Hey all…
In about two and a half months, my new book “The Stark Divide” will be released from DSP Publications. It’s NOT A ROMANCE. (Angel is snickering somewhere over this).
Publishing a non-romancey sci fi tale is a departure for me in one way, and in another it’s not at all. We’ll get back to that in a moment.
The challenge now? Everything I’ve built to market myself and all the contacts I’ve made have been geared to market my romance work. Sure, most of my romance tales are also sci fi or fantasy or magical realism. But I’ve never before released a published work that didn’t also have the whole romance thing included.
So it’s new horizons time. I have started scouring the web, working to make new contacts in the sci fi realm that for the most part have no connection to the romance world. It’s a bit of a challenge, kind of like learning a whole new language:
Some sites won’t review you unless you are published by a small set of approved sci fi and fantasy publishers. Some only take already written reviews. And one particularly cheeky review site just told me they only accept books for review for free if they are ready FOUR MONTHS before publication, but I can pay them for the privilege if I’m late.
Damn.
In the long run, I think this work will be worth it, especially if it helps me tap into a whole new market for future books, but it’s still a lot of work.
Now back to the whole romance vs. non romance thing. 🙂 I never intended to be a romance writer. All of my early writing was sci fi and fantasy, and none of it back then had queer characters – I was deep in the closet until I was twenty-three.
I mostly quit writing in my mid twenties, and when I came back to writing in 2014, my initial plan was to take my first (never published) sci fi novel “Across the Shoreless Sea” and re-approach it with a series of sequels, in the process figuring out where the story would go from where it had come from.
Then I ran across the Dreamspinner site, and decided to submit a story there for one of their anthologies, A Taste of Honey. They bought it, and all of a sudden I was a romance writer. As they say, the rest is history. LOL…
I love writing romance. And I love writing sci fi and fantasy. Sometimes the two mix, and sometimes they don’t, though my work will always have a queer flair.
The challenge is in trying to market to both audiences.
Anyone else have the same issue? How have you dealt with it? And do you have any great sci fi review blogs to share?