RWA San Francisco Meeting, Part 1: Genre Advice

After several discussions with trusted writer pals, it became clear that yes, I did in fact write women's fiction -- or at least general fiction that would probably appeal more to stereotypical female demographic (books about people) than the stereotypical male demographic (books about things and events). The next logical step for this, then, would be to consider joining the Romance Writer's of America under the Women's Fiction section.

With that in mind, I hauled my butt out of bed nice and early this morning to meet up with Sierra Godfrey and go to the RWA San Francisco meeting. I had no idea what to expect; I figured the worst-case scenario would be similar to Chamber of Commerce networking events I've been to for business.

Fortunately, it was far from that. Instead, it was an education to hear agent Laura Bradford talk about professional courtesy, and even better than that, have her muse on my own genre questions that I've been wrestling with.

During her Q&A session, the topic of trends was brought up. Laura said that editors haven't asked for anything in particular lately, and that offered up some flexibility for writers to write what they want to know. I went one step beyond that and asked if she noticed if the industry was starting to focus on sub-genres or if genres as a whole were starting to blur.

She brought up one of her first attempted sales, a mash-up of genres that involved romance, time travel, historical, alternate history, and mystery all into one. She said that ten years ago, no one wanted to touch it, but if it happened today, she'd be able to sell it.

Tangential to that, I asked if that was something to be concerned with in a query letter. Her basic advice was to think more about the hook of the query rather than defining it into a genre, and that regardless of how you presented the genre, she'd know more about what it was if/when she read it -- and if she liked it, she'd run with it.

After the meeting, I snuck in a quick question for her regarding my own specific situation. It's funny because I've interviewed so many different types of people in my career, and yet, here was this totally approachable, very down-to-earth woman, and I had more angst trying to ask a simple industry-related question than I had interviewing NHL players, business owners, or musicians. Go figure.

I explained that I'd been wrestling with the genre question, and I didn't know if I specifically fit under commercial fiction, women's fiction, or what. Her advice was simple but effective: know who your audience is going to be, then concern yourself more with that rather than genre labels. She also said that I was probably overthinking it.

Of course, that's what we tend to do, isn't it? We overthink the whole thing because we presume that the tiniest of mis-steps will kill our entire potential career in publishing. When you step back from that and apply some measure of rational thought to the whole thing, it's a little less scary and/or paranoid.