Crossovers
“Crossover” is one of those writing terms that has multiple meanings, depending on to whom you’re talking and what you’re talking about. In fanfiction, for instance, it refers to a story that includes characters from totally different series or settings – Superman shows up in “Romeo and Juliet,” for instance, or Harry Potter does Star Wars. Since you can’t do that kind of thing in professional publishing without permission from all the rights holders, “crossover” in professional terms means either 1) a book that you could easily sell in several different genres (Fritz Lieber’s Conjure Wife is the classic example; over the years, it was published as SF, fantasy, horror, mainstream, mystery, and romance – pretty much every possible genre of its time except Western), or 2) a book that deliberately mixes common tropes from two very different types of category fiction, which hopefully means it will appeal to both (Sorcery and Cecelia, co-written by myself and Caroline Stevermer, falls into this category).
The Conjure Wife sort of crossover, that just happens to be a story with multiple possible markets, is seldom, if ever, written deliberately for that purpose. When people say “the market changes,” they mean all parts of the market; if a writer consciously tries to aim at all possible current market genres, the result may sell to one of those markets, but by the time the rights have reverted, all the other markets will have moved on to something else. So I’m going to look at the other two.
Yes, two, because apart from the problems of copyright permissions, the sorts of stuff that can go right and wrong with a fanfiction-type crossover (where it’s the characters and/or worlds that are being mixed) and with the more general two-or-more-genres type of crossover are pretty similar.
Advantages first: done well, a good crossover potentially doubles one’s audience by enhancing the fun and appeal of both the elements of the cross. It can also be a huge lot of fun for the writer (and if it isn’t, you grabbed the wrong things for the wrong reasons).
The disadvantage is that one has the possibility of significantly reducing one’s audience (instead of all readers who like X, plus all readers who like Y, one can end up with something that appeals only to those readers who like both X and Y). In extreme cases, one can completely alienate an entire segment of one’s potential readership, possibly permanently. Also, finding a publisher who appreciates and understand both sides of one’s crossover (and who knows how to market to both of them) is not always easy.
The first step, though, is writing one. In order to get the kind that’s fun and has potential for double the audience, the first requirement is that the author has to really know and understand both parts of the source material. This doesn’t mean that if you want to do a science fiction-mystery crossover, you can read two or three detective novels (if you’re an SF fan) or two or three science fiction novels (if your first love is mysteries) and call it good. It means that you know both genres, settings, and/or sets of characters well enough to recognize what readers expect and don’t expect, what the genre conventions are with regard to pacing and filling in background as well as plot and characterization.
Knowing both genres isn’t quite enough, in my opinion; the writer also needs to love them enough to write them. I read a lot of mysteries, and I think I have a pretty good idea of how that genre works, but I’ve never been moved to write a fantasy-mystery crossover. Our fantasy-Regency-Romance, on the other hand, practically wrote itself.
A writer who loves and understands both of the genres that they’re crossing is far more likely to avoid the sort of wall-flinging mistakes one commonly sees in books that are marketed as crossovers, but which are actually primarily one genre with a few token nods to the other. I’ve read SF-Romance “crossovers” where the Romance author couldn’t be bothered to get things like the speed of light right, or made plot-critical mistakes in basic science (they apparently felt that as long as they used skiffy-sounding doubletalk, it didn’t matter that genetics doesn’t work that way, or that a galaxy is composed of a lot of star systems, rather than the other way around). I’ve also read ones where the “romance” was nothing more than a subplot in a typical space opera adventure – fine for an SF audience, but totally unsatisfying for a Romance reader.
If you’re writing a crossover, you have two sets of source material, and you have to respect both of them or it’s not really a crossover. You also have to satisfy both sets of readers on some level, or it isn’t likely to be a particularly successful crossover.
The next major trap is the “insider” one, in which the writer fills the story with plot-critical things that the reader has to be a long time fan of one genre or the other to understand. As a result, the only people who really appreciate the story are folks who are already fans of both genres. There isn’t anything actually wrong with this, as long as the writer a) knows what he/she is doing and b) accepts the fact that the audience is going to be much smaller than the audience for either genre.
There is a way around this potential problem, however, and it is to a) make sure that one does not need familiarity with a particular trope or convention to understand the story, the plot, or the characters’ actions, and b) make sure that one does not highlight the insider information in such a way that anyone who doesn’t have it realizes they are missing something. This allows readers familiar with one genre to smile in recognition of a particular stock character or plot twist, while readers of the other genre can marvel at the author’s originality in those areas and recognize other things from the books they love, and nobody feels stupid or slighted.
Ideally, a good crossover will not only appeal to readers of both genres, it will permanently expand the audience for both of them as some of the readers discover that they like whichever part of the crossover they don’t normally read. The Harry Potter books got a lot of adult fantasy readers to read YA and children’s books for the first time since they were kids themselves, and introduced a lot of readers (librarians and teachers and parents, largely) who did read YA to fantasy. (As well as getting a lot of kids hooked on reading and fantasy for the long term.) More readers is something of which I, as a writer, heartily approve.
