Is my MS an UF work?

Jennasis said:

So I'm done writing and now I am stuck in my own personal query hell. Here's my problem: I don't know what genre my story IS. I didn't get hung up on pigeon-holing the dang thing, I just wrote it. But now that I need to "sell" it to an agent, I thought I should know what it is.

It's about superheroes (in a nutshell). Takes place in present day Los Angeles. They are fighting, essentially, vampires, and one of the superheroes is a werewolf. I threw in a good dash of heaven and hell stuff for good measure too.

So...what do I have?

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Genre in a query letter doesn't necessarily equal the genre a book is marketed under; the first is what you put in so that the agent knows broadly what category it falls into (and isn't going "Wait, vampires?" in the third paragraph), the second is what marketers decide is useful for getting your book to sell.

So I'd call that either "superheroes" or "urban fantasy", since it's modern-day with supernatural stuff, and call it a day. So long as your genre acknowledges that it's not ordinary real life, and it's more or less in a contemporary time period, it should be close enough; I doubt it's worth stressing over being more precise in a query letter.

Although your summary is too short to say for sure, it sure sounds like urban fantasy to me.

There's a good thread in the stickies on how to write a query. Basically, don't try to distill down. Instead. Come up with a one sentence summary of your plot, and build up from there, adding only the most essential elements of the main story.

I think when superheroes are involved, that would be the main thrust of it, as it's a slightly different area to the usual kinds of UF - and superhero fiction is really making a resurgence, so it may be looked on favourably.

Which is the focus - vampires or superheroes? The query is a marketing tool and you want to make sure the agent is expecting the manuscript you give them. If the focus is more on the supernatural, call it UF. If the focus is on the superheroes, you might want to call it either contemporary fantasy or superhero fiction.

Jennasis said:

It's about superheroes (in a nutshell). Takes place in present day Los Angeles. They are fighting, essentially, vampires, and one of the superheroes is a werewolf. I threw in a good dash of heaven and hell stuff for good measure too.

So...what do I have?

Click to expand...

Sounds like urban fantasy to me, but I say the same about mine. It has devas, asuras, AIs, and a demon from outer space bound under the Antarctic ice cap.

There's also a really big cat that plays poker. His whiskers droop if you deal him a bad paw.