Recently, I whipped up a manuscript heavy on the romance, with a dash of snarkiness and a soupcon of twenty-something angst. The original plan was to self-publish this under a pseudonym while I shopped around another manuscript, only I’ve become a little too attached and now I’m thinking of giving the traditional route a stab. Only I don’t think it’s particularly marketable, and I’d like your thoughts.
My genre-blurriness: even though it’s mostly a romance, it doesn’t meet the typical genre guidelines. It's first-person, and the protagonist is twenty-three. While plenty of MCs are in their lower twenties, they don’t act like they’re that young, half the time. They don’t freak out about being part of the Boomerang generation and having to move back in with their parents, or about ill-advised one-night stands, or about what the hell they’re doing with their life in this extended-adolescence. Twenty-three year olds in romance novels are usually treated the same way as twenty-eight year olds – as adults.
Well, my MC’s not an adult, as much as she may protest to the contrary. She has much more of a YA voice than a women’s fiction one, though it obviously is out of YA, and I think it's too romance-heavy to be women's fiction (Probably?). The LI isn’t entirely grown up either – he’s only twenty-six. So I doubt it would sell as a straight up romance. It’s strictly twenty-something fiction, and that isn’t really marketable. It used to be covered by chick-lit, but now most twenty-somethings seem to be in urban fantasy.
So: what do you all think? Do people outside their twenties have any interest in reading about twenty-something angst? If I can’t sell it as a romance, even though that’s the main plot line, can I sell it as anything? There’s not really a place for it in the bookstores, though many of my friends have expressed interest in books about our age group. I’m curious how other people would handle a manuscript like this – do you think it’s useless to try to get it published traditionally? Or do you think that the story should carry itself, even if the marketability is low?
My genre-blurriness: even though it’s mostly a romance, it doesn’t meet the typical genre guidelines. It's first-person, and the protagonist is twenty-three. While plenty of MCs are in their lower twenties, they don’t act like they’re that young, half the time. They don’t freak out about being part of the Boomerang generation and having to move back in with their parents, or about ill-advised one-night stands, or about what the hell they’re doing with their life in this extended-adolescence. Twenty-three year olds in romance novels are usually treated the same way as twenty-eight year olds – as adults.
Well, my MC’s not an adult, as much as she may protest to the contrary. She has much more of a YA voice than a women’s fiction one, though it obviously is out of YA, and I think it's too romance-heavy to be women's fiction (Probably?). The LI isn’t entirely grown up either – he’s only twenty-six. So I doubt it would sell as a straight up romance. It’s strictly twenty-something fiction, and that isn’t really marketable. It used to be covered by chick-lit, but now most twenty-somethings seem to be in urban fantasy.
So: what do you all think? Do people outside their twenties have any interest in reading about twenty-something angst? If I can’t sell it as a romance, even though that’s the main plot line, can I sell it as anything? There’s not really a place for it in the bookstores, though many of my friends have expressed interest in books about our age group. I’m curious how other people would handle a manuscript like this – do you think it’s useless to try to get it published traditionally? Or do you think that the story should carry itself, even if the marketability is low?
