As someone who wants to become a professional writer, I spend a lot of time looking through resources online. Sometimes this means different websites, different kindle versions of books that I can't afford and, of course, social media.

Social media not only has changed the very definition of who we are as professionals, but also who we are as writers.

People who consider themselves prolific writers know of a little resource called #MSWL. It's basically the best thing that was ever invented for writers.

For those of you who don't know, it's a hashtag on Twitter where literary agents and publishers can post about what type of manuscript they're looking for. There are also a lovely group of beautiful people who have developed it into a website.

On this site you can search the genre of your manuscript or even just some key aspects of it and see which literary agents are looking for what you've written.

If you're one of the many people who have fallen into the Dystopian genre, written a book or maybe two or three-- since, you know, Dystopian is all the hype-- you will be sorely disappointed.

According to a majority of the agents that use #MSWL, Dystopian is a dead genre.

Before you start falling into a slump of sadness about the incredible novel you've created, let me just tell you one thing.

They are wrong.

I understand where they are coming from. Sure, it is a long process to publish a book. Sure, we all want to make money doing the thing we love. Yes, it does take about nine months for a book to go from manuscript stage to bound. Barnes and Nobles stocked stage so agents and publishers have to guess what will be popular in the future.

And nobody can do that.

The thing is Dystopian will ALWAYS be popular.

It is everything that every avid reader wants in a novel: it's the depiction of a world far worse than our own. And that makes living in the here and now a little bit easier.

And that's something we all need.

This is a big problem because when writers look at things like the #MSWL, they're looking for someone to give their world value because often, we find it difficult to let ourselves give it to our own work. Here's the major issue: If writers stop writing about things they want to write about and start writing solely to please the publishing market, books as we know them will cease to exist.

Books are written for the author, not for the reader.

We write because there is something we want to say, something we believe is worth saying. To allow writers to alter bits and pieces of their art is taking away from their story.

Telling authors to write certain stories defeats the purpose altogether.

No one told Van Gogh what to paint, he just did it. No one told J.K. Rowling that a story about a wizarding school would be a hit.

They just went for it.

Even when I asked a large group of writers what their relationship to the Dystopian genre was, I got a lot of people saying that they still read it.

Divergent is still selling out their movies. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 was a knockout. The Giver was one of the first Dystopians published. And that was in 1993. In 2014, a movie was made.

That only goes to show the extent of interest that people have in this genre.

I want to understand where publishers are coming from, but I don't. If you're strolling along through the shelves of books in Barnes and Nobles, or scrolling through Amazon nine months from now and you see no Dystopians, you'll know why.

And with enough people complaining, it's something we can change.