Traditional publishing is great. Authors write books. Publishers publish books. Readers buy and read books. Yay, getting paid to write stories!
But, when you walk into book stores, everything is… well… shelved.
And those shelves are organized, and narrow and divisive. Here is the adult section, and here is the SF/F, and here is the kids section and they’re all just so…
Separate.
So, what do you do when, like me, you’re a bit of a genre-market-blender? Okay, not so much a blender as much as a throw it in the Magic Bullet and see what comes out-er. Man, I am a genre/market smoothier.
That’s great for books, great for readers, and great for me. It’s always fascinating to do something interesting, twisted, a little left of center. And my readers always appreciate knowing that when they pick up a book by J.M. Frey’s going to be clever, and meta, and tongue-in-cheek, and not quite the center of normal for that genre/age range.
But it makes it hard to sell to traditional houses because the books I write are by default difficult to market. I am difficult to shelve.
The work I write simply rarely falls into neat and easy categories. And this is, in part, why I’ve decided to be a hybrid author.
