by Helen Hollick
USA Today best-seller author, first published in 1994: author of an Arthurian trilogy, an Anglo- Saxon Duo ( the events that led to the Battle of Hastings in 1066), a nautical adventure series with a touch of supernatural fantasy, cosy mysteries set in the 1970s, two non-fiction books and short stories included in three anthologies. (And a rather intensive To Be Written list of ideas!)
You would think that selecting a genre suitable for the novel you’ve spent months (years?) writing, would be the easiest part of the marketing process, wouldn’t you?
Think again!
Aside from the hair-pulling, hours gazing blank-brained out the window, restless nights etc, all part of the normal writing process, (just why do we do this darn silly job?), coming up with a reader-grabbing back cover blurb and a suitable synopsis is guaranteed to send indie authors screaming for inspiration from a glass of wine or double gin and tonic. The headache, though, will be topped by the need to decide on a relevant genre. Amazon KDP doesn’t help here, as it’s selection of categories is, not to beat about the bush, next to useless.
I say indie writers above, which includes 100% self-published authors, or those who opt for an assisted publishing company, because mainstream traditional authors have the luxury of a professional in-house marketing team, and usually an enthusiastic agent as well. Trad authors are not on their own, indies are. Deciding on a genre is essential to know where to point the book in order to attract potential readers. Simple if the novel fits a straightforward category: romance, thriller, sci-fi, historical fiction, but what if there’s more than one basic genre?
When I originally wrote the first of my Sea Witch Voyages (Sea Witch!) back in 2006, I touted the manuscript round several of the big publishing houses. I knew this was going to be a darn good nautical adventure yarn. I’d put my heart – nay, my entire soul – into writing it. Friends, authors I knew all said that this showed. Sea Witch was good. It IS good... And the publishing houses agreed. ‘Loved it!’, ‘Thoroughly enjoyable!’ blah blah, but (you knew there was a ‘but’...) the praise in the rejection notes all added the same conundrum: ‘But how would it be marketed?’
Cross genre, you see. Nautical adventure with additional supernatural fantasy. Think the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie: pirate adventure set in the early 1700s with ghosts, witches, fantasy and such. (Basically, good fun, but not to be taken seriously.) I wrote Sea Witch because of the popularity of that movie. I’d loved it. I wanted to read a novel that had the same sort of concept. I found plenty of straight nautical novels – O’Brian, Alexander Kent, C.S. Forrester et al, many young adult novels that were cross genre, but I wanted something adult with adult relationships, adult POV. Found absolutely nothing. So I wrote my own (as we do). I describe the series and my main protagonist, Captain Jesamiah Acorne, as O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey, blended with Hornblower and Jack Sparrow, with a splash of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe all crossed with Indiana Jones. Frustratingly, those mainstream publishers missed the point, but thank goodness, the mid-2000s was the opening up of the indie writing industry. I wholeheartedly embraced the opportunity. (And made some dreadful mistakes and went through a sharp learning curve – subjects for future #WriterWednesday articles?)
The movie industry has no qualm about advertising movies that embrace different genres – romantic thrillers as example, but the literary world doesn’t seem to have that same expanse of imagination to be able to embrace more than one theme at a time. Mostly, or so I was told, this was because of book stores. If a novel is about nautical adventure with supernatural fantasy what shelf does the store put it on? I find this to be nonsense. Surely it simply goes under fiction?
As a point of fact, my Arthurian Trilogy is straight historical fiction, set in post-Roman Britain, yet time and again, because it’s about King Arthur, I find the books under mythology or fantasy. Go figure.
And book stores are (admittedly sadly) irrelevant now. We have Amazon, BookBub, B & N – online stores, where browsing bookshelves in a physical shop is redundant. So why does multi-genre marketing matter?
One of the advantages of being an indie writer, however, is that we are independent, we are at liberty to choose, so if we want to write a novel that is a historical romance/thriller/fantasy we can go ahead and do so. One category, multi-category genre is our choice to market as and how we want to pitch the book on Social Media. (In fact, probably the quirkier the better!)
I did come across some super new suggestions the other day, which would be great if they took off in popularity. Combinations of familiar genres. I think we’re already familiar with ‘RomCom’ (Romantic Comedy) but how about ‘Adventasy’? Or ‘Superiller’? ‘Romystery’? ‘Histventure’?
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Today’s #HistoricalFictionChat Question:
* What other combinations of genres can you think of that we writers could adopt? *
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Thanks Cathie - looking forward to future posts!
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