S02E10: What Switching Genres Shows Us

Sam and Matilda are discussing what they'd do if they switched genres.

Next week, they will each be facing a challenge they've been putting off for a while. For Matilda, it will be drafting with dictation. For Sam, it's all about character art!

Where to find Sam and Matilda:

SAM IG: @sammowrimo

Website: www.samantha-cummings.com

Book to start with:

Curse of the Wild (Moons & Magic Book 1) https://amzn.eu/d/3QHym3m

Most recent book:

Heart of the Wolf (Moons & Magic Book 2) https://amzn.eu/d/4HecH3a

MATILDA IG: @matildaswiftauthor

Website: www.MatildaSwift.com

Book to start with: https://books2read.com/TheSlayoftheLand (book #1 of The Heathervale Mysteries)

Most recent book: https://books2read.com/ButterLatethanNever (book #3 of The Slippery Spoon Mysteries)  

Mentioned on the show:

JOIN THE PEN TO PAYCHECK DISCORD: https://discord.gg/w7BjxmeXfF

NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/

Publisher Rocket: https://publisherrocket.com/

The Cozy Mystery Clubhouse Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cozymysteryclubhouse/

Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003DWC6OA/

Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CPR6GUE/

Nicholas Erik’s Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4TTX65X/

Transcript:

Welcome to your next step of the Self Publishing Mountain.

I'm Matilda Swift, author of Quintessentially British Cozy Mysteries.

And I'm Samantha Cummings, author of Young Adult Books about Magic, Myths and Monsters.

I've written the books, changed their covers, tweaked their blurbs, tried tools from a dozen ad courses, and I'm still not seeing success.

Now, we're working together to plot and plan our way from barely making ends meet to pulling in a living wage.

Join us on our journey where we'll be mastering the pen to snag that paycheck.

Hello and welcome to Pen to Paycheck Authors podcast.

I'm Samantha Cummings, here with my co-host Matilda Swift, and we're here to write our way to financial success.

We're two indie authors with over a dozen books between us, and still a long way to go towards the quit the day job dream.

If that sounds familiar, listen along for our Mastery Through Missteps journey.

Each week we cover a topic to help along the way, and this week's topic is switching genres.

Before that, what are your wins and winches of the week?

I have got so many wins this week.

I'm going to start with a slight winch, which doesn't sound like a win.

I got a massage earlier, but I only had time for a half an hour massage, and I have not had a massage for a couple months, and for a solid half an hour, a woman just called my body terrible, and not in a personal way, not in a body issues way.

My back is terrible.

It felt like wood.

I'm right handed on the right hand side of my body.

It was like completely unmanable.

It felt like I had petrified on that side of my body, and I could feel her hands just like not penetrating anything.

And she just kept saying like terrible, terrible.

So I'm gonna have to go back and get a massage soon, because it's been so painful.

And part of that is that I have just been working really hard, not on work, work on writing.

So yeah, a bit of a win and a win on that front.

But otherwise just all wins.

I was gifted a new lip balm today by a certain podcast co-host, which is delightful.

Because we had our Meth to Mind session, which was such a good one.

And it felt like not our normal, incredibly wearying, just like talk for hours and like covering the entire world.

It felt like such a good productive session, like a business meeting of, you know, like we were gonna invent post-its in that session.

It was great.

And also I forgot this, as I was trying to think of my wins and wins earlier, I was like, wait, did I?

Yes, I did.

I had a book for once this week.

That's how long this week has been, that I launched a book in the middle of it, I forgot already.

How is that this week?

So yes, yeah, that was this week.

So a lot.

I have done tons of things this week, in a good way.

And I've started an exciting new thing that I can't talk about till the end of this podcast, but I will reveal it then.

And I also started my co-writing project, and did some writing on that.

And I sent that in, we've got our first meeting on that next week.

So just tons of things, and it feels exciting and good, but also I am not as exhausted as I've recently been, which is another win.

How about you?

Yeah, I am also gonna say it's a win.

I haven't been exhausted.

I've had a very nice week where I've just been picking up a few last edits before I send my book to the editors.

So I took my time.

I took so many days off this week, and just basically worked two days or two evenings just going through some notes that I've made and making sure that the file was up to date.

And that felt really nice.

But I know that I've got a lot of work coming, but I don't care.

I'm just having the time of my life gonna relax now.

Mastermind was obviously a win because we did do a lot of talking and dissecting of ourselves as we always do.

It's like open heart surgery every time.

But it's always so helpful because you don't realize you need to have the conversations that you have until you have them.

And I feel like that's what we do every time.

We always end up talking about stuff that we didn't really plan for, but it's the right time every time.

Another win is that I had a new business idea this week, and much like everything I do, launched straight into it, set up a website.

Yeah, 1000% set up a website.

Bought the domain.

Well, I haven't set the website up yet, but bought the domain.

And yeah, it's like a little side business hustle thing.

My winch-

Which we will discuss more later, because it is writing related.

It will, yeah, it'll come up at some point in the near future.

My winch is, it's cold again.

Hate the cold.

And it's just brutal.

I can't, I'm just like a delicate flower.

I feel like a daffodil that's bloomed too early.

And now I'm like, oh, oh, it's, oh, wrong time.

Should have stayed underground.

I'm freezing in the North of England right now.

It is too cold for mid-March.

My other winch, which has just happened, is that in my little intro, which Matilda writes, she hadn't switched our names around in it.

And I paused more for comedic effect than anything else.

I paused before I said our names because I could have said your name first and my name second.

And I was like, I didn't fall over a little bit, so I was making a weird face at you.

We had just started uploading videos to YouTube again, and then I realized halfway through, I was like, oh, that's going to be the beginning of a YouTube video, so I'm making a weird face at you.

I could see out the corner of my eye, I could see you making a weird face, so I thought, I'm just going to keep going.

So that's a whinge, but it's also a whinge because it's funny.

And I obviously now being a complete professional podcaster, I've just put me on live TV at this point.

I mean, pro, absolute pro.

Yeah, I think I'm done with all my whims and whinges.

I can't think of anything else.

Okay, so this week we're talking about changing genres, but not because we're necessarily planning to do it.

Why are we discussing this today?

We are discussing this because it's an important part of the process to understand genres.

And most of the time, whenever you're thinking about genres, you've already written a book.

I think that that's like what most people are.

We think that's actually not true.

Oh, well, okay.

That's not how you should do it.

Yes, but I think for a lot of people who start writing more hobby based, like me, is that I just wrote what I wanted and didn't think about genres at all.

