When Your Genre Is All Wrong

What do you do when you find out your genre is not right for the current market?

I pose this question because this is an answer I received from an editor at a big name publishing house.

My NaNo book is very close to being finished. It is a fantasy novel. It will have witches, which makes it fall under the "paranormal" sub-genre of fantasy. 

That is a bad thing.

Apparently, the market is super saturated with paranormal right now and publishers are eagerly escaping the flood zone in their kayaks and high-powered boats. They're yelling at everyone to get out as fast as they can. The editors and publishers are hightailing it to higher ground as the huge paranormal wave crashes down around the readers, sweeping everyone and everything away in its path. 

Do I really want to enter a market that is drowning the masses in its wake?

I hesitantly respond, "Um, yes? I don't know. Maybe?"

Will my book survive under the huge, pressing wave? Will it rise to the surface and breathe in healthy air that will give it energy and life? Or will it plummet to the bottom of the ocean, crushed by the pressing weight of the other paranormal books above it? Maybe it will be washed onto the shore, forgotten and left to die while the others get saved by altruistic passersby.  

I really don’t know.

I can’t predict the future. I can’t ride the tailcoats of trends.

I don’t know how I should proceed when I get turned away before I even reach the locked gate.

Well, maybe I do.

I have to go with my gut. My gut may be wrong but there is also a possibility that it may be right. If I don’t follow what I think is the right course of action, I may regret it and then I would always have that constant itch at the back corner of my brain, “What if… .”

It’s better to have an “Oh, well. That didn’t work,” over a “What if I only tried it that way?”

I have my answer. I know exactly what I’m going to do.

Now, it’s your turn to tackle this question: What would you do?

Until next time ~

TWEETS - How much is too much?

I admit it – I still consider myself a Twitter newbie. I forget to hashtag words in my tweets, I often hit the Retweet button instead of copying a person’s tweet and putting RT in front of it and my tweets go over the 140 character limit and I have to figure out what to cut.

I also do not tweet all the time.

For me, I have two reasons and they are very simple: I don’t tweet unless I have something I really want to say and I don’t want to annoy people with a plethora of words clogging their feed.

But, what I want to know is, how many tweets per day is considered too much? Would up to five tweets be considered average? Would 10 tweets per day be the limit? Would upwards of 20 tweets per day be considered excessive?

There is a person that I am following and, I kid you not, tweets, on an average, of nine per hour. Between this morning and February 1, this person has tweeted over 1,130 times! Some tweets are replies, some are directed towards people, a few are retweets (very few) and the rest are personal tweets. Is this typical? Is this over-the-top crazy?

Here is a sample:

Feb 1 – 183 tweets

Feb 2 – 122 tweets

Feb 3 – 92 tweets

Feb 4 – 90 tweets

Feb 5 – 242 tweets

Feb 6 – 173 tweets

Feb 7 – 142 tweets

Feb 8 – 74 tweets

So far today, there have been 32 tweets and it's not even noon!

In my opinion, that is just beyond extreme and this person needs to chill out with the tweets. I actually stopped using Twitter for a few weeks because I couldn’t read anything important in my feed. This person’s tweets were appearing five, six times in a row and I spent too much time trying to scroll through all of the person’s messages to get to tweets I actually needed to read, that I just gave up.

When I use Twitter, I want to read things that people or companies are doing and how I can learn from their message. I don’t want to be bombarded by messages (especially the same message over and over and over). Give me a link to click on if you want me to read more. If it sounds interesting, I can guarantee you, I will click on it.

So, I ask you:

How often do you tweet an hour? A day? Do you just tweet random things? Do you constantly push whatever you are writing/selling/marketing/promoting?  If you are an excessive or an extreme tweeter, why?

What do you look for when you read other people’s tweets? What do you consider too much? What makes you stop following a person?

I’m curious about what you think and how you use Twitter.

Until next time ~