Have you ever thought about what genre your book lies in? This is a tricky question and is really important as it affects the way you market the book. I went to the Bangalore Lit Fest today and was fortunate to meet some amazing sci-fi and fantasy writers. They spoke about how speculative fiction could often lose out because it was far too specific a genre. That got me thinking.

When I wrote my first novella, it was bracketed into the paranormal hashtag and frankly, the story can fall into literary fiction as well. A yakshi or forest spirit needn’t be spooky; she could also be a metaphor for a certain kind of feminine.

While genre-specifics help the reader to make better choices, it also puts the writer at a disadvantage. Many books are given a miss because, for instance, the idea of paranormal could make you cringe and yet you may enjoy a book that intermingles poetry and prose.

One way a reader can solve this genre quandary is to explore the preview option or browse through a couple of pages before deciding that this particular brand of paranormal or fantasy is not for him. A writer has to make it very clear to her readers about which elements the book includes. Something to think about while framing the blurb and the synopsis.

You could check out this post about Writing Cross-Genre Novels.