I just thought I'm writing the book that I want to write.

So maybe for a lot of people, you write something and then you don't really know how genres work or how you're going to fit into it.

You just assume that you've written something that's perfectly acceptable.

So by looking at genres in this way, as though we were switching them, it's giving us an opportunity to talk about like what you should do if you were going to start from scratch and like what you also could do even if you've already written a book.

I think that's a great way to explain it.

Yes.

And I think it was useful today in our mastermind, we were talking quite a lot about genres because we've got a new book coming out and we wanted to really make sure we could figure out what the comps were.

And I think genre is interesting in that obviously we market certain genres, we know certain genres exist, but they do not always exist on Amazon.

So for example, I write in Cozy Mysteries, but the subgenres of Cozy are Craft, Culinary, and Pet, which does not take into account the fact that at least half the genre is taken up by Paranormal and Historical, at least half.

And so absolute nonsense that those are the genres.

If you write Paranormal Cozies, they just go under Cozies, there's no genre for it.

And the same for lots of other genres where either they, like Amazon does not care to make category for them, I don't really know why, or they're quite new.

So things like we were looking today at Urban Fantasy, which is really lumped together with Paranormal by Amazon, but it's quite different.

And then there's other kind of genres that come from different directions.

So for example, you can get things like Paranormal Women's Fiction, Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy, Fantasy Romance, Romanticy.

And you're like, wait, where do they sit?

And what are they?

And it is, and the reason why you want to be really clear on what genre you've written is that not necessarily because you have to put the right label on it, it's irrelevant if Amazon doesn't have the right category.

It's because you have to know, who am I targeting?

What am I reading is expecting.

So if you're looking at a category that comes from the direction of romance, like it came out of romance, even if the exact concept of it is exactly the same one that came out of, for example, fantasy, the romance has to be prevalent.

The romance has to be front and center and the fantasy secondary.

Whereas if you're writing a genre that came out, expanded out of fantasy, the fantasy elements are going to be primary.

There has to be a big goal and the romance is a side plot.

And you have to know how to pitch those two to the right readers.

You have to know then who your comps are, the covers will look different, the beats will look different, the tropes will look different.

And you can't write a book, think, oh, it's kind of like romantasy and fantasy romance.

I'll just like label it both for people in both categories like it, because actually what happened is people in either category were like it, and you'll get no readers, you'll get no reviews, the algorithm won't find the right comps, the book will tank.

And you could have been just a little bit of refining away from the right genre.

So I think it's useful to think about this, because Sam and I come from different sides, I have a very clearly defined genre in Amazon, I write contemporary culinary cozies, which is an actual subcategory of Amazon.

And Sam writes in a genre which is like quite a an active moving genre and is quite easily polluted.

And especially because you're writing in YA, which is just like, you know, almost like a nonsense categorization right now, like calling it adult when it's it's for adults, it can be incredibly graphic in a way that I would not recommend to teenagers necessarily.

And it's fine, you know, if they pick it up and find themselves, that's one thing, but like as an adult, I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending it to them.

So it's just like, what is that category?

And then there's middle grade feels like totally, it's not one step down, it's for kids.

Yeah.

And then new adult feels like that's a, that's what young adults should be categorized as.

So it's like lots of categories are shifting, are meaningless based on their actual label, you have to know them inside and out.

Yes.

Yeah, you do.

And I think that's something that I've always really struggled with, which is why I was kind of happy to talk about this today.

Because for me, I found it so hard, like putting myself into a genre, a particular genre.

And even like, even now with my series about to complete, I still don't think I've got the genre right.

And I'm still every day thinking, oh, like maybe I should be saying it's urban fantasy, even though I don't think it is.

But what do people, I don't know what people expect urban fantasy to be like these days.

And I haven't kept my finger on the pulse.

I used to read urban fantasy a lot when I was younger, but I stopped reading it.

But have I accidentally written something that is classed as urban fantasy?

So it is, it's so, I just find it so hard to narrow down my own.

And I think the tricky thing is writers read in so many different genres.

If you step away from reading paranormal, you know, urban fantasy, for example, for a few years and you think, oh, I pick up an occasional one that's maybe from a few years ago, when I pick up a few things that are similar, but not exactly in that genre, you maybe don't notice that the genre has shifted an enormous amount.

And like, that can happen in certain genres.

And can make it really tricky to make sure you're writing to a genre.

I think another kind of key thing to think about is why we want to make sure we're writing to a genre.

And that I think is like you don't have to, you absolutely don't have to write to a specific genre.

You don't have to write to the middle of a genre.

You don't have to write to market.

Those things are not obligatory.

But if you want to make it easier on yourself to market a book and to make an income from your books, writing to market, by which you mean like writing recognizable features that belong in a specific genre, you can say, look at this, this is this genre.

You will love it because XYZ, you need to be doing that.

You need to be picking a genre and really sticking to it and understanding it inside and out.

Which, as a writer who reads really widely, is often really hard to do because you think, actually, you don't want to read 10 of the same book.

That to me feels really boring.

But to a reader in your genre feels like that's exactly what they want.

Yes.

It's hard to gauge what the genre expectations are.

Yeah.

So I was, that's one of the first things that I thought about if I was switching genres today and say, I was going to write science fiction.

I love science fiction.

I wouldn't, at this stage of my life, wouldn't write it.

Maybe in the future.

I love it that much.

But if I was going to switch to science fiction, I would instantly go and buy the main books that are always in the top of the charts.

I would buy the popular books that have been popular for the last couple of months.

And I would make sure I knew what books were coming out in the future as well.

And I'd really try and get myself into that world before I even started writing a book.

And that's definitely what I haven't done.

On just Indies or would you focus on Indies and trad?

My heart says that I would want to do trad, but I know that it doesn't work the same.

The genres, obviously, we all get lumped into the same, but you're not treated the same in Amazon, I don't think.

And also readers don't expect the same stuff.

They don't expect the same covers.

I think that people expect more from indie books because they're so eager to point out anything that's wrong.

I think that if you get anything wrong, even like a typo, you're just like dragged over hot calls for it.

So I would-

I think it's quite genre specific.

Like I think definitely ones where the genres are very like hot on TikTok.

People are kind of looking for something to say.

Perhaps, I think also it might depend on whether your genre is heavily trad or heavily indie.

Because I think if you've got a very heavily trad genre, A, that would make me think twice about it.

