Tasty Snails vs. Espresso Books (and genre crossing)

My friend Louise introduced me to a VERY DANGEROUS website. It is called Food Gawker, and it seems to troll the internet for cool blogs about food.

Here's a photo that was bubbling at the top of the pic gallery today.



I ask you. Does food get cuter than that? Bless her little macaron-making heart.

So I have been stuck there, clicking over and looking at recipes for chocolate cake (which I'm going to make and enter in the county fair this weekend, good luck to me!) and all kinds of other beautiful, deliciousness.

Meanwhile, I have also been reading a MS for a friend. She is writing out of her genre, and it's amazing how versatile some writers can be. I'm really happy to see the different sides of writers' personalities emerge. Yes, I think the voice for most writers is pretty constant--I can hear her romance side sneaking through in this great YA dystopian story--which I think is what makes readers for the most part not mind when writers cross genre lines. There are some writers I'd read whatever they wrote, no matter the genre (almost. I mean, I do have some limitations on what I won't read.)

I also got a load of something really innovative and interesting today. It's called the Espresso Book Machine. From the writerswrite blog:

"The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Trachtenberg discusses the expansion of On Demand Books' Espresso Book Machine, a desk-sized device that quickly prints out black-and-white paperbacks with color covers. Jeffrey says he printed his own book in four minutes."

Click on the link to see the machine.

Huh. How would that be? It might change things. And book publishing would no longer be for the snails. Yummy snails. Mmm!

Genres and Queries and Yogurt, oh my!

I've got two projects ready to query for agents, and it has made me think about the importance of knowing what genre your book is.

There's a tendency among writers to want to write what we want to write, regardless of the readership. And that's great. It's totally fine.

However, if a writer does have the goal of getting published it's important to have the end-product in mind. For publishers, writing is a commodity, and it needs to be marketable. The very first thing a publisher needs to know to evaluate whether the book will work for them is the GENRE.

What is a genre? It's a type. It basically dictates who the audience of the book will be. Here are some examples of fiction genres, with my general assessment of the audience they target:

Picture Books (books with pictures, aimed at kids)
Chapter Books (longer books for young readers)
Middle Grade Fiction (that means for grade schoolers, the protagonist should be age 11)
Young Adult, a.k.a. YA (teen readers, the protagonists should be age 15-16, very little wiggle room there)
Literary Fiction (novels where the internal conflict of the main characters takes center stage)
Commercial Fiction (novels where external conflict for the main characters is most prevalent)
Mystery (self-explanatory)
Thrillers (like Baldacci)
Suspense (like Hitchcock)
Paranormal (ghosts, etc.)
Dystopian (where the world as we know it is broken, like Fahrenheit 451)
Fantasy (where the world-building is a main part of the story, often a quest or epic battle)
Science Fiction (where futuristic technology plays a major role)
Magical Realism (regular world with a dash of magic)
SteamPunk (not quite sure, but often set in the past with current technology involved; is it like Cowboys and Aliens?)
Historical (set in the past, usually educating the reader about the time period)
Romance (where the end isn't a surprise, but the joy is in the journey of girl getting boy)

There are others, and there are sub-genres of these classes as well; for instance, within Mystery, there is a sub-genre called "Cozy Mystery" where the blood isn't too gory, and you can imagine reading this curled up next to a fire with a cup of tea on a rainy day. There are also "Hard Boiled Detective" mysteries, like the Sam Spade stories of Dashiell Hammett. Or you've got "Procedurals" where the emphasis is on the medical evidence. Doesn't Patricia Cornwall write those? They're a little gritty for me and my cotton candy reading taste.

There are also gradations of Romance. Everything from "Sweet," to "Christian," to "Hot," to "NASCAR." The genres of Romance seem almost limitless. And it's a big market.

Okay, now. This morning I sent my first query to an agent. In my letter I noted the genre of my book. In order to even know which agent to query, I needed to know what genre she agented, and what her interests are. It really narrows things down. It's an important step in getting published.

