On Trends

What do you guys think about trends? Author/Agent Mandy Hubbard did a post on current and future trends the other day. I thought it was interesting and I hope you will too. She is a YA author and agent, so it's for picture books, middle grade and YA. You can find her blog post here.

I'm not a huge fan of trends. Meaning, I don't follow them. When someone says all agents want is "dystopian", or "contemporary", I write something different. I don't like following everyone. It's not like I care if someone writes the same genre as me, I just like writing the story that is calling to me at that time. If I'm working on a paranormal and agents/editors aren't looking for that? Oh well. I'm going to write my paranormal. I have to make sure it's different enough to stand out, obviously, but I'm not going to put it aside because everyone is writing something else.

What do you think of trends? Do you follow them? Did Mandy's post make you cringe because you don't write what editors are looking for? Did it give you hope?