The Genre Promise and How To Stand Out
Before potential readers actually read your book, they're evaluating it, either consciously or sub-consciously. There are a lot of factors in that evaluation, but the three I want to focus on today are your Title, Cover, and Blurb.
I read a lot of books, and I can tell what genre I think your book is going to be based on those three things, as long as they agree, and your readers can too.
We'll use a popular book as an example, The Way of Kings.
The Cover
The Way of Kings cover signals that it's epic fantasy in several ways that are obvious, and several ways that are less obvious. The obvious ways are the outfits and weapons that they are holding (most people in the modern day don't fight with swords in metal armor). But it also suggests a vastly different world than ours, and presents implicit questions. Why is there a huge crack in the ground? What's up with those clouds?
It looks Earth-like, but off, which introduces intrigue and signals the kind of fantasy book that it's going to be. It also avoids the stereotypes of the genre by not showing Elves, Dwarves, or anything else that is typical to Tolkien-like fantasy.
It presents a fantasy world that feels unique because it doesn't conform to the standard expectation of what fantasy is, but still fits the model of what fantasy can be.
Even if Fantasy isn't your genre, you should strive with your cover to correctly portray your genre, but also subvert the standard for that genre in any way you can that is representative of what your book does.
One thing to make sure is that your book cover is also stylistically more in line with the YA or Adult covers of whatever genre you are writing in to avoid creating confusion about who the audience is.
The Title
The Way of Kings is a solid continuation of the genre promise. It mentions kings, which again conveys fantasy to us. It does more than that as well by hinting immediately that there's going to be big stakes and multiple kingdoms at play (Kings is plural).
But what gives us more of the EPIC part of the epic fantasy promise is actually the series title Book One of The Stormlight Archive. This gets us asking questions that are reasonable, like What is stormlight? The series title ending in Archive also shows the reader that this is going to be chronicling something that is historically relevant, but that happened a long time ago.
Archive just also feels like a very fantasy-ish word.
The Blurb
This is an absolutely killer blurb. It does several things that are very unique. Firstly, the blurb is in first person, while the book is written in third person. That in itself is not typical in the genre.
"I long for the days before the Last Desolation.
The age before the Heralds abandoned us and the Knights Radiant turned against us. A time when there was still magic in the world and honor in the hearts of men."
Secondly, it doesn't do what a lot of fantasy books do, which is throw a ton of proper nouns at you. For me personally after 3-4 new proper nouns I just check out. It says, Last Desolation, Herald, and Knights Radiant almost right away, and then it keeps everything in plain English. No names of countries or characters, nothing to throw off potential readers or confuse them. It introduces Surgebinding and Shardwielding at the end as well, but it leaves a lot of space without new terms for readers to get the gist of the story before it introduces more than 3 new in-world words.
"The world can change. Surgebinding and Shardwielding can return; the magics of ancient days can become ours again. These four people are key."
Regardless of your genre, try not to introduce too much information that you have to read the book to understand in your blurb, it puts readers off.
Make sure your blurb mentions things that are contained in the novel that are relevant to the genre. This is not only for readability, but it will help readers find the book organically on Amazon, where their search algorithm is going to look for whatever words readers are searching. For example, for a romance novel, you should definitely mention love, yearning, lust, etc. somewhere in your blurb.
With this being the first issue, if you have any feedback or thoughts related to the newsletter, whether that be the format or the contents, I'm open to suggestions!
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Thanks and happy writing!
Seth
