Thursday, November 10, 2011

Genre Research

As part of the research I'm doing on my 'genre' I thought it might be instructive to take a look at the new releases in Christian fiction. This research came from the American Christian Fiction Writers blog.

There were 18 books on the new releases list, and 11 of the 18 (roughly 60% for those of you scoring at home) were some variation of Romance (Romance, Historical Romance, Mystery Romance) I don't write Romances, but that seems to be a lion share of what 'Christian fiction' is based up on the November new releases.

There were 3 Thriller/Suspense novels. The last 4 were 1 each of General fiction, Historical, speculative fiction, and Biblical fiction.

Dream Chaser would fall under General or Biblical fiction. I would have thought hat Biblical fiction would be fictionalizing a bible story, but the log line didn't seem to indicate that was the case, at least for the book being released. In fact, out of all the books, the one labeled 'biblical fiction' seemed closest to Dream Chaser.

I would have never thought that so much Christian fiction was wrapped up in romances, and it makes me a little more doubtful of Dream Chaser's chances, but then again, it's a first novel, so it didn't have great chances to begin with.

3 comments:

tinkerdixiebell said...

Genres are just categories. Don't worry about them. Your novel as well as many others may cross lines of many of them.
Check out this webs site.
http://www.bookmarket.com/debutnovels.htm for information on first time novel success. Part of the article reads..
969 fiction deals were reported at Publishers Marketplace in 2004. Of those deals, 137 were for first novels. That's 14% of all fiction deals. Of course, only a percentage of all deals are reported to Publishers Marketplace, but the percentage of first novel deals is still probably close to 10% of all novel deals in any one year.
Love you

Unknown said...

While those maybe debut novels, they very likely aren't the first novels those authors wrote. Most authors pen one or more novels that never see publication before they get their break. Of course, with self-pub that is changing, but I will wait until the book is done before I start worrying about all that.

Laurie Tom said...

I've heard it's usually the third or fourth novel an author writes that eventually becomes the debut novel.

The writer needed to write the earlier novels for practice, and by the later books is writing at a professional level.