Story Magic

92 - The market challenges of genre blending

• Golden May

Share episode

Today, Emily & Rachel talk about the market challenges of genre blending.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

  • what constitutes a historical fiction
  • how to balance blending different genres
  • meeting reader expectations vs breaking the mold
  • finding the right answers for yourself and your story

Ready to make readers so in love with your characters they can’t stop biting their nails in anticipation?  Grab The Magic of Character Arcs free email course: https://www.goldenmayediting.com/arcsmagic

Join Tenacious Writing! With the perfect combo of craft, mindset, and community resources, you will build a writing life that feels sustainable, fulfilling, and fun—without any prescriptions or rules. Learn more: https://www.tenaciouswriting.com/

If you enjoyed Story Magic, please rate, review and follow on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this podcast!

Follow us on social media!

Rachel: https://www.instagram.com/bookcoachrachel/

Emily: https://www.instagram.com/ebgoldenbooks/

Emily:

Foreign.

Rachel:

Hey writers, welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast that will help you write a book you're damn proud of.

Emily:

I'm Emily.

Rachel:

And I'm Rachel.

Emily:

Today we're going to talk about the market challenges of genre blending. So this one's coming to us as a listener question, which we do take. So if you have something you would like to hear us chat about on the podcast, you can just email it to info goldenmayediting.com with podcast question in the subject line. Thank you. And we will get to it on podcast. So this one comes from Bradley. Thank you so much Bradley for submitting this question. It's a great one. We've definitely come across it before and so I'm going to read what Bradley sent us and then we can kind of dive in from there. So Bradley wrote, my story is a fantasy story set during a science fiction esque historical event due to an event where everyone believes in a science mythos which has no proof, whereas there is a true fantasy element underneath that appears in the story occasionally. So I am at a loss because this could either be fantasy science fiction or historical fiction. And I know all of those genres have very different expectations, audiences and mechanics. I don't want to write a book that the TRAD market will auto reject. So my question can be broken down into two parts. First, do all stories set in the past have to be considered historical fiction? Historically, the only thing based on facts is the event that surrounds the story. Everything else is fiction. Two, in case of genre bending blending, how do we choose which genre story arc to follow? If the surface appears as one genre, science fiction, should the story arc also follow that sci fi structure? Or should the story arc instead follow the undercurrent fantasy? Or three, should I blend them at the risk of making the audience mad?

Rachel:

Okay, there's so much to unpack here.

Emily:

Yeah.

Rachel:

So there's a lot of discussion points for cover and maybe like a little disclaimer, trad is hard, the market is hard. So we're going to talk about like what we probably feel like our best practices are or what we feel like is how the industry trends or whatever.

Emily:

Yeah.

Rachel:

And give some advice. But some of these questions boil down to choices that you will make and you have to decide for yourself what story you want to tell. So I'm not saying we're going to be like, well Bradley, you just have to pick because we're going to give some advice. But I do think that there are not like black and white answers to some of these questions.

Emily:

Yeah. Because I Think one of the things about TRAD publishing is it's such a mystery, right? It's all, I mean, it's all just a bunch of people just reading stories, vibing with them, and then deciding to choose them, and then deciding to choose them based on if they think other people will vibe with them and are they going to make a lot of money, Right. Like, it, it's so subjective and so it's so hard to know, right? Because sometimes, like most of the time I feel like people will say, don't genre blend? TRAD doesn't like it. But sometimes TRAD loves genre bending because it's fresh and it's going to sell a lot of books because people are going to be like, this new thing is cool. And I haven't seen something like it before. So my point is we, we can't know what TRAD is or isn't going to like when it comes to genre bending. And like Rachel said, you kind of have to just decide, like land in a place where you decide like what it is, what story you want to tell, which I think comes down to who are you telling it to and where is your book going to sit on the shelf? I think that's like market number one. Market question number one is like, where do you want your book to sit on the shelf and who is it sitting next to? Because if it's not in that same market and it's not going to sit on the shelf next to those books, then you have a problem.