So if I were looking at a genre, like, you know, if I were thinking about, oh, I really want to go broad on sci-fi, I want to write like a big, you know, epic, like a space epic, like I want to write like a space opera, or I want to write like a fantasy epic.

I would think twice about that because-

I'm not saying I wouldn't do it, but I would think carefully about it because they're so dominated by by trades with big budgets, with big names, on the books are so long, readers may need a few of them.

And so it would really make me think carefully about, is it the right genre for me?

Do I want to maybe niche down?

Like, is that something that I want to be doing?

So I also really like sci-fi, but I think I, if I thought back about what I've read and written in the past, actually, I kind of like the smaller areas, like I really like, you know, things that are kind of sci-fi adjacent.

So like a sort of social sci-fi, what we might call like cozy sci-fi right now.

So things like Becky Chambers, I really like dystopian and post-apocalyptic books that kind of belong in the speculative genre.

I would niche down and get to know a genre more narrowly and pick something.

And I think the tricky part is, if it's not an Amazon category, how do you figure out what it like what the big books are in it and where they are?

And I think that would be the first place I would try and figure out.

It may be easier if you are writing one of these genres where they are younger targeted.

So things like the cozy sci-fi or the dystopian, you'll find Reddit boards.

Is that what the cool kids call them?

Yeah, something like that.

I don't know.

I kind of stay away from Reddit.

Yeah, I think reader Reddit is quite active and interesting.

And I think it's not super toxic.

So I think you could find good Reddit boards and specific genres.

Obviously, Cozy Mystery, not so big on Reddit, but you can find like cozy fantasy stuff on there.

So if it's a genre which isn't represented on Amazon yet, I would make sure I'm finding a repository of knowledge that I trust and I would spend a long time doing that.

Like looking at, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily start with good read lists, but they're useful to kind of think about.

They're very track dominated usually, but you can start looking there.

And what I would be looking to do is find one or two things like you mentioned with kind of sticking power that you see around a lot, ideally indie and then start looking in their also boards to try and get a sense of as a viewer, looking at the also boards, which ones look similar cover wise to my eye.

So if I'm looking, for example, I think I want to, I think I want to write Cozy Fantasy.

But you know, I can't quite find how the genre is listed.

I don't know if it's listed on Amazon, I would guess not.

I want to find books like that.

I would pick a couple that I know, like very well, look at them, look at the also boards and find the ones with similar covers, that are clearly trying to code and say, this is the same sort of book.

And just start looking in them and use something like publisher rocket to see what actual categories they're under and see, okay, this is a category that's formed kind of from a Venn diagram of three different categories.

But the covers have to look like this, the titles sound like this.

Even the author pen names sound like this.

So my name is a pen name, and it's a pen name that I chose, because it sounds cozy.

My real name actually also weirdly sounds cozy, but a little bit too unique.

But I wanted to find a pen name that was also cozy.

You find some people who have really, really clearly fake pen names that sound like, you know, I made it from an amalgamation of, you know, very twee sounding words, which is fine, right?

That also codes yourself to a certain genre in Cozy Mystery.

But yeah, I would start looking at all those things before I started writing, ideally.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

If I was completely started from scratch, I wouldn't I wouldn't even think of, I would try to hold back on an idea for a story until I'd done this research, until I'd looked at comps and seen what's popular, even like looking at the length of books, like the expectation of the length of books before I'd started writing, that I'd definitely do that.

Which can be really different between trad and indie, so definitely narrowing down there.

Yeah.

And I think that a lot of-

KU versus wide.

If I was looking at a genre and they were all wide, I would think, actually, right now in my life, I don't have time to go wide.

Can I find a slightly different genre that is KU dominant?

Because that's where I want to be, that's why I'm more comfortable.

A while ago when we were kind of doing this for ourselves, when we were looking at butter and tropes, so when we were kind of going through all of that stuff for our own books and trying to come up with like just stuff for ourselves.

I would do that right at the start again.

Before I even picked up a pen, I'd look at tropes, character arcs that would be expected.

Even looking at reviews from those other books to see if I could pinpoint particular things that people loved, things that people hated.

I have got a spreadsheet of that for young adult books in some of my comps of things that people liked in the books and things that people weren't so interested in.

And that sounds really harsh because it seems like you're saying that rather than being a creative soul, you're going to be a machine and you're going to take the information and come up with something.

But I think that once you understand, once you're in it and you've got all this information, your creativity is actually then able to flow better because you're giving it a proper direction.

It's like the difference between panzers and planners.

And you're not worried, you're not thinking, am I doing it correctly?

Should I have to delete this whole chapter later?

You were able to unleash your creativity more.

Yeah, and I've since starting planning all of my books after pancing for years and years, I really love the structure of that because I really like to stick to a plan and know that I have put my acts into place and tracked my character progressions in a way that just makes it feel like I am putting my best foot forward with my writing because I'm not just filling pages with nonsense just to get words written.

It's all very pinpointed and very on purpose.

And I would love to do that more.

I find that right now, I don't feel like I have the time to put that much effort into books because I'm already floundering in this genre that I'm in.

And I feel like, you know, once you're in it, it's like, well, I'll just do this little bit over here, but like it's still all going on over here.

I don't know.

I know I need to take the time.

Like to master X, Y, and Z before you go on to the rest of like the high level things and those things.

Like we said, like you don't have to be writing to market.

A lot of writing is kind of like figuring out just the writing and releasing and publishing schedules before you're getting really, really niche.

Yeah.

One thing I just want to go back to is you mentioned looking at reviews.

I think I would say, A, people write things in reviews that aren't true, right?

So you know, all the time, romance readers write all the time, they hate cliffhangers, and that's absolutely not true, that they will buy a book, they'll buy a book two more if it's a cliffhanger book one.

Also, people in Cozy Mysteries complain a lot about things that are done regularly.

Like for example, the police officer is the sleuth's ex boyfriend or boyfriend.

There's too much focus on describing cakes and having recipes in it's like people buy those.

So, you might think you're sick of it, but you would dislike more something that is further away from that.

When I've done it in the past for my own comps, I was picking more things out that is more like the butter.

Like the very specific things that people said that they liked about characters, rather than like the nitty gritty, like I kind of ignored anything that was about the style of something.

Because people's writing style is...

Like you can't critique...

I would never take what somebody said about someone's writing style as anything other than pointless.

But definitely...

We did this earlier in the last year, in fact, in a podcast in...

I'm just looking at this episode 47.

You can get Notebook LM to write kind of summaries of the reviews.

