Dilemma on genre

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sharla

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I've been battling queries and I keep changing how I write it because people keep telling me different things about how it doesn't match my genre. I started out calling it rom/susp, then there wasn't enough suspense and it was too quirky. Well, the book is quirky, and yet not chick litty, and it has some suspense in it, but the voice is female and funny. So I changed to calling it romantic comedy, and now I'm told the query doesn't read funny enough for that. But I don't want it to be silly, the book's not like that. To be honest, if it were a tv show, it would be a Dramedy. But there aren't book genres for that. Anyone else have this dilemma?
 

L.Jones

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yeah. I have written quite a few of them. They never get marketed well and after a couple books the publishers lose interest. sigh. Working on something that falls more soundly in one marketable area now.

I suggest you find/inject something a reader/editor/seller can 'get' at a glance along with the 'dramedy' so it can go beyond that aspect. What does the suspense stem from? That might be your hook.

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If editors are rejecting your query ...
maybe you should purposefully not define the subgenre.

Just call it Contemporary Romance, maybe. Let the first five pages and the synopsis do your talking for you.
The editor can figure out what subgenre to call it after she's read the whole ms and fallen in love with it.
 
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Cathy C

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Well, first I'd ask whether it's romance at all. Is the romance the primary goal of the book or, as you say, it's "romantic"? It might be you want to query it as Women's fiction and then, as the others say, let the agent/editor tell you differently if they think it fits elsewhere.
 
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