag to wonder if they should've gone with another route to try and save lives or win a battle.

It's not particularly wish-fulfillment with that said, probably. Nothing like litrpg or isekai or anything. Just cute girls and suffering. Nor is there a particularly whole lot of action or individualistic fighting, since most of the action is portrayed as protags commanding a fleet of spaceships with (so-far) sparse focus on land combat.

It kinda dwells on 'War is hell' tropes and maybe anti-war messages, since there is a lot of good people that die without seeing their dreams come true.

Anime-wise I'd say the closet is probably Legend of the Galactic Heroes and maybe Universal-Century Gundam series. And since those are older series and already kinda niche in their own right (since you don't see those kind of anime anymore) it's already catering to a kind of non-existent demographic, in a webnovel demographic that likes wish-fulfillment stuff.

I think my early chapter prose is kinda hard to get into at first too, and I know my writing isn't exactly the best, but I have people who like it here and on Royal road, so being niche or not doesn't bother me too much.

 

[Leti]

I think Niche Authors are those that just follow their heart and just basically don't give a damn about the current trends at all.

Or it can be the Authors who just loves to write in that obscure niche which suits them.

They tend to be relatively unpopular (?) and may not be get the recognition they deserve, but they know that the most important thing is just writing.

I think those people are ones I respect a lot, even more than the big name Authors out there in general, even if I won't know most of them.

Do you consider yourself a Niche Author? What are your ideals in writing stories, in that case?

I'm not sure if my definition is correct, feel free to add your own :D

I would have considered myself as a Niche Author if I actually have a heart to follow. Since pain and suffering is the only constant in this cursed world, I have difficulties in writing anything that doesn't involve them.

Any stories I have written outside of the Horror or Tragedy genres are guaranteed to have low quality. I just don't have the correct mindset to become a competitive author. That's why I'm accessing this site as a reader instead of an author most of the time.

 

[LordJoyde]

Niche? Ehn... maybe? Yes? No?
Not really.

I suppose what I do most of the time is take a popular topic and add no small amount of insanity into it, like a heroin injection into what is otherwise a normal plot, most often forcing a 'realistic view' on one fantasy trope or another.

 

[CupcakeNinja]

Glad to see a fellow fan here. It's not that I hate isekai or anything, but I just enjoy the (not)harems with supernatural fights a lot more when they happen in the modern world (or some variation of it as seen in a lot of those magic academy harems like Blade Dance or Trinity Seven), with all the modern tech or even the sci-fi elements at play. All while the main characters juggle school stuff along with "muggle" drama with the beach trips, the school festivals, etc.

Then probably later find out their teacher is probably some OP undercover exorcist or something towards the last few arcs You know the cliche.

Totally. I mean I DO like a lot of isekai stories. But you just have so much more you can do in a modern world setting. Unless an isekai has good comedy like konosuba I usually dont like it very much. Would still watch for hot harem members but that's mainly it.

Wonder what the next trend will be tho.

Niche? Ehn... maybe? Yes? No?
Not really.

I suppose what I do most of the time is take a popular topic and add no small amount of insanity into it, like a heroin injection into what is otherwise a normal plot, most often forcing a 'realistic view' on one fantasy trope or another.

Oooh sounds like one of my stories. My main character for my first work is basically a drug addict in another world. Bro is out there starting cults, kidnapping kings, stealing drugs from dragons and making girls eat onion rings off his cock. Lol.

Do you get high while writing too?

 

[bigbear51]

I would say no, I don't consider myself a niche author seeing as my stories are obviously inspired by actual more mainstream products.

Also personally, I don't really care for niche authors either. A lot of them tend to be a bit full of themselves.

 

[AliceShiki]

Mmmmmmmmm... Not really?

I mean, I like writing Romance and Slice of Life... Both of which aren't niche genres.
I like writing Lesbian Romance too, which is a bit niche, but not that much.

I only write Fantasy, which is like... Absolutely not niche.

Like... Maybe I could call the story I'm working on kinda niche, since it's a child protagonist story, and there aren't that many of those out there that don't involve isekai, but the themes of the story aren't very niche and have a lot of inspiration on popular works, so... I'd say I'm not niche.