I think looking at individual reviews can be quite misleading, but getting it to say, can you compare my review, someone else's reviews and find out what I'm missing?

That was really helpful.

Yeah, I think that's it.

I think it's being able to spot the trend through reviews rather than taking the actual specifics.

It's more like, what is the trend?

And that obviously takes a lot of time because you have to read through a lot of stuff.

You can use Notebook LM, and obviously me, newly converted, will be doing that in the future because I love it.

It's so helpful.

Yeah, because you need to be able to look at it as data and understand how to read data, which takes time.

Yeah, it's so difficult thinking about how much goes into planning a book because so many people are, I think a lot of people land, maybe they don't, maybe I'm just being very generous.

I feel like a lot of people land in their genre without doing this, but...

I did, like I 100% did.

So I wrote the beginning, like the first chapter or two of my first Cozy Mystery, had never heard of the genre, Cozy Mystery is not really a genre that has been even mentioned in the UK until quite recently, and we call it, in fact, something slightly different, Cozy Crime.

And I wrote the first couple of chapters of just like, what felt like a cute little mystery set in a rural, because it sounds ludicrous, set in the countryside of England.

And the main character's best friend run a cafe, and she, her ex boyfriend is the police officer, local police officer, and she stumbles across a dead body, and she's got like a nemesis who's a local busybody.

It's like I had accidentally been sent like, some sort of mind control that told me here are all the tropes of a Cozy Mystery.

But it's just because I have ingested so much of it in my entire life.

Like Cozy Mysteries really is very common.

Yeah, I was gonna say that.

Yeah, like the UK, we have a lot of, you can't get away from it.

I'm not even somebody who watches a lot of mysteries and stuff apart from obviously Murder She Wrote.

Yeah, but Murder She Wrote is super cozy.

Yes, Murder She Wrote is very cozy.

And also just seemingly in our lifeblood, like I feel like I have seen every single episode somehow, just through existing at this time in the world.

So I think maybe that's something that we should consider is that sometimes you just know a genre, but you don't know the specifics of Amazon's genres.

That's really the key is understanding Amazon's breakdown of genres and sub genres, because it is a maze.

Not amazing, it's just a maze of chaotic information.

You can look at this like you'll go into fantasy, and then it's like fantasy adventure, but you could then go into adventure, and it's adventure fantasy, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Words switch around, but you think how could it be any different?

But it is.

So you have to really understand.

There's two of that weird Amazon category.

There's one called Amateur Sleuth, and one called Women's Sleuth.

And I don't know if this is the case, but I would not imagine that anyone's going, oh, I'm an amateur sleuth writer.

Like people use amateur sleuth as another genre that crosses over Cozy Mysteries, and the same for Women's Sleuth.

But it's like, it's interesting that Amazon has those categories, but not paranormal Cozy.

And so you have to kind of cross over from different areas.

And also I would say, because I sort of stumbled into this genre, A, I mean, the good thing is it's a very visible genre.

It's a huge genre on Amazon.

But it's quite a confusing genre to look at as a newbie.

So I had covers that weren't really, weren't at all to market.

No, not terribly to market.

They were old fashioned by the time I'd put them on.

They looked like Cozy Mysteries earlier.

And I didn't know enough about the genre to write the right sort of blurb, the books, I think I didn't think enough about the length.

I would have liked to put more tropes in, and like micro tropes.

So that I think is something that you...

It improves the reader experience.

It would not have taken me very much effort or time to kind of put a few extra things in that would have left the readers feeling more like, I'm desperate to read a book too.

And that is something that you, you know, like you're saying, like there's just too many balls to be juggling, necessarily at the beginning to kind of get everything right.

But it's worth kind of us being able to re-evaluate it now and think about that and how we would go about it for a new genre.

Yeah, I was gonna add something.

Yes, oh, micro tropes.

I think it's something you have to be conscious about.

You can get, you can talk to AI about it.

I think AI is quite good if you give some ideas of micro tropes.

And micro tropes, so for example, we can sort of think of it as butter.

It's like another way of looking at these things.

It's like the tiny things that readers, when they read it in your genre, they're expecting that and it gives them kind of the feeling they're expecting from your genre.

So for example, in Cozy Mysteries, you might expect to have like a group meal of some sort of like the found family have a group meal, where either the protagonist or their like cafe best friend is serving a big group.

And that's not you would expect in every book, but like that's something where it's one of the things, a list of things that you could do that the readers would feel really cozy about.

And you might think, oh, I wouldn't, that doesn't sound very special, but like you wouldn't put it necessarily in military sci-fi that would give readers like a, maybe like in your epilogue.

But it's not something you're thinking, oh, I've got to get that and see what I can love it.

And it's just kind of being aware of like that, in a cozy mystery could be quite a big centerpiece of the book.

You could really build a lot around that.

And the same for kind of anything where you're building community and building family through generosity and through acts of service feels very compelling in a crazy mystery.

I think primarily because of who the audience is and that's often people who that's their role in their kind of families as well.

They value that and see value in that.

Whereas in, you know, miniature sci-fi, you don't have time for this in a battle.

You've got you've got was he winning.

Yeah, that's very true.

Yeah, you've got to make sure you have all those things.

And you're yeah, you that's something that I would really want to do in the future, because I'm so knee deep in my books at the moment.

Like I've gotten I've I've got a lot already written that I want to publish, which I know is is mental because you should be writing to market and everything.

Or not should, but it's helpful.

You learn different things from different parts of the podcast.

You can't learn all at once.

And I do feel like my genre, whatever genre I'm in, is coming, it's swinging back around.

I just stayed in it for long enough that I do think that by the time the books come out that I'm working on, that it'll be popular again.

I know it.

I can feel it in my bones.

But I'm looking forward to writing a book.

I have got a couple of books on my list for the next year or so that I haven't written yet.

And I really can't wait to do this process of reading books already in the genre that I'm hoping to be in.

And yeah, do it like picking all of these things up before I even start writing, because I'm such a stickler for writing a book in November for NaNoWriMo or something.

And that will be based on an idea that I probably had for a while, or it's like the next in a series.

So I haven't really had much opportunity or mind, like brain bandwidth, can't speak.

To put all this into practice, I've only ever done this based on like already being involved in a series and trying to readjust my direction.

But I think doing this before you even start writing sounds like so much fun.

It sounds like a dream.

Like what, a little research project before you start writing a book seems like a professional thing to do to me.

There's also then you're writing it knowing that you've got reason at the end, that you're not going to have to face a whole different battle of like, okay, I've written a book.

