In the past week, I’ve worked on writing a literary fantasy romance and editing a literary sci-fi fantasy epic, thought of ways to advertise my recently released literary thriller romance, and came up with ideas for a sci-fi novel and a literary zombie apocalypse romance.
So, to say that I hop genres might be an understatement.
Now, every big marketing expert whose classes I’ve taken said that hopping genres is a bad idea.
Truthfully, it does make marketing a great deal harder.
But.
I can’t imagine sitting down to force myself to write something I hate just because it’s in the same genre as something else I wrote. The idea of spending months with a story or world or plot or character that I just couldn’t sink myself into seems exhausting, and I’m pretty sure it would ruin writing for me.
So I refuse to settle into one genre.
And I don’t have the energy to maintain a social media platform for pen names for every genre.
Which means that it does make marketing harder.
But it isn’t impossible.
You just have to find the unifying theme in all your books and really lean into that. In blurbs, in ads, in social media posts, everywhere you talk about your books, lean into that unifying theme.
For me, it’s the grit and psychology, the character development and the fact that these characters go through real shit (even if the world they’re in is far from real).
That, and my writing style. Lyrical, full of sentence fragments and short paragraphs for the sake of flow, providing only necessary details, first person/present tense.
Those things all together mean that my books, even when they’re fantasy or sci-fi or a thriller, are literary fiction.
So, I need to lean into that.
Character profiles and details about their struggles, their traumas, their strife.
Things like that.
So if you’re debating on whether to hop genres, you need to make a decision.
Which is more important, writing what you want or having a more straightforward marketing path?
If you plan to hop genres, going wherever your heart wants with your books, then you need either multiple pen names or you need to find that thing that unifies your books.
Maybe it’s that all your books have a love triangle. Maybe it’s that they all contain a clean romance tucked within the larger plot. Maybe it’s that you prioritize world building.
Lean into that in your marketing efforts so you can attract the right readers, people who’ll want to read all your books, regardless of the genre the story is contained within.
(My main problem so far, if I’m being completely honest, is that I tend to prioritize every other aspect of the writing and publishing process over marketing/advertising.)
But if you really lean into that unifying theme across your books (and actually market and advertise), you can hop to your heart’s content and still build a fan base that will follow you through the genres.
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