Cat Johnson Braves Doll Lil’s Word Association Challenge!

How many different genres do you think we have in literature? How about subgenres? When writing a story the genre is one of the last things I think of yet when trying to get published it’s one of the most important things an agent or editor wants to know. They want to know if you know where your writing fits in the writing world along with if you can write a good hook. That every first correspondence tells agents and editors where you think your work should go, so you need to know what genre you are writing in. For some writers this maybe simple and for others it may not.

As you’ve guested this article is going to be a discussion on the difficulties in picking the correct genre for your writing or at least the difficulties I’ve had. Hopefully this will help other newbies, in their quest. Now when you write in one genre say Sci-Fi or Mystery and it’s pretty clear what the genre is as a writer your golden. You don’t have to research subgenres or figure out what falls within each category like the rest of us.

At a conference it was suggestion that I go to the book store and find my favorite authors to where they were located and then see if my book fell within the same category as they do. Mine doesn’t. Heck in one of the book stores I found Kim Harrison in the Horror section next to Stephen King, never in my wildest dreams would I have put those two together. Kim Harrison is Urban Fantasy not Horror but that where I found her. So needless to say when it comes to genre selection it’s baffling.

In one of the writing magazines either The Writer or Writer’s Digest I can’t remember which had an article listing all of the genres and subgenres for authors so we could figure out which genre to fall under. The article came out in either ’09 or ’10 I can’t remember which but it was helpful to a point. It helped me figure out that Legacy is a paranormal novel. Here’s the thing I see a lot when people see the word paranormal romance which I don’t write. What a paranormal story is is something that has ghost in it or that wouldn’t fall into say an Urban Fantasy. But the kicker is the bookstores don’t have a paranormal section so that’s my subgenre, I have to figure out where else Legacy falls. Personally I think it has some mystery but that’s me, I think all writer’s want their stories to have mystery in them. I don’t have vamps, or were’s but I have ghosts, a haunted house, an empath who doesn’t know she’s a witch and a lot of government types i.e. cops, FBI, and military. And we wonder why I question want genre to list Legacy under. I could say mainstream paranormal but that feels like a copout, then again nothing else really fits. If you don’t know the placement you won’t get any bites on your queries because you’ll be sending them to the wrong people. Which could be an issue I’m having sometimes I wish there was a genre fairy to tell me where Legacy should go. It’s my only story that has this kind of issue. Everything else I could tell you where it would fall, this one not so much.

So look at what your writing if you’re a writer and decide what genre you’d put it under. Then go to your local bookstore and see if you can find something similar where you thought your work would be. Also check to see where all your favorite authors are located. Are they where you would have placed them? Would you’re work be located in the same genre? A lot of times we write in the same genre as the authors we enjoy reading.

So why is this important? It’s important because it’s a part of marketing and something publishers think about all the time. Granted it wasn’t something I was thinking about when I started writing or when I went into my MFA, but now it’s something that I know I need to think about. I think about frequently now because I need to make the right decision when it comes to which genre my stories fall into. Knowing which genre my stories fall into helps me make the right decisions on what agents to send queries to. It would be so easy if I had a cut and dry genre, but of course I could never make things easy.

Until next time have a wicked cool time and keep reading.
Teresa

www.wickedcoolflight.com – www.teresacrumpton.com – www.wickedcoolflight.net

Paperback Dolls is made up of women from different parts of the world, with different backgrounds, different tastes and beliefs that were brought together through a love of reading. We like to think of ourselves as a cyber version of "The View" that focuses on books, authors, and reading. We are proof positive that one common love can unite the most opposite of people and form lasting friendships that introduce other ways of life and perspectives to each other.

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