Guest Blogger: Dianne Harman

I’ve written several posts about genres and the difficulties authors have deciding where to put their books. After a lot of feedback from a number of authors, I agree with what most of them said: even if a book could fit into a number of different genres, the author needs to decide what the foremost element of the book is and put it there.

Blue Coyote Motel was a quarter finalist in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award contest in mystery/thriller. Then it was the Book of the Month for Goodreads Psychological Thriller group. I can certainly see a tie-in there. But then I look at reviews and they’re all over the board. It’s been called existential, Hitchcockian, having a universal them for the human being, a great cover, omniscient, reminiscent of Twilight Zone, and that’s only a few.

Then you can get into the Listopia lists on Goodreads and see where it was put and voted on by people.

Here’s the Lists it was #1 on:

5 Star Kindle
Beach Reads 2012
Most Unique Romance
Best Thrillers
Women Authors Who Don’t Write Chick Lit
Slice of Americana
Best Books On Awakening
Favourite Books Of All Time

And the lists it was #2 on:

Best Plot Twist
Debut Novels Waiting To Be Read
Brilliant Book
Psychological Thrillers
Psychological Suspense/Thrillers

See the frustration? Blue Coyote is everywhere from A Slice of Americana to Favourite Books Of All Time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to be at the top of the heap, but I think this illustrates the difficulty authors have when it comes time to place the book in a genre. I guess the bottom line is that the reader will take whatever he/she feels is relevant to what they wanted or needed. But it sure can make it difficult for us!

Love to know your thoughts. Please feel free to email me at dianne@dianneharman.com And thanks for taking the time to read this!
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Thanks to Dianne for sharing her writing.
As part of the All Author Blog Blitz, I’m featured by another writer, Penelope Silvers.
You can find my post on working through the clichés and fillers at her site, philosbooks.com.