Hi everybody, it's Gina Holmes, a founder of Novel Rocket, the website for writers and that's www.novelrocket.com. I am also the author of Dryas Rain with Tindale House Publishers and my previously published Crossing Oceans. Today we're going to be talking about genres. One of the things that I notice new writers doing and I was guilty of this myself is you ask a writer what do you write and they get this deer in the headlights look about them and then they start stuttering and then they end up with something that's like well it's sort of women's fiction but it's sort of fantasy and it's got a touch of science fiction in it. This is the death now that is going to most likely be a very very difficult self for you and the reason is that publishers want to know what it is that they're publishing. They want to know where you're going to fit in on the bookshelf at Barnes and Noble. So if you would like to be published with a you know a traditional publisher and a traditional publisher is going to be someone who haves you in advance you get royalties and will actually get you in the bookstores and that's there are a few exceptions to all of that before I get any weird mail about it. You're going to want to write within within one genre most likely now there are some exceptions there is romantic suspense which is sort of a cross genre category but for the most part there are some basic categories and you're going to want to sort of write within one of them to give you the best shot of getting published. Women's fiction and women's fiction is going to be fiction for women about women's issues, suspense, science fiction, fantasy, young adult and within young adult and different age type genres like middle grade readers there will be you know different there will be fantasy within them and science fiction or whatever. The thing is to know your genre so if your book my first book which was not published was somewhere between women's fiction and suspense and I did not have that published it was something that didn't fit in anywhere and there are going to be exceptions to this people that break their rules but for most of us that's not going to be the case for most of us we need to pick a genre. I started writing cross genre women's fiction and suspense and then realized I wasn't getting anywhere when I went to writers conferences and pitched it to agents and so I learned that I needed to write within a genre and so I picked suspense. I wrote a few books in suspense that weren't published and then I tried something new and now I've I've poked by first book Crossing Oceans was published within its women's fiction and that's the genre I've fallen into. Know your genre so that when somebody asks you what do you write you can say I write women's fiction I write fantasy I write science fiction and you cannot have that deer in the headlights look you can have this confidence that you know what you're doing you're not a novice you're ready to be published and in order to know your genre if you're not sure send your stuff to friends and say what genre do you think this would fall into is this women's fiction if they can't decide either you probably have some work to do on your manuscript if you want to write women's fiction then read a bunch of women's fiction read as much as you can and sort of figure out if your stuff really does fall in that. So know your genre and each genre is going to have different word counts historical fiction is going to allow longer word count then say a cozy mystery which would be shorter so you want to know about the word count you want to know what type of things ought to be in this book if you're writing romance there's certain elements that ought to be in there so know your genre before you go to sell your manuscript and really ideally before you even write it so that way when you go to sell it publishers won't give you this sort of curious look of I don't know what you're talking about I don't know how this fits in it really is the death now so know your genre and it'll save you a lot of time and aggravation hope to see you on novel rocket bye.