Blogger: Wendy Lawton
Location: Books & Such Central Valley Office, CA
So what’s another thing your agent does not want to hear?
“I know I’ve been writing [my genre] for some time now, but I’m dying to try my hand at [a totally different genre].”
Writers are creative people. It stands to reason that writing in the same genre or on the same subject can get old. But for an agent, finding out that a client wants to change genres or experiment with a new approach, it’s not news we want to hear.
Why is that?
Developing a reading audience is one of the most important things a writer does to insure success. If that audience grows with each book, the authors sales are going to grow. It’s that simple. I tell my clients it’s much like starting a business.
Let me draw you a parallel. Let’s say you have a thriving hardware store in a farming town. You work hard to stock all the things your customer needs. You maintain a list of your customers and you let them know when the seed comes in for vegetable gardens and when hoses go on sale. You deliver, you keep in touch and your customers are loyal because they know what they’ll get at your store.
Now let’s say you start to get tired of hardware. You took a pastry course in your spare time and so you decide to follow your passion. At first you install a bakery case in the front of the hardware store. Most of your customers are confused. Farmer in overalls don’t seem to want petit fours or designer cupcakes. Hardware sales drop 10% but you’re sure you’ll make that up with the bakery. Baking takes up a good part of your time and unfortunately, ordering suffers. When old customers come in and can’t find what they need, business drops off again.
You see the writing on the wall. You need the hardware business to fund your life while you try to get the bakery going. You move the bakery out of the hardware store and into it’s own building. Now it’s not so confusing because you realized that you have two completely different businesses with two completely different customer bases. Trouble is, you don’t have enough time, energy and money to service both businesses.
So what does this have to do with writing?
If you’ve been writing historical suspense, that’s your thriving hardware store, so to speak. Your readers know what to expect when they see your name on a book. They’ve come to expect a certain quality from you– a certain kind of read that they love. If you’ve decided to try your hand at, say, contemporary women’s fiction your readers are going to be confused. Some will even be angry that they bought a book thinking it was one thing but got something totally different. You’ll come to realize that the bulk of your readers will not follow you wherever your creativity takes you. They like a certain kind of book. They have expectations. They don’t want you to write like Jodi Picoult. If they want Jodi Picoult, they’ll buy Jodi Piccoult. They want you to write like you. The you they’ve come to expect.
So if you want to branch out, you realize you may have to continue to satisfy your old audience with what they expect– they are your bread and butter after all. You need to start a new brand, maybe even with a pseudonym, to reduce confusion. You’ll have to start all over and build your new readership from the ground up. Now you have two businesses, so to speak. The question is, do you have enough time to satisfy your core customer while building a new business. Can you write enough books to satisfy both audiences? Will there be enough money to promote to two different audiences?
Agents hate to hear that a writer wants to change his “brand” because it assumes things that rarely happen. It assumes the reader will follow the writer wherever the muse happens to take him. This is not necessarily true– think legal thriller writer John Grisham and his quiet coming-of-age-story A Painted House. Think Anne Rice and her move away from vampires.
And wanting to write it all– even if we can– displays a strange kind of hubris. It’s like you are saying you are all any reader needs. “You like mystery? I’ll give you mystery. You want a tender memoir. I can do that. You want literary fiction. That’s me. You want a book on how to save your marriage? Let me get right on that.”
So, yes, there can be compelling reasons to change from a successful genre, but don’t do it lightly. It’s like closing one established business and reentering start-up phase.
Experimentation is for the early years, the pre-published years. Find your voice, find your genre or subject and then build. If you veer off course once you’ve built, it’s gonna cost you. Sometimes the cost is way beyond anything we imagined.
What about mixing it up a bit? Adding another complimentary genre with your original one. It would be like having a book store but adding an area for coffee and pastries. Wouldn’t that satisfy the writer’s need to be creative yet keep the same audience?
Sue
Excellent advice. We’ve been talking about holding a panel on branding at our next writers conference. Some people don’t care for it, but as someone who works in online book promotion, I think it’s a great idea.
We’ve had clients who switched genres between books and it’s hard to get people excited when they are expecting one thing from an author and get something totally different.
What about the children’s market, though? It seems it could be difficult picture books this way.
Thanks for another great post.
This type of brand management applies for even the giants. Look what happened when Coke tried to become New Coke. Disaster.
All this brings us to the importance of really planning out the lead hitter of your writing career. If you aren’t crazy about historical novels, then that should be your breakout novel.
It does seem this rule can be bent when it comes to writers of both fiction and non-fiction? Is there more flexibility in these situations?
This is a great post, Wendy. I think this is hard sometimes for authors because our ideas don’t always come to us in our specific genre. I write YA Fantasy, and yet I have story ideas jotted down in genres varying from contemporary women’s fiction to historical romance to literary coming-of-age.
Maybe a good skill for an author to learn would be translating some of those story nuggets into his branded genre. Like, perhaps my historical idea would work just as well in a fantasy story world I create that has political and technological pressures that are similar to those during the First World War (or whatever historical time period my original story nugget happens to be from). Good storytelling is good storytelling, right? Just because the idea entered my brain in a WWI package it doesn’t mean it has to be carved out of stone that way.