Rachel:

Yes. Well, I feel like that's really Bradley's question. One of them is where does his idea sit on the shelf? And should, is it okay to blend some of these genres to have a new idea? And like, there's the shelf. Sci fi fantasy is the same shelf in a lot of bookstores. But I do think some of these ideas, like fantasy is one genre, sci fi is one genre. And, and to combine pieces of them works, but fundamentally they are different genres. And so if you're combining their fundamental pieces, the story probably won't come sit next to other stories very well. So I'm, I'm, I'm going to explain to that. But like, wow, okay. I think the first question I want to answer, however, is Bradley's first question, which is, do all stories set in the past have to be considered historical fiction? I think that's the easier part of this question. And the answer is no. But here's Historical fiction currently tends to be older than 30 years ago. That's the general rule I've heard Do you agree?

Emily:

Sounds right. I don't know.

Rachel:

Okay, so older than 30 years ago, for those of you that are having heart palpitations right now, that's 1990.

Emily:

Yeah.

Rachel:

Like the 80s is technically historical fiction. Whoa, that's scary. We don't like that. But historical fiction older than 30 years ago, there's wiggle room there. And I also think when you add in some of these other large genres to that, historical fiction goes on the back burner. Like sci fi, fantasy, set a hundred years ago, whatever.

Emily:

Alternate history. Like I have a client who wrote an alternate history where something happened that just ain't changed the course of history. And so it like whole other different directions. So that seems more in line with what Bradley might be, because there's a science fiction esque historical event. So that would make it an alternate history because it's just kind of pushing it in another direction. But I agree. In terms of your other questions, Bradley, about, like, where how do you structure the story? I would put historical fiction, like, way.

Rachel:

On the back burner. Yes, it's on the back burner. If you were writing a contemporary story set in the 1950s, about 1950s things, that's historical fiction, period. But it doesn't have like fantasy. So if you have fantasy in there, like, that's probably gonna take the front. The front burner, you know. So that being said, I really wouldn't worry about the historical fiction marker here. As you said, Emily, I would call it alternative history, if you needed to bring that up in a theory. Cause sometimes you're gonna have to set the stage of like, what's going on in your story. I wouldn't call it historical fiction. I'd probably call it alternate, depending on. I mean, Bradley, we know little about your story, so from what I can see here, I probably wouldn't call it historical fiction. I'd call it like an alternate fiction or an alternate reality. Okay, so let's talk for a second about what is fantasy and what is sci fi. Because there's a lot of. There's a lot of confusion. There's a lot. There are parallels. So sci fi is a genre that is. Is grounded in fictional elements that have scientific plausibility. It is, it is science related. It is extrapolated from existing science. Even if it's super advanced, it is grounded in technology. Science technology with plausible connections like this could happen with science. That's science fiction. And I think that that's important to think about because fantasy on the flip side is magic, is supernatural, is paranormal. It's got Its own rules and logic. Science has rules. Okay, I think that's important. And Bradley, I'm going to circle back to this on your question specifically because science is not mythos. Science is truth. Don't come at me in our emails if you disagree with that. But science has a method, right?

Emily:

Yeah.

Rachel:

Science has method, it has proof, it has a process. Right. Like we have our steps of the. The scientific method. So you extrapolate on that to create what the mechanics of science fiction. Fantasy is not that. Fantasy has its own rules and logic. It has. It has mythos, it has magic, it has supernatural, it has paranormal. Those things are not real and they. They won't be real. Right. Like those are outside the boundaries of what's scientifically possible because it's magic. And I'm not talking about scientifically probable because that's scientific fiction. That's sci fi interest. Sci fi. I mean, we cannot go through a black hole like Matthew McConaughey did in Interstellar, but one day, maybe that's possible because it's plausible. We have math for that. But like fantasy, there's not. You could probably develop your own, you know, method for magic, but you know what I'm saying? Like, can you see the.

Emily:

It comes out to the source, I think. Right? Yeah. The source of science fiction is science. Right. It doesn't matter how ridiculous the science is. The source of the quote unquote, magical things that are happening in science fiction come from science. When you're talking about a fantasy, the source of the fantastical things that are happening is a magic that is not scientific.

Rachel:

Yes.