It's kind of dystopian-y, sci-fi-ish.

It's got a mystery in it that's not the main part.

There's also a big romance.

Yeah, who's gonna buy that?

And the answer is maybe nobody.

And like maybe a lot of people would love it, but you can't find them because you haven't, you haven't pinned it to a certain genre.

And that's that I think can be really frustrating.

Yeah, if you think like, and you know, it's really horrible when you get good reviews for a book that you just can't sell, because you're like people who pick it up, people who read it, adore it.

But I can't afford the marketing spend to reach enough people who would love it.

And that is that is often the barrier.

And maybe what you would need to in that case is figure out like, okay, can I just go back and edit it?

And make sure that I'm saying my primary genre is the sci fi.

And like the other parts are secondary, like, you know, they're all going to be an all stories about like, you have mystery and everything, you have romance and everything.

But like, I want to make sure I'm going to market this as sci fi.

And I'm going to make sure I hear everything that sci fi readers are expecting.

And I'm not going to leave things out.

I'm not going to leave them frustrated that like actually it's sort of a sci fi, but it just takes place on like Earth and not until the last few pages you read it's like it's Earth in the future.

Surprise, like people aren't going to read that.

So you have to make sure you're hitting the enough of the real expectations of a central genre that you can afford to market it to the readers who will love it.

Yes, and I will say I think that making that decision at the start helps you so much in all of the ways you could think with marketing.

Because for my, say, my current series, which is The Werewolf Series, and I found myself questioning this a lot throughout the whole process, is not, I know who my readers are, but I don't know how to talk to them.

But also, like, I don't really know what my, what the correct sub genres are that I should be trying to shout about.

And it's not just me.

I'm obviously very self critical, because I'm like, oh, I should know this better.

I don't really care about that, because I'm learning, but I really find it really sad when I see other writer friends or just people that I know through social media, and I see them talking about their books, and they say things like, oh, it's kind of like this, but I also, but it's like, but it's different enough, you know, but and what are these words coming out of my mouth?

The difference they think is the thing that sets them apart, they think is the selling point, but the thing that sets you apart is actually your hardest sell.

And we think that by being super original, that's like the thing that people want, but actually that's not what people want.

People don't want you to be the most original.

You can pick it up.

So like they might say, okay, it fits all the tropes of this genre 100%.

So like, oh, if you love sci-fi, you're gonna love this.

And you were absolutely like, it is so unique in this aspect, but you can't be, yeah, you can't be saying it's totally unique.

By the way, it's also got some sci-fi elements.

Like, who's picking that up?

Yeah, yeah.

You can't be trying to sell it based on the things that you don't see other books selling for.

And that's where I've struggled in the past.

And I see other people struggling with that as well.

And I think if you decide on your main genre and your main tropes before you start, you'll feel so much more confident talking about those and slipping in the other stuff, instead of just focusing on what you think you've done differently.

It's probably obviously a mindset thing as well, because you're trying to big yourself up by saying that you're different.

But if you do all the research beforehand, you will see that nobody does that.

I don't think anybody self tries to sell it on their unique point of view.

I think they try and everyone tries to sell based on what other people have already done.

You see on trad books.

Yeah, you see that the trad books on Amazon do it all the time.

You know, for fans of these other books that have come out under the same publisher usually, because that's a nice bit of cross selling for them.

And loads of people do that now is, and I even put it in my own blurbs for some of my newer books.

Yeah, we're all cross selling as hard as we possibly can.

We picked X meets Y for a purpose.

So you need to be so true to those in order to peak people's interest, that trying to sell based on your uniqueness is not helpful.

I'm just having this opportunity myself as well, you know.

I think your Werewolf books are such a good example, because we were looking at them today, and we were trying to figure out, because there are so many very similar categories on Amazon, what would be the correct keywords for these books, and what would be the correct category to read books.

And looking at what should objectively be the correct category for those, and also a little bit more coming up this year, it's, and it's YA category, and it's very clearly YA, and it's about a specific sort of magic.

It's just full of like, shifter romance, and it doesn't belong in that category at all.

So then it's like saying, the question is, is it just category pollution?

And if you go beyond the top 100, which we can't see, is the rest of the category actually fine?

It's just that like, shifter romance is so highly ranked, it pollutes the category visibly.

Or is it that that category doesn't really exist anymore?

I think that's probably it.

Yeah, I do think that.

What we were doing was we had to look at specific books, we had to really search for like, can I find a specific book that I know is a good comp for mine, regardless of what genre it's in, and like just do that by googling different things and kind of looking at covers and figuring out, is this secretly, mostly adult romance?

You know, how short is the main person's skirt on the front cover?

Or is it actually YA and they are doing the same sorts of things my characters do that and then go back into Amazon and then look at the also bought and try and figure out what categories are those books in and look at publishing rocket and figure out what categories those books in.

And that's really hard manual work.

And if you are newer, it's just really like you've got too many questions.

The questions are like, Oh, do I need to change my werewolf book vent to be shifters?

Because that's a whole different book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The expectations and I have in the past used like hashtags on TikTok and put shifter hashtags.

But very, I know very sparingly just to see if there was like an uptick and it's not really done anything because obviously, once you actually see what my book's about, like it's not what people are expecting because shifters is specifically, you don't ever say shifters, it's shifter romance.

That's it.

But even when people say shifter, I assume they're having sex with a wolf.

Yes.

Or a bear, or a dragon, who knows?

It could be anything.

Yeah.

So I think that-

The limit is your imagination.

Yeah.

Definitely trying to stay on top of the genre trends is something that I have dropped that ball recently because I was keeping an eye on Amazon's top 100 for a while and I just haven't had time to do that.

But then truly if that's not a real representation of the genre, if that is difficult for your category of pollution.

Yes.

I was going to say something else that I've forgotten.

Was it about your books?

Maybe.

It was very insight for whatever it was.

I'm sure.

Okay.

No, I was going to change topics just very slightly because-

So we've talked about if you're kind of completely starting new and we've talked a little bit about how you can apply that to your own work and think about, are you really hitting genre expectations enough and what else you might need to do?

One thing I wanted to definitely talk about is, if I was starting a genre, I would find other authors in that genre.

That would be one of my top priorities.

If I were like, you know, freakified into someone else's body and I was going to start a whole new thing and hadn't got any history.

Because it makes such a difference to your mindset around the genre, knowing what's coming up, knowing what does and doesn't really work, being able to ask questions.

Because that's what's very helpful about being in a very clearly defined genre.

