So I got my first rejection to a full manuscript today! The feedback was wonderful, but she thought it'd be a tough sell, genre-wise--and she thought it was very firmly paranormal. I had never considered that.
The novel I'm querying is set in an original world with Victorian-style culture and technology, where immortal (yet bodiless) beings possess humans, after which the two have to share the body. These things have magical powers.
And I've been pitching it as just YA fantasy, because... well, there are possessions and trains, but it's also a highly magical premise with beings that are more like demigods than ghosts. When I think "paranormal" I mostly think ghost stories, pseudoscience, or vampires and werewolves. And even this earlier thread agrees that paranormal generally has a modern setting.
I realize genres are fluid and there's lots of overlap. But what makes a paranormal a paranormal?
The novel I'm querying is set in an original world with Victorian-style culture and technology, where immortal (yet bodiless) beings possess humans, after which the two have to share the body. These things have magical powers.
And I've been pitching it as just YA fantasy, because... well, there are possessions and trains, but it's also a highly magical premise with beings that are more like demigods than ghosts. When I think "paranormal" I mostly think ghost stories, pseudoscience, or vampires and werewolves. And even this earlier thread agrees that paranormal generally has a modern setting.
I realize genres are fluid and there's lots of overlap. But what makes a paranormal a paranormal?