Michelle Sagara

Having said all of this, my gut advice would still be to write the book the way you want it to be written. Trends are things that it's better to set than to follow -- and no one knows who will lead the next one. Once you've finished, you can then withdraw a bit from the story-rush and look more clearly at what you have -- but I've never found it horribly useful to try to think "business" and "writing" at the same time.