Finding Your (Time Traveling Hot Angelic) Peeps

Stopping by a tiny used bookstore the other day, I wandered into the romance section, wherein this handy-dandy key was posted:


Personally, I hadn't read enough romance to know that there was a demand for romance that featured time travel, much less Time Travel with Angels (gold circle with a STAR!)...moreover, a demand large enough to warrant its own place on a homemade Dewey Decimal system! So awesome.

So naturally, this made me start thinking about my own writing: sure, I can maybe say a certain manuscript is YA fantasy, but it has some steampunk elements to it (cogs, cogs, cogs!) as well as a bit of historical romanticalness (it is steamy, just not THAT type of steamy). What do I get with that? A blue dot with a green square with a star? A brass colored lipstick imprint on the spine?

How important is it to find your particular "sticker-on-the-spine" niche when writing? Do you read extensively in the genre you write? It's important to know what's been done before, but do you ever fear getting too inundated with the tropes and subconsciously copying entire books? Urp. Maybe that's just me.

NEXT UP: Once your book is on the correct genre's shelf...is it hurting other people's feelings?


Play nice with the other books, No Country For Old Men.

(Remember to stay tuned next week for the WEEK OF AWESOME GIVEAWAYS! Your mind will asplode.)