So Cozys, even though within that you get historicals, you get paranormals, which seem objectively incredibly different.

They have a very similar demographic audience and a very similar emotional resonance in them.

So we have really good active groups for Cozys, and especially the Clubhouse group that I've mentioned, many times people should still be joining if you're not in it.

I will put a link in the show notes.

There's a Facebook group, there's a weekly Clubhouse group.

Just having that is putting your head and shoulders above anybody else in the category because you can shortcut so much work.

And if I were trying to write in a category where I was really struggling to figure out the category, I would be hunting for a group where people are, other authors are, and are talking about that genre, even if it were a wider genre group.

So maybe, just to narrow things down, like maybe if I was writing psychological thrillers, which is a really hard genre to sell in Indie, because they're mostly stand alones, it's very trad dominated, but Indies do do it.

I would maybe just start with a thriller group and just try and narrow down from there and ask people in there, do you know of any other groups that are more specific to psychological thrillers?

But then you're also going to learn a lot from thrillers because thrillers are often stand alones as well.

So I would be absolutely trying to find people.

Yes.

Oh, yeah, I agree that that is one of the main reasons why I started my YA Discord.

It's because I just didn't know where anybody was.

To just have people to ask all sorts of questions or just a chat in general, just to know that you have got colleagues that you could fall back on if you're having an absolute nightmare not knowing how to write a particular part of your blurb, or whether the book cover matches genre expectations, it's really nice to have that feedback and not have to go to friends and stuff who just don't know.

Yeah, who are going to give you an opinion based on just their likes and dislikes rather than anything else.

Even the wider writing audience, you see in Facebook groups all the time people asking for blurb feedback, and it's like, I don't read your genre, but I think this part sounds really boring.

It's like, no, absolutely doesn't.

That's incredibly key to the genre.

You need that part of the blurb in there.

Yeah, I see a lot of people asking for cover feedback.

And it's just I never have anything to say, because I just think I don't want to get involved in this, because the comments, I go to look at the comments, which is terrible, I know.

But I just have to see what people say, because it's unbelievable that there are people out there who just have to throw in their true sense.

A loud opinion.

Yeah, for no reason other than the fact that they think that everybody must want to know what they think.

Crazy.

Yeah.

And then I've got another jump to a slightly different topic, race topic.

So another part of the reason why we want to go at this is, because recently I have somewhat switched genres with this co-writing project I'm doing.

It seems like the same genre, in that it's also a book that is published under or will be published under Cozy Mysteries.

But it's a historical Cozy, which again, you might think not super different, but actually historical Cozy kind of fall into two subsets.

There's ones that are Cozy Cozy, and they have many, many of the same tropes as contemporary Cozies, so they have like a female Central Sleuth, a group of friends, and the pacing and the tone of voice is often quite similar.

And then you have books that are actually technically much more like historical, as in like books actually written in the 1920s or more like traditional which is so cool, maybe like Agatha Christie type mysteries, which have a much more detached tone and very kind of dialogue and investigation based rather than being personal.

And this is what the book that I'm co-writing is like.

And for me, I sort of even didn't particularly think about that aspect of it when I agree to take on the project, because I was like, Oh, it's cozy.

Yeah, I write in Cozy and historical, I've read loads of historical.

And I didn't think about it.

And actually, when I was starting work on it, I was like, Oh, I didn't think about it.

But actually, I didn't have to, because even though this writing style and the tropes and the micro tropes are incredibly different to Cozy, the feeling for the reader is quite similar, like the sense of following clues and a sort of emotional closeness of like, you're in a close-knit community, even if it's not the same kind of cozy, friendly sleuth.

They're very familiar.

And also, I have read and watched so much 1920s, like traditional mystery fiction and TV shows, that I didn't have a big hurdle to overcome.

However, I did have a hurdle to overcome, right?

There was like the sense of, it's got a different set of expectations from the reader, that I want to make sure I'm hitting as much as possible.

And sometimes that's just just in the level of micro tropes.

So there's not going to be scenes where, you know, the sleuth and their best friend are laughing and joking together while they bake cakes.

That's never gonna happen.

But there are but in exchange, there should be scenes where the sleuth is at a very formal dinner party, or they should be at a maybe not a ball, but maybe some sort of like, you know, a hunting event or something, they should be at a specific type of event, there should be a very particular set of characters there, you definitely need to include things like the servants in the house, and they have to have what we would consider to be not a very realistic attitude.

Like if we were going to be a servant, I would be, I'd have a bad attitude if I were a servant.

My grandma worked a service, and the family rumour that I'm not sure it's true is that she got fired, probably for trying on the lady of the house's clothes.

So she left school at 14 to be in service, and I think I would also get fired for that.

But if you're writing a 1920s mystery, you could have that as like a funny aside, but the main servants should be servants who love serving, you know, very Beauty and the Beast style.

So you need to know these micro tropes, and keep them top of mind, and make sure you're including them.

If you had written a whole book where you hadn't included the servants, because you might think, well, it's about the family of the house, and it's about the guests for the party, you would be missing something quite significant.

So what I did just to make sure that I was very on target, I had the assumption that I'd be fine because I've read and experienced so much of these.

I've been in one Agatha Christie play and seen another one recently and seen like every Poirot and probably Marple and listened to the one on the radio and read them all and lots of other kind of golden age mysteries.

So I was familiar, but I wanted them top of mind.

So things I did just to bring in a little bit extra awareness as well, because I wanted to have a little bit more modern interpretation just to kind of bring in the sense of like what modern readers might be expecting, I watched Downton Abbey, which I had never watched before.

And I loved it.

I might do a rewatch straight away.

It's got all those things in that you love, right?

You or I love like people who are sort of immune from consequence because of their wealth, which, you know, is everyone's dream.

Yeah, I can just say and do whatever they want because they are old and rich.

So great.

And you know, I was like, I really want some Maggie Smith characters in these works.

It is my favorite.

I also recently read some Nancy Mitford's and really paid attention to the parts that gave me like a real thrill of delight.

And it was often when she used phrases that were showing such a different sense of the world.

So in the first couple of pages, they were just words that were unrecognizable in their usage at the time, in a way that made me really interested.

And one was some character, I can't remember the exact phrase they said, but they were talking about, oh, I've invited him for a Friday to Sunday or a Friday to Monday.

And I was like, wait, does she mean a weekend?

And like people, aristocratic people didn't use the word weekend, because they didn't have weekends because they didn't work.

