Here I go again, writing myself into a hole. One of the problems I’ve always had is that, while I write books marketed as romance, they always contain a secondary plot that is either mystery or suspense. Sometimes both. Unfortunately, that secondary plot too often tries to take over the story to the detriment of the romance plot. This has never bothered me, of course. I love romantic suspense. I love suspense with secondary romance plots. I love mysteries with romance arcs spanning the series. I love pretty much anything that has a romance in it, however minor. I rarely worry about the number of pages devoted to the romance versus the number devoted to the rest of the story. After all, I cut my teeth on gothics in which you frequently couldn’t tell the hero from the villain until near the end of the tale.

My editors, however, always object strongly when the romance plot is not THE MAJOR ELEMENT OF THE STORY!!!! Sometimes I think they would be just as happy to lock the hero and heroine in a room and let them resolve their personal conflicts with no intrusion from the outside world. So I’m in the hole again. My characters are happily chasing after a thief, entirely focused on figuring out where he is likely to strike next. Their cooperation is drawing them closer emotionally, but I know from experience it won’t satisfy a New York editor since their idea of balance is tilted strongly toward the romance thread.

That is one of the more frustrating parts of today’s market. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s (nothing like revealing my age…), bookstores sold three categories of merchandise – fiction, non-fiction, and magazines. Non-fiction got shelved by topic, category romance was shelved with the magazines, but fiction was organized solely by author name. So (using today’s genre designations) my favorite romantic suspense, gothic, mystery, historical fiction, etc authors were jumbled together with westerns, science fiction, literary fiction, classics, etc, etc. The system made it easy to find the latest book by a particular author. It exposed browsers to a wide variety of fiction types. It meant that the only criteria for selling a manuscript was to write a gripping tale. But for readers looking for a particular type of story, it could be frustrating.

Which is one of the reasons bookstores don’t do that anymore. But shelving books by genre means you need specific parameters that define each genre so readers know what to expect when they pick up a romance, mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, western, etc. It means books that don’t easily fit into a specific genre are hard to shelve and thus hard to sell – so hard that many bookstores don’t even try. Over time, it has pushed publishers into paying more attention to genre expectations than to story. Other changes in the business have accelerated this trend to genre-oriented marketing. Editors wanting more best-sellers encourage authors to write books like (fill in the latest NYT title). Publishers are now divisions of international conglomerates who demand higher profits than publishing has historically produced, reducing risk-taking at all levels of the publishing industry and killing any idea of building an author slowly over time. Computers put sales numbers at everyone’s fingertips, accelerating this trend. Distributor consolidation makes it difficult to tailor title selection to different regional/neighborhood taste, increasing the emphasis on genre. Etc, etc.

The result is a fragmentation of the market into discrete little boxes that rarely overlap. As long as a manuscript fits neatly into one of these boxes, it has a decent chance of selling. Otherwise sales are much harder to come by – if it doesn’t have an easily understood handle, sales reps won’t push it, stores won’t know where to shelve it, and thus potential buyers won’t find it. Every few years, a fabulous tale comes along that is so good and so gripping that an editor will buy it despite that it doesn’t fit. With strong publisher support and an enthusiastic sales force pushing it to account buyers, it could zoom onto the bestseller lists, thus establishing a new genre. But that doesn’t happen very often, so most of us have to keep genre parameters firmly in mind. It’s no longer enough just to write a really good story. Pushing the box too far can kill potential sales.

All of which means, I have to restore the balance in my wip by deflecting my characters’ attention away from the thief and back to each other…