Morgan Clasper Author

Picture this: You’ve finished writing your magnum opus. It’s a fantasy epic with romance, spaceships, and a murder mystery. Or, like one author I follow, you’ve written a supernatural archaeological thriller with pyramids and werewolves.

But when it comes to publishing and marketing your book, you run into an issue: you have so many different genres packed into your story, you have no idea who to sell it to.

Authors with genre-bending or multi-genre books often feel this frustration. Your book might feel impossible to categorize, or defy being forced into a neat little box. But when you try to market it, readers have no idea what kind of story they’re looking at—and as a result, they don’t buy.

So if you have a book that feels too unique to fit into a single category, how do you approach marketing it?

A unique problem—and a big mistake

Book marketing is organized around genres. Amazon’s categories exist to group similar books together—fantasy in one pile, thrillers in another, romance in a third—and certain niches have evolved over the years, each with dedicated fanbases.

You might have a fantasy romance novel, but some readers only enjoy epic fantasy and don’t care about your love triangles and drawn-out romantic pining. Other readers are looking for passionate romance and don’t care for deep worldbuilding and complex magic systems.

For authors with a book that crosses multiple genre lines, it can feel impossible to know where your book fits.

One big mistake is trying to appeal to everyone. If you try to appeal to multiple genres simultaneously, you risk creating book packaging (that’s things like your cover, title, blurb, and metadata) that gives mixed messages, resulting in reader confusion.

Additionally, marketing to multiple genres risks drawing in readers who only kind of like the book you’ve written. This can lead to disappointed reviews that begin with “I don’t normally read this kind of book…”

Worse still, if Amazon’s algorithm can’t figure out who to recommend your book to, it may just give up.

Pick a primary angle

I cover this in my free copywriting book for authors. Every book description presents a filtered version of your plot. It highlights certain elements, while leaving out others.

Because of this, it’s possible to position a multi-genre book with one primary genre and audience.

I call this finding your Angle of Attack. To see it in action, let’s say you have an epic fantasy novel that includes these elements:

• A romantic subplot.
• Political intrigue involving a threat against the realm’s monarch.
• A world-changing war between the forces of light and darkness.
• A complex hard-magic system and deep worldbuilding.

Finding your Angle of Attack involves deciding what your story ultimately centers on. If your book is a romance-first, fantasy-second kind of story, your Angle of Attack could be the romantic element. If it’s a sweeping epic like Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire, the war or the political intrigue may be the better angle.

• “A forbidden relationship that could destroy everything.”
• “Unmasking a secret plot to overthrow the crown.”
• “A war that will decide the fate of the realm’s kingdoms.”

Each Angle of Attack gives you a different direction for writing the blurb, and it shapes how your book will appear to readers. If you focus on the romantic subplot, but your book is really centered on courtly politics, you risk giving readers the wrong impression.

Use “X meets Y”

This is a powerful technique for quickly communicating a book that’s otherwise tricky to explain. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but to reiterate, you can use comparisons to build a mental picture in readers’ minds.

The best example I ever saw of this was “James Bond meets Cthulhu”. This tagline already tells us so much: classic British spy thriller plus underwater eldritch horror. It gives us an idea of the tone, the setting, the atmosphere, even the characters, all in four simple words.

To use the aforementioned supernatural archaeological thriller, here’s how Chris Fox describes it: “It’s like Indiana Jones went through the Stargate and ended up in Aliens versus Predator.”

An added benefit of this technique is that it builds positive connections in the minds of readers between your book and media they already enjoy. You’re essentially saying, “If you liked that, you’ll love my book!”

To use this method, pick two or more different books, movies, or IPs that represent aspects of your book. Then, combine them in an X meets Y format to highlight the unique combination.

As a caveat, one risk of using this method is that it does invite “negative comparison”. If readers don’t feel like your book lives up to the promise, then this could be reflected in your reviews.

Focus on overarching concepts

“I don’t know how to market my story because it’s so unique!”

I’ve often heard this complaint. Maybe you have truly written something that not a single other soul throughout human history has ever thought of, but probably not.

And that’s a good thing.

You may fear that not being “original” makes you a copycat or lacking in creativity; however, readers typically don’t want something that’s unlike anything they’ve ever read. Most people want more of what they already enjoy. Even the word original means a return to the origin, not something entirely innovative.

By relating your book to existing media or genres, you can promise them a mix of familiarity and uniqueness.

To do this, it helps to focus on overarching themes or plot points. I saw one author on Reddit who was trying to market their book based on the fact it had a species of plant people. That’s a cool detail, for sure, but it’s not necessarily a major selling point for the blurb.

Readers buy for a core type of experience. That might be a fantasy quest, a love story, a spacefaring adventure, or a puzzling mystery to solve. Focusing on the big picture, rather than individual details, can help you position your book in a way that readers will instantly understand, regardless of how many genre lines you cross.

Conclusion

Marketing a multi-genre book can be a tricky task. Instead of casting your net too wide and trying to appeal to everyone (a sure-fire recipe for disaster!), it helps if you can:

• Find your Angle of Attack and pick a primary genre to target
• Use an X meets Y formula to relate your book to existing well-known media
• And focus on your overarching concepts instead of getting lost in the weeds of your story

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