Emily:

Right. It's not based in anything science. It's like some kind of magical source. Or does it even. Even if you're Brandon Sanderson, Right. Like, his magic has a source that is magical. It has lots of rules. It sounds like science when you get to book five of the Way of Kings. But like, yes, that. It's not science. It's not rooted. The source of it is not a scientific thing, and the source of it is a magical source within that world. And so, I mean, fundamentally, Bradley, with the little that we have, the little tiny window that we have into what your story might be, I would say that it has to be a fantasy because you have a fantasy element, you say a truly fantasy, fantastic, true fantasy element underneath the science. So what I'm seeing in this, like, if we're just talking about Bradley's story, Right. Is a story in which the characters don't realize that magic exists yet and how many stories exist out there. Like that. Right. We don't know that there's magic in the world. But that's, that doesn't mean it's not a fantasy because the characters don't realize that there's magic in the world. It just means that, you know, it's a fantasy story in which the magic needs to be discovered.

Rachel:

Yes, I, I 100 agree. And I, I would say I would market this as, as fantasy because I personally think fantasy readers are willing to accept the myth, the mystery, the mythos. They're willing to accept it could be com. It could just be magic. But like science fiction readers need science. Like they accept, expect the proof. So when, when Bradley says due to an event, everyone believes in a science mythos which has no proof, I would be like, that can't be science fiction because science science has proof. Science is built upon the science that came before. Science fiction builds on the technology of its past. So if there's no proof for this science myth, like science mythos to me are too conflicting words.

Emily:

Yeah.

Rachel:

That makes science and mythos don't go together.

Emily:

You have a really interesting fantasy set. Bradley and I understand why you think it might be, you know, like, there's science fiction aspects to it and there could be. But I think, I think what I want to come back to. Right. Is the importance of the audience. And like, because, because a trad publisher, really what they're doing when they're looking for books is they're like, is there an audience for this? That's the question they're asking. That's it. And that question is answered by what other books are out there that are similar to this? Like, who are the readers who are going to enjoy your book? And like Rachel just said, right. There are science fiction readers who are. If they're, you know, die hard science fiction readers, they're going to be looking for that scientific underbase. Right. How, how that science came to be. And the fact that all of a sudden you're throwing a fantasy curveball in there. Yes. Right. Is going to piss off some science fiction producers because that's breaking, that's breaking a fundamental convention. It's like if you wrote a, if you marketed a romance that had, that.

Rachel:

Had no happily ever after. God. About to flip this table. Have you seen. Sorry, minor tangent, Emily. There have, have we talked about this on this is this is. There's a point to this there on threads. There is this really big discussion that happened recently where a book was marketed as romance. The author is calling it romance. There is no happily ever after. Did we talk about this? No, there's no happily ever after. So fundamentally, that's not a romance. Right. We all know and accept that the author was going into these comments and, like, people were adding her. She was coming back with, like, no, it is a romance because that. It has a romance in. Is a romance because it has romantic elements. And people are like, no capital R romance genre has a happily ever after. That is a rule. If you're gonna break that, which this person made a choice. If you're gonna break that, that's a choice you're making and you need to be aware of. But this author then should have responded. You're right. I'm breaking genre expectations. No, that's not that genre.

Emily:

I mean, you know, I'm mad about this. I think. I think. But I think that's. That's key. Right? It's like, do whatever you want. There are no rules. But when a reader picks up a romance, they expect there to be a happy ending. Yes. And you are willingly walking in. If you are telling them that it's a romance, you are willingly walking into a bunch of people being disappointed. Right. And like, the, the problem is that this person didn't want to open that up. Right. They could do whatever they want. They can do whatever they want, market it however they want. There's no right or wrong. Right. I love romances that have, like, five tragic summer.

Rachel:

Yes.

Emily:

Oh, I love tragic.

Rachel:

I love that. Tragic. But is it because they both grew that they weren't together, but they did have happily ever afters? I love that. Love that. That's a discussion point.

Emily:

We should talk about 500 days. Is that right? Anyway, I think so. It's all about, like, everything comes down to who you're selling, like, who you want to read your story and what you're telling them your story is about. And are they going to be satisfied? Are they not going to be satisfied? And what are you okay with? You know, like, are you okay with disappointing people in certain ways? Like, I hate. I hate a mystery. Or like, a mystery where the, the twist at the end is like some kind of mystical thing and you're like, hold on.

