Asking for advice

I haven't had the pleasure of reading your book...but here's a question I've heard asked when trying to determine where a book falls when it straddles genres: what plot point gets wrapped up last--the history, or the romance?

Are you self publishing? One route you could take that might illuminate things a little bit is to run contrasting Facebook ads - one positioning your book as historical fiction, one as historical romance. If there is a clear winner, go with that one.

Someone who clearly reads a lot of books considers it historical romance. It's hard to discount that opinion.

My impression is that historical romance is more marketable than just historical - but maybe I'm biased because my stories are not romances. (I thought that at least some were because they had a strong relationship at the centre, but apparently they don't count if they don't have a happy ending. )

Tom from UK said:

My impression is that historical romance is more marketable than just historical

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I'd say it's not so much a case of HR being more marketable as it is a case of who the market is. The readership of HR is almost exclusively women, and women buy more books - why do you think romance is the biggest selling genre on the planet? On the other hand straight HF can be a very masculine genre, because those stories tend to focus more on the political and military spheres that were traditionally dominated by men. I don't know many women who read male authored adventure stories by the likes of Simon Scarrow, Ben Kane, Bernard Cornwell, C S Forester etc, but plenty who read Philippa Greggory, Dorothy Dunnet, Mary Renault, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Elizabeth Chadwick etc.

But on the flip side... all those female authors are considered to have written historical fiction (although sometimes positioned as women's fiction), not romance. And incidentally, out of the top 10 best selling HF authors, 7 are women

So basically, I think there are advantages and disadvantages of positioning it as either genre, so I don't think 'marketability' should even come into it. If you've written a historical romance, market it as such, and visa versa. But the last thing you want to do is label it dishonestly in an attempt to sell more copies - that won't go down well with anyone.