When I say military romance what do you think? I think a romance with military or former military characters. Apparently, when I say military romance, agents and editors are thinking something else. They’re thinking romantic suspense. Recently, I had a fantastic conversation with a fantastic Romantic suspense author about where my book fits in the market. When she read it, she was reading it like it was a romantic suspense but when I explained that it’s straight romance, she said it changed the way she looked at it.
What does this have to do with anything? It’s got to do with knowing where you fit. Which I apparently failed to do prior to sending my stuff out to the broader writing world
When I was pitching my books to agents, I was pitching with something to the effect of Suzanne Brockmann has written blah blah blah. So what I was doing was gearing agents up for reading this like it was a Suzanne Brockmann when in fact I write nothing like Suzanne Brockmann.
I don’t write R/S. In fact, I suck at it. Which means that when agents were looking at my stuff, they were expecting to see Suz and instead they saw what I was putting out there: straight romance.
It’s no wonder I was soundly rejected. So the lesson here is do your market research. What I discovered in my conversation with Roxanne was that there really isn’t a whole lot out there like my stuff, which can be really good, but if I use a pitch saying that I’m like so and so, I better make sure I’m sending the right message. Otherwise, it’s really bad.
So learn from this. Figure out where you fit in the market and be able to articulate that. Otherwise, you might be like me, banging my head against the wall.