Rachel:

Yeah.

Emily:

We were in a contemporary that I've read two books that I will not name recently that did that. And I was just like, come on.

Rachel:

Really?

Emily:

Everybody's like, hypnotized. What?

Rachel:

Yes.

Emily:

I'm not going to take that further. But, like, the, you know, the whole thing is like, you, you want to deliver your readers with the expect, like, with what your marketing is telling Them they're going to get. And that's where these categories come in.

Rachel:

Yeah. So you ask Bradley, should I blend them? At risk of making the audience mad? That's when you have to answer for yourself. But know why you're making the choices that you're making and know you would be giving people something different than what they expect if you were to make one choice over the other.

Emily:

And then it's. And then if you were gonna go the self pub route, right. I would just say when you market it, be honest about what it is. Don't say that it's one thing when it's not. Right. Don't say it's a sci fi when it's actually a fantasy. Tell people like oh, it's a fantasy with sci fi elements, right? Like you wanna, you wan about it the way that it is and say same when you're pitching agents and publishing companies and stuff, just be honest about what's in it. Because there's nothing worse than marketing something and then people don't get what. What you told them they were going to get. So to come back to this idea of genre bending and blending, I do think like we're saying don't break the rules, right? And, and, but now I'm going to tell you, break the rules because I think there are rules. There are rules, quote unquote. There are no rules. But there are genre expectations, right, that readers are going to be very upset about if you break them. Like the romance one that we just talked about, the happily ever after, you do not want to break that one. You're going to mark it as a romance. Same with science fiction, right? You don't want to have some fantastical non science based element in your science fiction because that's core to the genre, right? But there are other conventions and things that can be twisted in beautiful ways, right. Or ignored or left out or whatever if they don't serve your specific story. So the reason that I say that is because. So we have lots of friends who talk about like genre conventions. So I know the storygrid folks talk about this. Our friend Savannah Gilbo talks about this, right? There, there are like conventions that. And I think Bradley, that's what you're getting at here when you talk about the story arc, right? Should the story arc follow a sci fi structure, a fantasy struct? And I think there's all kinds of structures out there. There's all kinds of conventions out there. People will tell you, you know, a murder mystery has to have two bodies. No, it doesn't Right. A lot of them do. Right. But, like, there's. There are, like, smaller little art rules that don't matter as much. And so what I would say, Bradley, is I wouldn't worry about it. This, like, you don't have to get a sci fi structure in a fantasy structure, in a historical fiction structure and put them next to each other. And, like, make sure you have every single convention. That's way too much work. I mean, if you're having fun, whatever. But that's the kind of thing I would have done out of anxiety to make sure that I had every single beat and every single structure and every single convention for all of the genres I was trying to blend.

Rachel:

Right.

Emily:

And I think that a different way to think about this might be how can you draw inspiration for the story that you want to tell from those tools? So instead of being like, which prescription am I going to follow? Right. Look at, like, get all of them. You know, get everything that you can find. Get all the, like, conventions and genres and beat sheets and whatever that you can find about fantasy, sci fi, and historical fiction and ask yourself, like, which. Which parts of them excite you? Like, which parts of them fit the story that you want to tell? Because you don't have to follow any of them if you don't want to, but they can be really helpful. Like, I find I'm writing a mystery right now, and so I just did a bunch of reading on, like, mystery structures, mystery BE sheets, mystery conventions to get inspiration. Not to be like, okay, what do I have to have into my story? But to be like, okay, what are readers looking for? What are they excited by? You know, like, where should the twists happen for inspiration so that I could pull that into the idea that I've been building. But I wasn't looking at any of them. Like, I must follow this beat by beat, page by page. Right? Like, that's just gonna hold you back.

