Not Knowing Genres Is A Sure Way To Rejection

Let's get back to query letters again.

One of the elements of a query letter is to showcase what type of story you are presenting and how it fits into the current market. This, of course means knowing your genre as well as knowing what each of the publishers are doing. I really want to focus heavily on the genre piece today because this is where so many authors are walking themselves into an automatic rejection letter.

Why? Because it shows your lack of knowledge in the business. It shows the editors and agents that you may not be ready to make the big jump into the world of publishing. 

We have actually three groups of people out there who don't know their genres (or variations). Let's go through each.

TAKING A GUESS This is the biggest group. They grab what they think their genre is from what they have seen in the book store. The odds are, they have no idea that there are sub-genres, and if there are sub-genres, they will often just blend these together in some fashion thinking that this is how it is done.

This group has probably also over heard conversations from other writers and pieced together what they said. For example, I have seen a stack of authors submitting what they believe are "dark romances" simply because they think these are stories with "hot sex scenes". Not quite. 

GOING OFF OF WHAT SOMEONE ELSE TOLD THEM - Now with this group, they are pitching stories but not fully understanding why their story might be what that other person said their story was. What is more often the case is that this other person only had the "blurb" to work with and told them what they thought the story was. Unfortunately, not seeing the whole story, they might be misguiding this person.

TRYING TO FIT ALL GENRES This writer is just trying to show that their story is so amazing it is going to be marketable to everyone. They will claim this is a "cross genre" novel. The reality is that part of the novel is one type and part of the novel is another type.

Here is the issue with all three of these. When you pitch your query letter to us and we start seeing signs that you are not really sure what you have written, you are giving us a really bad first impression. We DO want to work with you, but if it starts to show you are going to be more work than it is worth, then here comes that letter you do not want.

Take the time. Learn your genres.

Oh wait, there was that phrase again. TAKE YOUR TIME!!!!