And then I had also, around that time came across the, I must have been saying like Downton Abbey episode, where Maggie Smith said, what is a weekend?

That's my amazing Maggie Smith impression.

And I was like, I absolutely like those things.

So it's being really aware of like what the butter is in those genres.

Like, it wouldn't be funny to joke about weekends in a contemporary culinary mystery.

But it's absolutely lovely to focus on the language that we as contemporary audiences find, like a real treat of, of, you know, almost like at the past of the foreign country.

Yeah.

And sorry, I did those kind of making sure I was be able to pay attention to what was buttery to me.

And I also, because I'm a, I'm a big reader with no friends, to quote Blue Bag season two, my initial Greece difference.

I picked up a couple of incredibly dense historical books about the period because I love book learning.

One of which absolutely recommend Andrew Maher's Making of Born in Britain.

And I am not a big fan of Andrew Maher in person, like on screen.

I find him a little bit, you know, smug.

But in writing, absolutely delightful.

I would read anything he's written.

So we love that.

Another one was really interesting called Constellation of Genius that was specifically about 1922 and kind of the beginning of the modern era.

And again, everything in there was like lots of small little references that you can slip in that make a reader feel really a sense of like they're learning but without doing any, you know, without the effort of learning and like a real sort of sense of light.

And those things obviously are not going to transfer to other genres.

That's not the right sort of research for other genres, but that was to me, the ways in which I wanted to use my experience of writing culinary cozies.

I've been focusing on butter and setting and being able to get the right sorts of characters in and transfer that across to these 1920s more traditional style mysteries.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's a great example of somebody who already is in a main genre, but has to readjust for sub genres.

Yeah.

Well done for all your book learning.

I feel like I have lost time and I'm like, I've just stopped reading, not stopped reading, but I've just not been reading in my genre recently.

I've just been all over the place.

So next two weeks, I have got just to chill out and mentally prepare for editing my next book.

I'm going to be genre reading and doing all of this for an editing stage rather than a writing stage because I feel like there's still a valiant effort for me.

I can do it.

It can feel really difficult to read in your genre at volume because it's not naturally how people who write tend to read.

You might read like one book from this genre, one book from this genre.

And also if you've just spent three months writing a book in a certain genre, the last thing you want to do is read 10 more books in that genre.

You think, oh, I made a little break right now.

Yeah, true.

But last year for my newsletter, I started the process of, I went to a weekly newsletter and I started recommending books in there.

And that was a real good thing to kind of keep me on the straight and narrow with the cozy reading.

Yeah.

And it was really useful.

I think just being able to see what I liked and didn't like and also just sort of view as part of my job.

In Nicholas Eric's gigantic, the world's biggest book, The Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing, he's got a really good section in there.

I mean, basically the whole book is built around like, these are the core things that you need to be doing.

And it will take you a number of years to build up all these things, but you have to be doing these things.

And I can't remember the exact number, but I think he, he suggests reading a genre based book every two weeks max member.

He was like, you should be reading 25 books a year minimum in your genre to just to kind of have enough knowledge.

He might even recommend a book a week.

I'm sure he does.

I'm sure he has all the time in the world to do that.

I'm glad.

I'm happy for him.

Happy for him.

Of course, there's like an hour a day of just this one course I'm doing.

But I think it definitely helps.

I write in a genre where books are really short.

I must read a fancy book a week.

I used to.

I used to.

I just, not whilst I'm also running a business.

Yeah.

Or several businesses.

Yeah.

With a full-time job.

Yeah.

One day.

I also think it's worth picking books that are not good.

And just seeing what makes you DNF a book.

And you could say like, oh, that's the book for this week, is the book that I didn't get past page five, because I absolutely found it incredibly boring to get into it.

Yeah.

That is also valuable.

Yeah, that's true.

I have never...

Have I never DNF'd a book?

Well.

I know once I'm in a book, I'm just so easily swept away.

Yeah, I'm so easy to just...

One thing that I really do as part of my...

starting off my genre is I very regularly look at top 100, which again, is easy because my categories are as much bigger and easier to look at on Amazon.

But I also look at the free lists.

So authors that I will kind of keep top of mind, that I see around a lot, if they have any books come up in the free list, I will grab that and then have it on my list to read later.

And often the books in the free list are short, and they might be first in series, they're quite easy to get into.

And I don't necessarily have to read it then, but I'm often just adding those to my, you know, Kindle to read at some point.

Yeah, that's actually...

I just make sure I've got a content supply.

I'm gonna be very honest here, because why not?

I have never looked at the free books section on Amazon.

No, it's like the next tab along from the 100 pages, 100 pages.

I know, I know.

I never look...

It's important to look out for your genre.

I know this is not judging.

No, I'm happy to be, yeah, I'm happy to be judged.

It's just something that I never think to do.

And it's just, when you don't do something, you don't know that you should be doing it.

And then you realize that you should be doing it.

So this is today, I was today years old when I decided that I should be doing that, yes.

I mean, it's so useful because just checking those both of those regularly shows you who's doing what promotions, who's wide and doing free first in series, what effect does that have, who's, you know, KDP and using the free days, who's got a bookbub, who's done like, you can see authors doing certain tactics and you can see what rises up and drops in the charts.

And you also get a chance if you check regularly, you can see like, oh, that book isn't normally free, but it's free today.

I'm going to grab that so I can read it at some point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also keeping a chance to check on the paid charts.

You can see what goes to 99 cents and goes cheap and grab that.

So yeah, I check the charts at least every couple of days.

If not, daily at times.

Just one of the many, many things that has to be listed.

Yeah.

Just another thing to do.

I'm sure I'll get on that.

Because you're looking at something that you're familiar with, whereas like the first, you know, I think that's it.

You're like, well, here's just a bunch of books.

What we're looking at.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think especially hard for you, Gerona, because it's so disparate and hard to figure out, like, what, what should it be looking at?

What really belongs this category?

So maybe you need to look at the top level category and then start narrowing down.

Yeah.

But just the exercise of doing it every day will help you become familiar with like, oh, OK, those books are irrelevant.

Those wolfshifters, they hop in and out of the tops regularly.

They don't have any seeking power.

They're nothing.

I can see these books staying and they are being constantly read, you know, and becoming more familiar.

That I think is there.

I agree.

It's time consuming, but good.

It is time consuming to start with.

But like you say, once you start looking regularly, you start to recognize books and authors names, which is something that I'm really bad at.

I just don't remember books or names because I'm not looking.

So yes, that's lesson learnt.

