Today in, "Things that should be obvious"

I am not a person lacking for things to read.  My TBR is robust and ever-growing...

So when people push back against a simple suggestion like, "If you're writing in a genre, read something published in that genre written within the last five years," I am frankly baffled.  This advice is so common-sense, I'm not sure what the malfunction is with these people.  But it does explain quite a bit about (for instance) dudes trying to write in genres that aren't their own, convinced they've hit on something people IN the genre have never thought about.  You know the ones; "I wanna write a romance book, but this one will have a plot!"  "I wanna write YA, but you know, sci fi!"  "I want to write a book about what would happen if the Nazis won the war."  And you talk to them and suggest, ever so gently (or not, if you're me) that the genre in question has a zillion different versions of this, and have they read any? they get offended, or offer an example 10+ years out of date ("I read the Hunger Games." MY DUDE).

Your job as a writer is twofold, and the second half of that is reading.  And I have long since championed reading broadly (you will get far fewer historical details wrong if you've read some recent histories, even if what you're writing is a historical romance), but also being familiar with your chosen genre.  This includes contemporary examples therein.  If you love sci-fi, and you can quote me chapter and verse some Heinlein and Asimov, Clark and Herbert, cool (but I mean also read some goddamn women in the genre).  But the genre has moved on.  There are issues that they didn't cover (or covered POORLY), and there are issues that modern readers are more interested in, by and large.

From a financial standpoint (and a reader-engagement standpoint), you are only hurting yourself by not being familiar with the trends in your genre, or the conventions, or just who's writing good shit in your field.  If you're trying to pitch your book, it helps to have some other titles that you can compare it to, or that you can recommend in addition to your own work.