THE NEXT CHAPTER – Finding Your Shelf

Choosing your publication's neighborhood.

"For us, creativity means thinking about the lives of our audience and how to connect with them." - Anna Wintour

As you look up from writing a story to figuring out how to bring it to the public, you'll run into a lot of questions about genre and audience.

While you might think it abundantly clear that your audience is any right-thinking person with the price of a hardcover in pocket, pitching to agents who will be pitching to editors who will be pitching to committees referencing marketing and sales figures requires a bit more focus and specificity.

Genre and Genre-Bending

When you step into a bookstore, you probably will gravitate toward a particular section. This could be labelled as broadly as Fiction or Non-Fiction, but usually there will be labeled sub-sections for each.

Under FICTION, for example, moving from Literary and Book Club or Classics, you might favor Romance, Horror, Mystery (or its cousins, Thriller and Suspense), Fantasy or Science Fiction. NON-FICTION in the library is set out according to the Dewey Decimal System numbering, but in a book store you'll more generally find categories such as Self-Help, History, Psychology, Cooking, Travel, Biography, and various others to taste. Memoir may take a section of its own.

You'll note when submitting that agents and publishers will specify what genres they are seeking. In Query Manager, that drop-down selection is on the same line as Title and Word Count, so yes, it is important.

Of course, not all work fits neatly into a single classification. You may have written a Romantasy, a combination of Romance and Fantasy, or perhaps a Historical Thriller. To decide where your prospective book might belong, you need to consider your intended audience.

Audience

You will be asked, in a Query Manager form, a one-on-one pitch session, or a submission specification, who you see as the readership for this work. What they are really asking is the neighborhood in which you see your volume shelved.

What does this mean, specifically? Think again about walking into a bookstore. What shelves grab you? How are they labeled? What books do you see there, some that perhaps inspired you to write the work you are pitching? These books would be your neighbors in a perfect world.

So now consider, as you were drawn to a certain section, certain titles, so would certain readers favor one shelf over another. You want your book to be where your readers would find it and pick it up.

The remainder of the audience question crosses over from sales to marketing. How would this book be promoted (if in fact it is to get some publishing push)? What organizations, book clubs, locales, reviewers, or publications will be targeted? This addresses the goal of not only seeing your words in print, but imprinting them in the minds of receptive readers.

While you're there…

Take a closer look at the books in your genre neighborhood: the front (or back) jacket copy is roughly how they might have been queried. The books themselves may be the comps (comparative titles) you would want to specify on query, or if perhaps too popular or published more than about two or three years ago, you could look them up on Amazon or other online bookseller services to see You might like… recommendations. If you have a moment with a particularly favored work, you might also want to look at the Acknowledgements for the name of the agent who helped bring that work to publication.

Keep on,

Andy