Authors, are You a Genre... or a Tone?

If you’re anything like me, you may have spent years trying to decide what genre you belong to.

Romance? Women’s fiction? Paranormal? Mystery? Cosy?

For a long time, I tried to squeeze my books into one of those categories. Some of them had ghosts, some had time travel, some were mysteries, and some were simply stories about women rebuilding their lives.

Eventually, I realised that I wasn’t really writing to a genre at all.

I was writing to a tone.

The tone stayed the same even when the ingredients changed. The stories were always character-driven, usually a little wry, and often about women sick of being sensible, ready to reclaim their lives.

Sometimes a ghost helped. Sometimes a time slip. Sometimes nothing magical happened at all.

But the story's flavour was always recognisable.

Once I stopped trying to force my books into one rigid category and instead focused on the tone of the stories I write, everything became much clearer.

And much easier to describe.

So if you’re a writer who has been tying yourself in knots trying to decide exactly where you fit on the genre shelves, it might be worth asking yourself a different question.

What if you’re not a genre at all?

What if you’re simply a tone?

Of course, when you upload your books to retailers, you still have to choose categories. The bookshops need their shelves, even if they’re digital ones.

But the best advice I can give is not to let those shelves dictate the kind of stories you write.

Choose the categories that seem closest, help readers find you, and then concentrate on writing the stories that feel natural in your own voice.

Because in the end, many readers don’t fall in love with a category.

They fall in love with a voice.

For what it’s worth, the description I eventually settled on for my own books is this:

Witty British fiction about women who are sick of being sensible.

It only took me eight years to realise that. 😉