1. Smut. Dirty, filthy, poorly-written smut to fill up supermarkets and the romance section.
2. "Urban fantasy" to WASTE ALL THE GORRAM SHELF SPACE IN SF/F and bait in teenagers who are hot for more vampire-on-werewolf-on-ghost-on-zombie-on-ghoul-on-whatthefuckever action but don't want to read out and out smut.
3. Yet another fucking terrible knockoff of the Zombie Survival Guide or World War Z. As if those were particularly remarkable for anything other than being new.
4. Travel back in time to the '40s and write for a pulp magazine. Don't matter which one, any of them will print anything.
5. A tie-in novel. Either another shit Star Trek thing, another shit Star Wars thing, or another shit 40K thing.
6. Anything for the "humor" section. You haven't known success until your book is sitting between a twenty year old Garfield flipbook and yet another toilet-sitting factbook full of misinformation.
7. Mil-SF. Start with deep and abiding
buttlust admiration for 'Murrican independent men what don't need no gubbment liberals, toss in some evil aliums, add a few worshipful friendly-but-inferior aliums who need their dose of HFY, and spice with power armor. If you go two scenes without anything being shot or any strawmen political you're doing it wrong.
8. Be like Brandon Sanderson and write the same book two dozen times, pausing only to change the conceit of the magic system and the names of the male lead, female lead, and ebul male villain.
9. Anything about steampunk (
just glue some gears on it).
10. Any bland fantasy with the cover art done by that one guy who does the mostly-photorealistic people, who are inevitably either Dude In Black Hooded Cloak With Knives or Half-Naked Woman Walking Through A Place.
11. Be like Terry Goodkind and write tens of thousands of words of ethical manifesto and then paint rough outlines of characters over the top.
12. Any grimderp shit "inspired" by 40K or Warhammer Fantasy, especially if it has cover art by that one guy who does a bunch of characters which are either Dramatically Posed Grimdark People Fightan in Power Armor or Dramatically Posed Grimdark People Fightan in Armor.
13. Anything based on D&D. Especially if it's got a fucking Sue in it. R.A. Salvatore gets a pass because he did it first.
14. Anything that has cover art done by that one guy who did all of the covers for the nice Ender book reprints or that one guy's whole series of cash-ins after Old Man's War. Seriously, just goes to show that you can get hired in the industry for drawing like shit as well as writing like shit.
15. Anything which, if opened to a random page, will have at least eight place/thing names or words on that page which are not plain English and require you to read the book to understand.
16. Anything which can be summarized in the blurb on the back as something roughly equivalent to a hastily assembled TTRP campaign but isn't actually a novelized campaign transcript.
17. I could go on...No, seriously, that was literally just shit that I see in SF&F during casual browsing.