Once upon a time, I would have behaved like most other
authors and frowned on someone jumping from genre to genre. I would have
believed the hype that it could damage my career. I was told by many that an
author should be known and branded by only one type of book.

 

Hooie!!

 

What makes you think if you have a receptive and
following audience in paranormal romances, that your writing won’t be just as good
and your voice be just as strong when you delve into a romantic suspense or…  even a children’s book? LOL

 

I know that many authors in the past would change
their names to write different genres because they believed their fans would riot
if they bought a book thinking it to be one of their historicals and it
turned out to be a suspense or contemporary. I’m thinking of women like Nora Roberts who uses
J.D. Robb for her suspense series or futuristic author Jayne Castle who writes
historicals under Amanda Quick and mysteries under Jayne Anne Krentz. Of
course, these ladies have a NY publishing house behind their best-selling
careers and therefore they don’t have to try and keep up a social media
presence for three different brands.

 

Today, it’s different. Today we respect the reader to
such an extent that we know she/he checks to see that the book they are about
to buy is the one they’ll want to read. And for those that make an error – on
Amazon (don’t know about the others since I’m only with Amazon) – a purchaser
can return an item once they’ve realized their mistake.

 

So, my advice to others is what I do myself. I try
very hard to keep my covers and my titles a depiction of the inside story so that people who
want to buy one of my books knows it’s a Vicarage Bench spirit-travel tale just
by looking at the covers. Same with the Angel series and of course, the Vegas
series can be nothing else but suspense since almost all the books show a cop
on the cover.

 

 

A short sentence on the cover can also help the reader in knowing
the type of book they’re perusing. Heck, if all else fails the book description
must be full of the story details leaving no one wondering what genre this story
would fall into.

 

There is one type of book I might be tempted to
start writing under a psuedenom especially if my other books are sweet romance
and I know you’ve guessed what that might be. But there’s certainly no law that
says it’s a must. I know quite a few very good authors who use one name and
they haven’t suffered by doing so. Today’s business has opened that particular
stuffy door and the fresh air in here is lovely!

 

In fact, this new world of publishing is making me
so happy that I’ve decided to revise an old contemporary romance written years
ago and it will be released next month. Lord I love this business!!

 

So – does this make sense to you? Or do you think we should still be sticking to only ONE genre?