If anything, I avoid stuff like action, adventure and isekai, so I guess I'm not mainstream, but I definitely wouldn't consider the stuff I like writing about niche~

 

[morhamza]

Well... I don't know. Certainly the main reason I'll ever start writing any story is because I find the premise interesting enough. I don't really know much about the market, or what tags and popular, what tropes to use and whatnot. However, I do want my story to be read by as many people and liked by a significant number of people who read it.

 

[Prysmcat]

For any practical purpose, I consider what I write to be niche.

I write fantasy, both contemporary and other-world... but even within something as broad as "fantasy" I'm generally writing stories people find odd. I have a terrible time finding genre tags.

My characters tend to include a high percentage of transgender, non-heterosexuality, honest polyamory (not harems!), and consensual kink, but that's not what the stories are about. My story premises are real adventures or struggles that happen to have a core that, from the right angle, reflects my weird flexible views on relationships (friendship, absolutely... love, absolutely... romance, generally ugh) and gender and power dynamics and identity in general. They're never about saving the world, generally only about looking after selves and loved ones, but sometimes inadvertently the world becomes a better place. They're sex-positive/body-positive without much explicit sex, despite a trend I'm noticing that polarizes everything into extremes.

Plus, in my contemporary fantasy especially, my characters tend to be adults born pre-1990, not YA or NA.

I spend far too much time trying to decide whether several on-the-go projects belong on a regular fiction site or an erotica one, because the essential premise could be seen as fetish but there's little to no explicit sex, not what any erotica audience wants. I'm sort of sitting in a strange space between regular and erotica. If I have trouble finding appropriate homes for my work, I pretty much have to call it niche.

I have no intention of changing any of that. I write what I write the way it comes when I sit down and let the words flow. If I don't find a large audience, well, that's fine. I write the first draft for myself, just for the sheer joy of doing it, and then edit and polish it and release it just so there's a bit more out there that's positive, for the ones who stumble across it.

If I get fewer readers but those readers enjoy it, then hey, it's all good! :-)

 

[Toomanysorrows]

100%. I'm writing a work of non-fiction set in a fictional universe and that genre is pretty tiny. I can only think of three other examples of the top of my head:

1) The world of Ice & Fire, which was written as an in-universe encyclopedia by one of the maesters of the Citadel.

2) A story written by a world of warcraft fan in the form of a forsaken character writing a travelogue.

3) The warhammer fantasy rp Old World Bestiary which was again written by an in-universe scholar.

(The Dictionary of the Khazars probably counts as something close to this, same with the fictional scholarly articles written by Borges, but despite all the fantastical elements those are clearly set in our world so it's not exactly the same.)

And all of those were written within established settings, so there were already people interested in getting that sort of information about the world. I think it's a fair bet that the vast majority of such fictional non-fiction fits into that mould: some sort of supplementary material to flesh out an existing setting. I'm writing it as a standalone work about my own setting, which I haven't seen anyone else do. Which makes sense, if you've got a world and want people interested in it, it's probably better to write a story set in it to grab people's attention with that. I just don't like writing stories that way.

Now mind you, I'm not saying I was the first to think of this "brilliant" idea. I'm 100% sure others have done this before many times, either online or on paper (and if you know a work like that, please do tell me, I'd love to read it.) But fictional non-fiction, as a standalone thing, is clearly not a common genre, or even really recognised as it's own genre in and of itself, to the point where I'm not even sure what to call it. So yeah, I'd say it's niche.

As for "ideals" then, honestly I was going to write some sort of document with all the worldbuilding information anyway. Might as well publish it then, to get that feeling of accomplishment from having written something public, and so I can point people to it and say "hey, I did this!"

 

[xluferx]

Follow trends, a lot of views and popularity
Writes a very specific story (niche) barely anyone notices even if you promoted it in your popular story...
Feels bad man

 

[Kitsura]

I feel like I'm the only person here who likes to write and read isekai. It's a fun genre with a ton of room to play. I guess I consider myself niche but mostly because I write what I want and what I want to write is isekai. People here care way too much about trends. If you write good stuff, people will reward you if they enjoy it. Obv you can game the algo a little by daily uploads at the right time and raw dogging the recently updated with chapter spam, but still you have to write good stuff for people to stay reading.

 

[Hadassah]

Fun seeing all the responses here, sharing all sorts of different perspectives on what niche means to them.