Rachel:

Yeah. That, frankly, gives me, like, heart palpitations trying to do that. But when I worked with a client who was writing, like, mystery and gothic horror, it's like a combo of the two of them. We looked at the genre conventions of gothic horror, and we looked at the genre conventions of mystery, and we were like, okay, cool. What kind of plot ideas could come out of these things? And that was all it served us to do, was help us ideate on what could happen in this story. But that didn't mean that it had to happen in the same order. It didn't mean that it had to happen with all of These different pieces. So, like, if there was a brush with authority, how could we turn that on its head? You know, that's where I would mess with genre expectations in those little pieces. Not in, like, the core parts of the genre, but if there's. If you're writing a murder mystery and the expectations say there need to be two bodies. What if you did, like, a body and a twist, you know? Yeah, that's where I would. That's where you're going to surprise your reader, not surprise them by, like, jk, this was a fantasy the whole time, you know, like, that's what. That's when people say, jk, they're not in love. Jk, this is not. This is a sad ending. Yeah. Like, that's. It's in those details where I think you have, one, a lot of flexibility. And two, that's where I would try to surprise people. Not in the big parts or in the big expectations. And there are. There's tons of resources on this. And I also find that incredibly overwhelming. That's why I tend to really gravitate towards the save the cat structure of plotting. Because one, it covers all these different genres into one thing. And two, there's so much flexibility within it that you could add in other elements of, like, different expectations, whatever, but there's not. Like, you don't have to have both. You don't have to have all. You don't have to have any.

Emily:

Yeah. It's all about, like, instead of going to find resources to give you the answers, go search for resources to give you inspiration. I think that there's a huge difference between those two approaches. And one takes trust that, like, you can explore your story the way that you are drawn to explore it by picking and choosing what is fun to you. And I do think that that matters for what readers will enjoy. And so, yeah, pick and choose. Pick and choose. What if it doesn't give you anxiety or heart palpitation to go look for those resources? I. Since you've written all this, I'm guessing that you already have these resources.

Rachel:

Yeah.

Emily:

So I would come at them from a place of inspiration instead of a place of trying to figure out, you know, which rules to follow. And I think that you'll. I hope that you'll find that a lot of inspiration kind of flows from there.

Rachel:

Yeah. And if anything, we're saying, like, you know, we made some assumptions about the different parts of your question. So if you're listening to this and you're like, no, no, no, that's not at all what My story is about Bradley. Totally. Okay. Like, again, it's just advice. So interpret it. Interpret it in a way that's going to make sense for the publishing path that you choose. And also, like, you know what your story is about and we don't have all the pieces, so there could be like a really brilliant take on, like, the way that you're blending genres, but there's usually always going to be one that's primary because that's what you're going to try to sell the book as. And I think, like, whatever your goals are to sell this book and whoever the readers are that you're trying to reach, that can inform your choices and just make your choices, like, with awareness. That's it. There's no. There's no rules. There's no right or wrong answers.

Emily:

Yeah.

Rachel:

There's no right answers. Yeah. It's a. It's a complicated, subjective industry. Market marketing is hard. So just I think, like, do the best. Do the best you can do. No shit. But like, I think, be inspired, listen, read and find comp titles and then like, you can study those comp titles for how that's working. If you are. This is not just to Bradley, this is to everybody. If you are not finding any comp titles, there is no book like your book. That's usually, to me, a P. A little red flag. And I don't mean that. I don't mean that in like a really judgy or, you know, troublesome way. But if you cannot find a comp title because your book blends so many different things, there's just nothing like it that is going to be really hard to put on a shelf. And that is an indicator for a reader to not pick it up because they. They won't understand it. They won't get it. Then you get to choose, is that what you want to pursue anyway, or not? And that's the part that's like, there's no right answer. That's up to you. Yeah.

Emily:

Yeah. It all comes down to the risk you're willing to take. Risk with what your readers are expecting and not expecting. But I mean, as long as you've got a good handle on what your readers are reading and you are excited about your story, um, you could take it really far.

Rachel:

Yeah.

Emily:

Yeah.

Rachel:

For sure. If you want to build a successful, fulfilling and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.

Emily:

Sign up now to get our free email course, the Magic of Character Arcs. After seven days of email magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers flipping pages all through the night.

Rachel:

Link in the show notes.

Emily:

We'll see you there by.