Excellent post, Wendy. I love the hardware store analogy. And as a reader who’s gotten whiplash like you described, I’m all for creating a brand and sticking with it. 🙂
Sue, mixing it up is one of the problems. It tends to mix the reader up.
Try thinking about this from the reader’s point of view. I love Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. I wait impatiently for each new release. Seems to be too long between books so I decided to try his Isabel Dalhousie series. Yawn. He may need a break from Botswana, but as a reader I don’t care. I want to keep him barefoot and pregnant (so to speak) and writing more about Mma Ramotswe.
Cheryl, I would consider picture books to be one genre. Think Patricia Polacco or Jan Brett. Their books are so distinctively theirs the subject hardly matters. It is far different than adult books.
Michael, writers who do both fiction and nonfiction have two complete businesses. There may be customer (reader) crossover but the intersection is probably much smaller than they imagine.
If you write both you need to be prepared to twice the work in promotion and dedicate twice the resources. Your brand is going to be more complicated (potentially more confusing) than say a J. K. Rowling.
Lindsay, you said, “maybe a good skill for an author to learn would be translating some of those story nuggets into his branded genre.”
Yes! That is exactly the ticket. If writers could always honor the brand, it would help them continue on an upward career trajectory. These days, when sales numbers are so important, we want to see growth with each book. That means giving the readers exactly what they expect from the brand.
Maybe I just read too much, but I’m one of those readers who faithfully follows beloved authors wherever their muse takes them. Perhaps not every author or every genre, but more often than not. My genre preferences may be more varied than other readers’, though (I read fantasy, suspense, romance, historical, SF, chick lit, teen, and their blends, while avoiding contemporary or women’s fiction, westerns, and Amish novels).
Um, Wendy. This is your resident librarian. Do you mean Jan Brett in your comment to Cheryl? 🙂
Most all of the books I read are non-fiction, so my perceptions may not be applicable to this post. I find that even if I really resonate with one book, my enjoyment of subsequent books by that author diminishes with each one I read, to the point where I stop reading their work altogether.
I would appreciate some diversity of topics by an author I like, instead of them merely producing variations on a theme. To me it is annoying to pick up a new book and essentially re-read what the last one said.
But sometimes when authors have written dozens of things in the same genre their books get boring because of the similarities. I used to enjoy a certain secular Sci-Fi author who uses a lot of puns, but his more recent books are just replays of plots and characters from earlier books. And I could say the same thing about other authors. It seems to me after writing about a dozen books in the same genre authors have trouble coming up with new ideas.
Excellent post–drove home the point–but so hard to embrace! You’re right, Wendy. It’s difficult to settle on one genre when the ideas are constantly flying. I’m realizing I’d better figure out both my favorite kind of writing, AND my brand, early on. Thanks!
Thanks for the direction, Wendy. I’ll take a look at the authors you suggested.
Thank you so much for this post, Wendy! I have also been told this by a NY best selling author friend as well. It’s so hard when your heart is calling you to write a specific story. I’ve written one YA and one Inspirational Suspense in the past year and a half. Both stories wouldn’t stop nagging at me:)I felt the need to have to write it.
Great advice. Thanks so much!!
I think the author needs to spend the time plotting out their business plan first. It’s time consuming to not only change genres and expand but to write in two different genres. The fact is, most authors cannot do it without losing a little bit of their sanity (and audience). I get the need to keep a broad audience, but I’ve always been a little all over the place. A central theme to ALL of my work however comes across. That’s how I distinguish myself, and how I use both pennames to work different audiences.
Best of success to everyone!
I think this may be one of the most important posts I’ve read on writing. I’m writing a memoir, which is emotionally exhausting, so I was looking forward to writing fiction, because I’d like to escape to the make believe world. After reading your post, I realize I need to stick with non-fiction. It’s where my passion lies and now that I’m thinking about it, as a reader I have done exactly what you are explaining. One of my favorite authors is Anne Lamott, but after reading Traveling Mercies and Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, I couldn’t read her novels. I tried to start one, but it wasn’t what I had fallen in love with. Thanks for helping me define my goals.
Does this hold true for YA as well. For example, if up until this point I’ve been writing contemporary, chick-lit style YA, would it be a bad thing to branch out into a dystopian or sci-fi YA? Since these books still fall under the same broad genre, are there different rules?
I think some of the rules for this could be changing with epub, being able to publish through Kindle, etc — we have places now where we can publish in other genres, experiment, and I have found that to be nothing but positive for my overall writing career.
Additionally, experimenting in other genres — which has been completely supported by my agent — has helped me overall as a writer. I wrote a mystery which, while it didn’t sell, received some very good comments from editors (I posted it on Kindle and will be writing the second book in the series soon b/c it has sold so well), but writing that book taught me things I would never have learned otherwise. It made my ability to incorporate mystery/suspense in my romance novels much stronger.
I like variety, and luckily, even with category, I have been able to do a lot of different things, but my agent has never said “no” when I say “I think I’ll try… ” or “I have an idea for…” and I have always appreciated that about her. She will tell me “well, those are hard to sell these days” or give me some general advice, but she never says no. In fact, she always encourages whatever creative bent I might have. It’s one of the reasons I find working with her so great. 🙂
Just providing a slightly different perspective. 🙂
Sam