I think Niche Authors are those that just follow their heart and just basically don't give a damn about the current trends at all.

Or it can be the Authors who just loves to write in that obscure niche which suits them.

They tend to be relatively unpopular (?) and may not be get the recognition they deserve, but they know that the most important thing is just writing.

I think those people are ones I respect a lot, even more than the big name Authors out there in general, even if I won't know most of them.

Do you consider yourself a Niche Author? What are your ideals in writing stories, in that case?

I'm not sure if my definition is correct, feel free to add your own :D

Niche is so much a product of community as it is anything else. What's niche on ScribbleHub doesn't hold up at RoyalRoad, webnovel, or even ""traditional publishing"". A lot of times people like to feel like they are on the fringe in general, so they hold onto niche as a personal trophy too, which is cool. Being popular and mainstream can feel terrifying or assimilating.

I am willing to own 'niche', but its for the fact my format and origin of focusing on traditional publishing originally, where I was also not-mainstream.

My book, Free Agent, is written with a traditional novel format in mind, and is about an adult woman slowly confronting the superheroes that use her world like a sandbox, killing and mind controlling locals for fun and games, it seems. No system, no cheat codes, just a programmer clinging to her personal identity as forced friendship ruins her life.


-----

I think another great question is "What is "Mainstream" for Scribblehub?" and we will find dozens of answers too.

I tend to think of Scribblehub's mainstream as based on the work I read, and what I see in the "trending lists."
- Harems, Isekai, LGBTIA+ content, empowered protagonists, lots of meta humor, and a leaning towards sexually mature content

Free Agent only manages to touch on LGBTIA+ content, as the main character is a lesbian, and meta fiction, which is more horror than 'ha-ha'.

 

[AliceShiki]

I feel like I'm the only person here who likes to write and read isekai. It's a fun genre with a ton of room to play. I guess I consider myself niche but mostly because I write what I want and what I want to write is isekai. People here care way too much about trends. If you write good stuff, people will reward you if they enjoy it. Obv you can game the algo a little by daily uploads at the right time and raw dogging the recently updated with chapter spam, but still you have to write good stuff for people to stay reading.

I like reading isekai quite a bit! ^^)/

I'm not really against writing it either, I just need a good concept for it, I guess? So far I got none, so I prefer to keep the characters in the worlds they were born in.

Only idea I can remember having on that topic was making an Otome Game Reincarnation novel, but I felt like I could make something I'd enjoy more without the whole isekai and Otome Game thingy, so the story I was planning for that premise got scrapped... >.>

I think isekai is a genre that was already explored a lot, it's a bit hard to think of interesting new concepts to play with in it... And well, dunno about others, but I don't want my story to feel like "more of the same", so I avoid creating stuff of a genre I can't think of anything interesting to make from it.

 

[Lord_Drakonus]

I don't really know if I'm a niche author, but I do know that I just write what I want to write. Sure I like writing on the genre that I like, but I don't like jumping into any bandwagon. I write for the sake of creating my own story. Because when I read other people's stuff, I usually go "Why is it like this and not like this?" and that just fuels me to write on my own.

 

[Sylverius]

I think Niche Authors are those that just follow their heart and just basically don't give a damn about the current trends at all.

... Yes.

but they know that the most important thing is just writing.

Although I do want to keep this mindset, it's just a bit discouraging that almost no one actually enjoys my writing. I don't know if it's the same for you guys but if you don't get discouraged, good job, you deserve a choccy milk, some cookies and a pat on the back.

 

[OliviaMyriad]

I don't consider myself a niche author since, while I do write what I want, I tweak it so that it can be popular. I do want people to read my stuff since I'm not just writing for myself, so I'm a bit vain in some respects.

 

[Deleted member 52929]

Yeah!! I genuinely enjoy what I write, even though it may not ever become popular or necessarily follow the trends. What motivates me is generally a love for it and also the few people who also do like it.

 

[Deleted member 45782]

Yeah!! I genuinely enjoy what I write, even though it may not ever become popular or necessarily follow the trends. What motivates me is generally a love for it and also the few people who also do like it.

That's is some good motivation right there. It sounds lovely. Glad its working out for you. :)

 

[Ellieporter]

Well... I'm a mediocre author lol.

I write what i want and if somebody likes it and adds that series to their reading list.

It actually motivates me to write down more...