What IS "upmarket" fiction? 🤔

Are you writing upmarket fiction without knowing?

Agents want “upmarket fiction.” But what is it?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a video about the genres literary agents are requesting most right now, based on QueryTracker’s most-requested genres list.

The standout was upmarket fiction: it’s number three on the most-requested list, but it doesn’t even crack the top ten of what writers are submitting.

If you missed it, here’s the full video:

So what does this mean for the current publishing landscape? As I said in the video, I don’t think it means writers aren’t writing upmarket fiction — they just don’t know they are, because it’s an industry term rather than a section you’ll find in a bookstore.

I summarized Carly Watters’ helpful article that attempts to define upmarket fiction.

And, well, viewers of the video had thoughts.

They’re not wrong. Upmarket can be hazy to define.

But I don’t think the answer is to throw the term out altogether. Commercial, literary, and upmarket can be helpful in describing how a book is written and who it’ll be sold to. There are commercial thrillers, literary thrillers, and upmarket thrillers — but the way they sound on the page will be very different, and the readers who will gravitate toward each one will have vastly different preferences.

None is inherently “better” than the other; the author is just prioritizing different elements of their storytelling.

If you’re querying, it’s helpful to know where your book sits on this spectrum, since it’ll help agents understand if your manuscript fits their list and where it might be placed in the market.

---

I wrote a book for querying authors…

Get all of my tips and see stats from 4 million real queries

---

But because these terms can be difficult to explain in the abstract, I think we should look at some actual examples of prose — which is where the difference actually lives.

So I pulled the opening paragraphs of three published novels: one commercial, one literary, and one upmarket. Let’s analyze the writing and pinpoint what exactly puts them into their respective categories.

Example 1: Commercial

Here’s the opening excerpt from Harlan Coben’s I Will Find You, a commercial thriller:

I am serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering my own child.