I will start being better, I promise.

Yay, what a good promise to make to yourself for your future and success.

I know, come back to this in a couple of months and see that I did not do that.

No, I definitely will.

I think we may have exhausted the topic.

Do you have anything else to say?

No, and that felt like a really good chat to kind of recap everything and to make me...

I've been thinking about this for the last week, so I think maybe from this episode, there's nothing that I'm necessarily going to take away, but actually over this past week, just having to really consciously think about what I'm going to talk about made me make sure I was on top of everything, and it was a good kind of spring clean for me.

Yes, yeah, because you were actually doing it there and then, so yeah, good.

I'm glad that we chose this and it happened at the right time, like our topics tend to do.

I mean, we did that on purpose.

Yeah, I guess, maybe.

Don't ruin it.

The magic.

Completely just by magical accident.

Okay, so next week, we are trying out a new type of episode.

We are hoping or hopping on to, sorry, our quarterly review.

No, I've read the wrong thing.

No, I just completely took a word and went with it.

So we're trying something different and we are going to do a personal challenge episode.

What do we mean by this?

So we want to do this quarterly.

And so as Sam was saying, we do actually find these episodes to align with what we currently are working on and focusing on and want to think about more.

But one thing that we sometimes miss is when we're both working on really different things, because we were trying to pick topics where it's relevant to both of us.

And we like to be able to think about things from different angles.

But sometimes we just have a different thing on our lists that we would miss if we can't find time to talk about it together.

So we want to use personal challenges.

And the idea of it is, and hopefully you'll join us, is it's something from your list that you think, Oh, I should do that.

And it's not an obvious time consuming.

And I would benefit from it, but I don't particularly want to do it.

So I just do a little nudge.

And so personal challenges.

So feel free to pick on yourself, whatever it's going to be, mine is going to be dictation.

So I've been thinking about it for absolutely ages and thinking, oh, you know, I don't have great wrists.

Sometimes they get really painful, and I have felt them be painful recently.

If they really flared up, you know, and I have arthritis, if they flared up, they would take a long time to feel better.

I've had to have steroid indexes in my wrist before.

I had to give up handwriting for typing because my wrists are not good.

And it's like, oh, I really feel it's not like a, an if but a when that my wrists feel not great and I can't write.

So I really want to have dictation in my back pocket.

Also, people rave about it, people who do it.

And the reason why I don't try it is because it feels itchy, which is not a reason that grownups don't do something.

Because as I said, I have gone from handwriting to typing, and I used to be like a real handwriting.

I want to say purest, but I mean snob.

I mean, like handwriting is the only way to get your art and the language is creatively connecting your mind to the page.

That's not true.

So I've wanted to try dictation for a long time.

And in fact, we set this challenge episode a few weeks ago, and dictation is quite a big topic.

So a big thing to try.

It's not just a try at once and then you know what it's like.

And because I've just started this new project, this new co writing series, I thought I'll give it a crack with that.

So I've actually already started my challenge because I knew it was coming up and we would have to talk about it.

And I didn't want to have nothing to say.

So I've started it.

I have got loads to say, and I'm very excited to talk about that.

I'm so glad that we have this challenge episode that has just like nudged me into doing something I've been putting off for ages that I think is going to be really beneficial for you.

Mine is a little bit more frivolous, and maybe other people won't do this.

I think this is frivolous, but I really have wanted to have character art done for my books for a long time because it's kind of expected.

A lot of people like it for young adult fantasy.

And it's just something nice to put on social media.

Maybe nice to somehow create some like little merch things.

Yeah, it's just like it's a fun thing to have.

And so for a long time, I've been thinking about getting it done by somebody else, but I am actually somebody who loves to draw and just have never had the time.

You're so good.

I loved, I love drawing.

You're such a good digital artist.

Yeah, and I do really, really love it, but I just never give myself the chance to do it anymore because I'm so busy writing and working on other stuff.

But obviously, because it's been planned very well, because we're so good.

I now have a couple of weeks where I'm just going to be doing some behind the scenes work rather than actually like crying over a laptop.

So I'm going to cry over my Wacom tablet instead, and try and just spend some time doing digital art and see what happens.

See if I like it, see if I think that anything can come of it.

It might just be a fun exercise for me, but it might be that it spurs me on to do something else.

So that's what my challenge is.

Fingers crossed I still have the neck.

I hope everyone else will have some personal challenges.

Just like I think I do want to do every quarter, because I think there are so many things on my to do list that they're not time consuming, particularly like learning di tation.

It would hit me a few days to learn if I like it enough to persist.

And maybe a couple of weeks, I like it enough to kind of make it work well.

But if I didn't have to, I would never do it, which is like a lot of things.

I think there's like I should do it, but if I didn't have to, I would never.

A bit like changing genres, I think sometimes that you think like, oh, I'll just stick with where I'm at.

And then I'll wait until my genre becomes like disappeared from Amazon and no one reads it anymore, and then I'll find something new.

That's too late then.

So on that topic though, we need our question of the week, which we forgot to think about last week.

I had to think about on the fly for our Discord.

So question of the week, we could have what genre would you switch to, or what do you think is the most important thing to think about if you're going to switch genres?

Or what was the most important thing you thought about when you're choosing a genre?

What do you think we should have?

I think what the most important thing that people thought about when they were choosing their genre, like, it's like, what was the personal thing that made you want to do that?

Because that's, for me, fun to think of, like, why did your heart tell you to go that way?

Okay, okay.

Yes, I, that is interesting, because I think having fallen into it so sort of accidentally, it felt like it's interesting to hear from people who chose things more deliberately.

So I've definitely have to hear from people about how they chose their genre, what they felt was most important.

And I would expect really interesting answers.

So I'm glad that I chose a genre that's so KU focused.

I wouldn't be really annoyed if I chose a genre and it turned out you had to work really hard to go wide straight away, because that's a big hurdle to overcome.

And I wouldn't have wanted to be obliged to do it.

So I would love to hear from people.

So what's the most important thing you thought about when choosing your genre?

And we look forward to everyone's escort answering that.

We've had some good chats and celebrations of winning the discord recently.

Sam, you should share your epiphany about your genre in there.

We've got a whole epiphany's channel in there.

So we will look forward to seeing that.

And I will go after this straight away and share the hilarious writing meme of the day, which I haven't done yet.

And I just have so many memes on my phone that I'm sharing one day to try and get them out into the world.

Yeah, fabulous.

Okay, well, thank you very much, everybody, for tuning in.

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