Do you want to grow a profitable content business? If so, join 25,000 readers. I share daily insights about personal brand building, writing online and growing a profitable business. It's for creators, coaches and business owners.
What Gone Girl taught me about picking genres
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Hi Reader I obsessed over picking the right genre for a few years. Should I write science-fiction, thrillers, mysteries, non-fiction, dystopian horror…? Do I even need to pick a genre? The answer was a resounding YES. Genre is a helpful constraint for writers and their audiences. Try and self-publish a book on Amazon KDP and they’ll force you to pick two or three genres before it goes live. You must pick something that defines your work. Selecting a genre doesn’t mean producing something bland, boring, and generic. Understanding the conventions of a genre gives you confines to work within. If you’re writing a thriller, someone must die. If you’re writing science fiction, something fantastical must happen. It’s easier to write if you know what readers expect from a genre too. Picking a genre signals to readers what they’re in for. If you leave a convention out, you risk confusing readers and even attracting bad reviews. I enjoy reading science fiction, literary fiction, and autobiographies. (I don’t write in these genres, though.) Through writing, I discovered that I like writing books in these genres: business, personal development, memoir, and entrepreneurship. I got to work figuring out the conventions of each of these genres. Now, if I bought a book labelled as science-fiction and the author recounted the life of William Churchill, I’d feel short-changed. Gone Girl is one of my favorite books and movies. Here she is on the conventions of a thriller book: “A great thriller, to me, is more about creating a sense of unease: a queasiness that comes with knowing something is not quite right.” Flynn crosses a few genres, including mystery, noir, and suspense. She mastered one genre and moved neatly to the next without shortchanging her readers. Once you know what you’re doing, you can combine the conventions of different genres like Flynn. That’s often where the magic happens. I published an article detailing the most popular types of genre. Check it out. Write on, |
Letters From the Desk of Bryan Collins
Do you want to grow a profitable content business? If so, join 25,000 readers. I share daily insights about personal brand building, writing online and growing a profitable business. It's for creators, coaches and business owners.
Hi Reader Over a million of young Italians left their country in the past 10 years. These 25–34-year-olds are saying arrivederci to cities like Rome, Florence and Milan because of low salaries and job opportunities. A few years ago, Ireland faced the exact same problem. Thousands of Irish my age quit the country and boarded planes to countries like Australia and the US because the Irish government bailed out the banks. A good chunk of these emigrating Irish never came home. A few friends of...
Hi Reader, Forget the algo. Don't worry about going viral. The real action lies in building an email list or newsletter. Many paths to monetization exist for newsletter owners. Here's one: Build an email list, and you'll get invites to 3rd party bundles and promotions. I say no to most 3rd part promotions. They're either not a good fit or I don't believe they'll convert. But, I regularly partner up with InfoStack. If you haven't heard of them, they bundle courses and products from across the...
Hi Reader Google is facing BIG problems in 2025. And I don’t just mean the US Justice Department telling the boffins at Mountain View to sell off Chrome. Search is one of Google’s core products, and frankly, it’s broken. As a search user, finding what I want is harder because the results are often wrong, unhelpful, or take ages to wade through. As a content publisher and creator, ranking a site in search is harder because the algo favors Reddit and giga-chad brands like our ex-friends at...