The Genre

“It was a dark, moonless night. A woman screamed and shot rang out” I leaned back in my chair admiring my auspicious start. This would be easy, I gloated. That was, however, the very last time I would ever feel that writing a publishable novel would be easy. I backspaced over those first thirteen words and began to consider where I was going with my new book.

What would I write about? Since I was a CPA by profession, I could write about various accounting principles – both theory and practical applications. I yawned. Next, I considered a treatise on real estate development and the issues of community social needs, or financing approaches, or producing architecturally pleasing, as well as publicly acceptable, development efforts. After all, I had spent most of my adult life as a real estate developer. This would be more interesting – at least for me – but as I struggled to identify a potential market for such a work - especially in this particular period of time – I thought better of it. I know, I’ll write my autobiography. I yawned again - deeply. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I could write a novel – historically objective – but a novel. I was not interested in vampires, love stories or murder mysteries, a group of genres accounting for seemingly 90% of all books written – and, not to put too fine a point on it, read.

My reading interests are non-fiction – politics, money and banking, economics and history. As for fiction, I read hard science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) by the boat load. Well, there it was then, I would write the Great American novel combining these genres although with little hope of producing a best seller based on market realities. I soon learned that as the genres of politics, money and banking, economics and history were concerned, the average first-time author would have an-all-but fatal struggle finding an accepting audience. Could I be the exception? Well, I was willing to try. Of course I had an ace-in-the-hold, science fiction. SciFi is popular, and as far as I could tell, an easier genre for a new author to breach, although, most of the popularity in that group leaned toward fantasy, which I supposed accounted for the remaining 10% of fiction reader genre preference rather than my favored hard science fiction. On the other side of the coin of genre popularity, indications to me were that most writers were serving those popular genres leaving a less competitive field for me. Everything is relative, I thought. A few challenges, I admit, but I was determined.