Yeah, I can see how it feels constricting to some of us who would like to think of ourselves as "genre-bending" writers, but the problem with that is that when a reader picks up a book, he or she has a certain expectation and desire to be entertained in a certain way. For instance, some nights I stand in front of the Red Box thinking, "Do I want a comedy or an action movie?" There's an expectation, and it's part of the contract between the reader and the writer, as William Noble said. The deal is, the reader says, "Tell me a story," and the writer does.

Now, onto more important topics. Sometimes I stand in front of the Red Box and realize it's across the street from McDonalds and all I can think is how much I am craving a Fruit and Yogurt Parfait. I love that crunchy granola they put in the packet to keep it crispy and slide the spoon through the little plastic wrapper to keep them together and ready for me to combine and eat. Sometimes the chunks of strawberries are still frozen. I know, I know, some people are haters about The Golden Arches, but don't dis the Yogurt. That stuff is gooood.

Check out the Deliciousness

Genre:Does Cold Cereal belong in the Candy Phylum?

Lately deciding on how to label the genre of my novel has been taking up an unnatural amount of my brain's hard drive free space. I think I need to defrag or something now. Does it fall in mainstream fiction or commercial fiction? Ha ha I wish I could say it fell into literary fiction but it's too cottony and candy-y.

So since my protagonist is 24, it won't fit into YA (young adult) fiction, even though it is a kind of a coming of age story. I got that much. Parameters as far as I can gather from combing the Internet and agents' sites and know-it-all-experts' advice books require the main character of a YA novel to be no older than 17, and preferably 16.

So it's definitely not middle grade even though when I read the prologue to the 5th graders a few months ago they ate it up. Middle grade novels star kids age 11. Or else!

Then there's women's fiction. Even though this could be termed a love story (the main character gets the girl at the end) and I would like to believe women will really find the hero of the story appealing, in spite of his flaws. But it's not technically a romance, even though the protagonist's main need is to overcome his loneliness. It doesn't fit the template of what's required for a romance. For one, the main character is male, not female. And since it doesn't star a 28+ single woman with a careeeeeer and eschewing marriage but secretly pining for love, it sure ain't chick lit.

So, do I try to market it as sports fiction? The whole story is about a fish-out-of-water, an unexpected foray into a new sport. It doesn't cover one of the big favorite sports of basketball or football, or even NASCAR, so maybe that won't work. Did you know there's a NASCAR sub-genre in Harlequin romance? I heard that last summer and I think my head is still trying to wrap itself around that fact.

Sometimes I think I should rework my story to fit neatly and squarely into one of these categories. But I wanted to tell the story of this particular character at this particular point of his life. To do that, I need to tell THIS story. I realize that the only reason I would need to alter it is if I decide to try to market it, which I guess I will, just to force myself to DO HARD THINGS. However, I am not going to weep failure tears if no publisher picks it up. I realize the story idea is a stretch. I know it doesn't fit neatly into a genre. I'm okay with that. I like the story, and I'm sticking to it.

For now.

And I WISH with all my HEART that I had a door on my hall closet. That it didn't gape open, with all those cereal boxes calling to me every single time I pass them, begging me to reach in, to get just a little handful of strawberry frosted mini-wheats or a few of those Raisin Bran Crunch flakes. Man, those are good. So good in fact, I kind of find myself thinking they (like the NASCAR Harlequin) should be a subgenre of candy. The mini-wheats and raisin brans could be the health-nut cousins of candy. Lucky Charms and Froot Loops could be more closely related. Apple Jacks have sugar listed as their first ingredient. Mmm. I love when those loopy rings have an obscured center, caked over with delicious dried, appley frosting.

Kingdom, phylum, class, family, whatever. All that sugar tastes really good when combined with wheat or oats or rice or corn flour. I'll take a big handful again when I pass by.

I think I might have blogged this opinion in an earlier post. Oh, well. My kids tell me all the time I'm repeating myself. So why not in cyberspace, too?

Now, pass the Berry Kix.