Long, long ago authors risked their livelihood by writing cross-genre stories. Editors wouldn’t accept them because publishers wouldn’t buy them because bookstores arranged books by one single genre. If you wrote a historical paranormal story they wouldn’t know where to shelve it, so no one would buy it. End of story.
Then came digital publishing with this thing called links, and writers pulled their cross genre stories out from the box under the bed, dusted them off, and epublishers happily bought them. Digital books can be filed under a dozen different genres at once and buyers can find them a dozen different ways.
Writing cross genre books took off. Want to write a cowboy dragon time-travel novel? No worries. Go for it! Freed from being chained to specific genres authors’ imaginations went wild. The paranormal genre really took off. Urban fantasy grew tremendously, steampunk hit the shelves at a flat sprint, and it’s rare now to find a book that is strictly one genre.
Want to submit a vampire historical rubenesque steampunk novel? Go for it!
Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.
4 comments:
I didn't know/understand the genre thing when I started so mine have always been a mish-mash of genres. I think they're more interesting that way.
I agree. The popularity of newer genres such as Urban Fantasy and Steampunk proves that readers enjoy it when authors mix things up.
Helen
I've pretty much always done the mash-up thing too. It's more fun to color outside the lines.
And you color outside the lines so well!
H11elen
Post a Comment