From Stavros Halvatzis: Genre and Marketing
“In his book, Story, Robert McKee states that “to anticipate the anticipations of the audience you must master genre and its conventions.”
“Genre is as much a marketing tool as it is a story creation-tool. If a film or book has been correctly promoted the audience or readers approach the story with a certain expectation. In marketing jargon this is referred to as “positioning the audience”. This alleviates the danger of readers or audiences spending the first part of the story trying to find out what it’s about.”
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“In film, music forms one such convention. Traditional love stories, for example, use a certain type of score to elicit emotions appropriate to that type of story. The mellifluous musical score for Gone With The Wind would not be appropriate for Alien, or vice versa.”
Interesting stuff. Read the rest here: Stavros Halvatzis.
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fyi – the link would not let me through. Might be my computer.
This reminds me of the post a few days ago about the Romance genre and reader expectations. It’s true – if you tell the reader the genre, you’ve set up a subtle contract about content.
You’ve also marketed the concept. This is interesting – thanks for the article.
I think the link was mis-entered.
Here is the correct link:
http://stavroshalvatzis.com/story-design/genre-marketing
Where genre confounds me is in the branding of pen-names in the current self-and-indie publishing environment. How tightly do I need to structure the genre under each name?
As an example, under Michael Coorlim I’ve written a series of steampunk mystery and thriller novelettes. Can I successfully publish non-steampunk mysteries and thrillers under this name? What about steampunk horror stories or romance? Non-steampunk horror? What about harder sci-fi genre and subgenre? If I can publish sci-fi, can I publish fantasy?
Or does none of this matter in a marketing sense anymore? Really, I’ve been trying to brand myself as not so much explicitly “steampunk”, but rather as an author of “fast-paced character-driven fiction about authentic people in fantastic situations.” Would that sufficiently function as genre?
I gave up having a pen name. No one cares in a digital world what you write that’s beyond their interest. No one cares that I’ve done middle reader books and women’s contemporary fiction. It freaks agents and editors out because then you’re not neatly pigeonholed but I don’t think it matters anymore. Just perhaps in the case of erotica where you might not want 10 year olds coming upon material intended for a mature audience.
Personally, I do it according to tone. My default style combines humor and gruesome/dark. (I’m told it’s well-balanced.)
For dark fantasy that doesn’t also contain humor throughout, I use another name.
I have yet another name to be used when I finish some of my planned lighter works.
If I ever write the sweet historical romance series that’s starting to knock about up here, I’ll probably pull another name.
And then my non-fiction is using my primary penname, but with an initial rather than the name written out.
*shrug* That’s how I’m handling things. I do it this way to make it easy for a reader to find the specific type of thing they’re looking for—even if they’re browsing, for example, the B&N e-book store through their Nook.
That’s what I’ve been considering. Most of my stuff is fairly light, a little twisted, and with plenty of humor, but I’ve got a lot of ideas that are a little darker, a little more depressing, with endings that are a little more of a downer, so I was thinking of a separate pen-name for that.
Sorry, don’t know what happened as the link was somehow changed to Gone With the Wind. I guess it was gone with the wind. Anyway, repaired I hope.
I started with two pen names. Found that things were selling better under one pen name rather than the other and decided to consolidate everything under one name. It’s easier to keep track of and I now have a larger body of work for people to browse. I’m just very careful about choosing and classifying the genres, titles and cover art to represent the tone of the story.