I've just gone through the year-long experience of selling a cross-genre novel. I thought I would share the experience, both good and bad, in hopes that it might be of some use to people interested in breaking the rules. (If not, you can always make a hardcopy of this and scrunch it into a ball for the cat to play with.)
First: I didn't set out to do anything more edgy than write a modern-day mystery with antecedents reaching back to the Hapsburg Dynasty. Basic, safe stuff: lost treasure and homicidal badguys and the like. Smooth sailing until I decided to add a modest romantic angle. I went with American gent meets European lady. Couldn't make it work. The male character was too strong while the female character was too weak. So I switched roles. Same issue in reverse. A couple of days later, I hit on exactly the wrong answer: two female characters. One of whom is barely self-sufficient; suffering from a developmental disorder. Add in a few bedroom scenes and now an extremely sketchy adult romance had overtaken an old-school mystery. Traditional readers of either genre were going to be unhappy.
Of the first ten agents I tried, I got back three variations of: "Love the writing, but you can't sell this. We can't market it as genre fiction. Come back when you have something different."
When I found an agent, the difficulties were merely pushed one rung up the ladder. One publisher wrote back: "Unless this guy has a couple million followers on Twitter, we aren't interested. We have no way to market this."
I was being advised, many times in not so subtle ways, that I needed to pick a genre and stick to it. The problem with this was simple: the reason these people liked the writing was because I believed in what I was doing. Change the manuscript to be more marketable, and that belief would be gone, taking the writing with it. After a few months of this, I figured I would have more fun playing hopscotch on the nearest airport runway.
The good news is that we picked up a major publisher at last. The bad news is the print run is not what you would call huge. So it goes.
My take-away from this is nothing new: 1) In publishing, as in every business, the bottom line rules all. 2) Because of this, publishers are extremely conservative when facing interstitial material. Old news, except that if you are writing between the genres, you get to experience this reality first hand. You might find (as I did) that knowing a thing and experiencing a thing are vastly different.
I would add that many (perhaps even most) of the huge best-sellers of the last twenty years were deemed unmarketable by numerous people. Never forget the advice given to Tony Hillerman by a publisher who didn't like mixing genres: "Your mysteries would be great if you took all that Indian stuff out."
Write what you believe in. If it's good, it'll sell.
First: I didn't set out to do anything more edgy than write a modern-day mystery with antecedents reaching back to the Hapsburg Dynasty. Basic, safe stuff: lost treasure and homicidal badguys and the like. Smooth sailing until I decided to add a modest romantic angle. I went with American gent meets European lady. Couldn't make it work. The male character was too strong while the female character was too weak. So I switched roles. Same issue in reverse. A couple of days later, I hit on exactly the wrong answer: two female characters. One of whom is barely self-sufficient; suffering from a developmental disorder. Add in a few bedroom scenes and now an extremely sketchy adult romance had overtaken an old-school mystery. Traditional readers of either genre were going to be unhappy.
Of the first ten agents I tried, I got back three variations of: "Love the writing, but you can't sell this. We can't market it as genre fiction. Come back when you have something different."
When I found an agent, the difficulties were merely pushed one rung up the ladder. One publisher wrote back: "Unless this guy has a couple million followers on Twitter, we aren't interested. We have no way to market this."
I was being advised, many times in not so subtle ways, that I needed to pick a genre and stick to it. The problem with this was simple: the reason these people liked the writing was because I believed in what I was doing. Change the manuscript to be more marketable, and that belief would be gone, taking the writing with it. After a few months of this, I figured I would have more fun playing hopscotch on the nearest airport runway.
The good news is that we picked up a major publisher at last. The bad news is the print run is not what you would call huge. So it goes.
My take-away from this is nothing new: 1) In publishing, as in every business, the bottom line rules all. 2) Because of this, publishers are extremely conservative when facing interstitial material. Old news, except that if you are writing between the genres, you get to experience this reality first hand. You might find (as I did) that knowing a thing and experiencing a thing are vastly different.
I would add that many (perhaps even most) of the huge best-sellers of the last twenty years were deemed unmarketable by numerous people. Never forget the advice given to Tony Hillerman by a publisher who didn't like mixing genres: "Your mysteries would be great if you took all that Indian stuff out."
Write what you believe in. If it's good, it'll sell.
