Genre

[alg]

Genre as a marketing category!
Publishers and editors do not think about genre the same way authors do. Here's an explanation.



... Now I write an ode to spinach:

spinach,
you
are green
and
i wish i had more
of you than
what I ate
(yum yum yum)
at five in the morning,
dawn
creeping
up
you are
(my sunshine and)
the perfect delivery method
for salt and
garlic.

Comments

[susanw.livejournal.com]

When I read Point of Honour by Madeleine Robins, I am reading a mystery novel; others are reading a novel of alternate history about a woman P.I.

I feel strange admitting this, since it's such a subtle, nebulous thing, but the friend who told me I should read Point of Honour just said, "It's a Regency mystery." So I wasn't expecting the alternate history element, and it threw me out of the story, because I'd been looking forward to a mystery set either in the author's best approximation of the actual historical period, or else the consensus frothy alterna-Regency many romances are set in. I need to go back and try it again, because I could tell it was well-written--it just wasn't what I was expecting to read.

Which I guess just goes to show genre is all about expectations--if I'd known going in that I was reading a genre-bender instead of a straightforward historical mystery, I'd have responded differently to the book. And that's probably a cautionary tale for an aspiring genre-bender like me (I'm somewhere on the border between historical romance, historical fiction, and the military historical).

[alg.livejournal.com]

Hee, I think you just replied to your own comment!

This is partially what I am talking about -- people like categories, and they like their expectations, and it is very difficult to snap out of expectations once they are there.

That makes it hard on writers, too -- harder, I think, than anyone usually thinks about. Take Nora Roberts: her fans want the same thing over and over again, and buy her books because they know what they are going to get... and yet then they complain to each other that she's become predictable. How unfair to her!

so i am a wimp...

[laast.livejournal.com]

Oh my gosh... I love Nora Roberts..

and after the Red Lily, BLue Delilah, Black Rose (one I never got to)... trilogy... no one can say she is predicatable. I love her writing, loved this trilogy... it's nothing like anything she has ever written before. I thought it was wonderful. It was so good it scared the crap out of me. (I am also a wimp & sleep with the lights on after watching Gohst Hunters). ... anyway... I couldn't bring myself to read the final installment of the trilogy. I was too scared. freaked out really. She had my worst nightmare written right out there for me, and it was phenominal...It was that good and that scary that I couldn't finish it. It really is a compliment to how good she is... really, I couldn't read Black Rose because the other two were so good, and I had no idea what to expect. lol...