Put me in my place, please…

Last week was not bad in terms of productivity. I finished another editing project, and I made progress writing guest blogs. I also scored two minor victories by getting articles accepted with writers who have much bigger audiences than me, which hopefully will mean reaching out to new readers. I still need to schedule another 5 or so slots on my tour to get up to my desired range of more than 20 articles. I've been thinking about who to contact, and not in terms of who I know, but rather who they know. The right writers have a larger audience of readers, and an informative or entertaining post with a link to my site at the bottom would really help me out…in theory.

I'm reading Zoe Winters' blog, and lately she's been making clarifications about the sex in her books, assuring people that the scenes aren't too out there. Now I've only read two, so I can't be a judge of how far she goes. She hasn't gone crazy with the visuals, but the romantic scenes I have seen pass the "thigh press" test. (Do I press my thighs together while reading the passage? It's a keeper.)

But that's not why I'm bringing her posts up. As I read these clarifications, I feel her concern that some people see her sex scenes as "too much." In which case, those same people would see my work as "over the top," or possibly even approaching "the work of Satan." So I'm hesitant to approach the romance market precisely because a lot of my stuff isn't meant to be read as romance. There are romantic angles in a lot of my stories, but I'm worried that the more graphic scenes would catch a lot of bad reviews from the delicate readers. It's fine if readers don't like my stuff, but if I market it to the wrong crowd, whose fault is it when the reviews all turn out scathing? It's certainly not the readers' fault. So I don't want to make a marketing fumble…again. No, I mean this…week. Um, let's move on.

I feel like approaching purebred paranormal romance writers is a bad idea. It's the wrong reader group for my fiction, since they like their creatures of the night a little lighter in tone. I would think this might be inviting a lot of bad reviews by promoting to the wrong crowd. But it was suggested to me that I could find a more receptive crowd in the grittier sections of Urban Fantasy. This does feel like a good fit for several of my dark fantasy stories, and once I've interested those folks with one "flavor" of my writing, maybe I can convince them to read the rest of my crap too.

Besides Urban Fantasy, I'm wondering if there's some other group I could market myself to. Fantasy fans seem to avoid me for the gore and sex (understandable), and romance people probably would for the same reason. Horror fans avoid me cause…actually, I'm still not sure why they're avoiding me. I get a lot of impressions from the horror crowds, but not many sales, clicks, or comments. Overall, it's a pretty tepid reaction so far, but we'll see what happens when I come out with the next Zombie Era story.

I don't think I've approached sci-fi fans for Wake Up With the Kimellians, or fans of comic books to find readers for the two Tales of City books. But those should be given separate book tours at later dates, and I'd like to focus my resources in picking up readers for my core genre. That's dark fantasy.

The problem is, dark fantasy is not really a recognized genre. It's more like an umbrella term these days, meant to cover just about everything that goes bump in the night. As such, it carries instant association with horror. So it sends off the straight romance reader, the sci-fi purist, and the fantasy fan. It also sends off the horror fans, which leaves me scratching my head and making "arroo?" noises cause I'm all confused about who to talk to.

What I'm looking for from the other genres are the fringe readers, the people who read from many genres. I need romance readers who also read horror. I need the fantasy fans who also like zombies and werewolves, or sci-fi followers who like their alien encounters to get bloody every now and then. I need to market to the fringes of the genre markets, I think.

For the most part, when I've found an interested reader, y'all seem to do okay with my stuff. Not all of it, I know. But don't worry, I don't expect people to buy everything I write. That's actually my plan in writing so much cross-genre stuff. I want to cover more tastes and interests than just my core group.

And this leads me to ask the question, what is my core group? Readers, if you've made it through one or three of my stories, I would like to know how you would categorize the books you've read. If you were looking for the book in a brick and mortar store, where would you think to look? Or, if you were online and searching by tags, how would you search for similar work to what you've read from me? Horror? Sci-fi? Fantasy, UF, or Dark Fantasy?

You don't have to explain your logic in the comments, unless you want to. But I would love to know what cliques you think I could approach to offer my wares to. So, how about it, readers? What box would you put me in?