I started writing this as a reply to Kav’s comment on yesterday’s post, but it was getting long enough it deserved its own post, so that’s why you’re getting a real post instead of Open Mic Wednesday today.

Kav wrote: I would think that an author might gain more readers by doing both. If they captivate a contemporary reader that reader might just take a leap into the same author’s historical books because she loved the contemporary.

Starting out writing more than one genre can be helpful—instead of switching after building a name with only one type of books. For example, when I was in my teens and early twenties, I absolutely devoured every historical romance novel written by Julie Garwood and Catherine Coulter. Then, in the mid-1990s, both of them inexplicably switched to writing contemporary-set romantic suspense novels. I tried reading them, but I didn’t enjoy them (understand—up to that point in time, I had never read a contemporary romance novel in my life). In the last year or two, both JG and CC have each put out a new historical romance novel (not those that are pictured—those happen to be two of my favorite historicals from these authors). I was so excited, I got both in hardcover. And I was horribly disappointed in both—they were terrible. It’s not just that their writing style hasn’t changed since the ’80s/’90s (head hopping even to the servants and walk-on characters), but the stories were poorly thought through and executed—not even up to the standards set by the worst historical romance novels they wrote twenty or thirty years ago. So building a readership in one type of fiction doesn’t necessarily mean that those readers will follow them over into another genre. And I know that Garwood and Coulter have huge readership numbers for their romantic suspense novels (or they wouldn’t still have books coming out). But how many of those readers would make the switch to reading their non-suspenseful historical romance novels—even if their new ones were up to snuff?

Liz (Roving Reader) wrote: I must say that I prefer reading historicals…I think because I enjoy getting lost in a place and time completely different from my own.
I didn’t read a contemporary romance novel until I was in my late twenties. I grew up reading historical romance, from the time I got my hands on my mom’s Jude Deverauxes and Catherine Coulters when I was twelve or so. I tried reading the contemporaries, but I just didn’t enjoy them. I think it’s because it was easier for me to get completely lost in the reading experience with a historical because there weren’t things in it constantly reminding me of the real world. (And my favorites have always been medievals.)

It’s easier for me to read historicals that are set during time periods about which I don’t know as much—for example, I was never able to read anything set during the Civil War, and now I have a hard time reading anything set during the Regency era or that’s set aboard a ship, especially a Royal Navy ship…simply because I’m always checking their facts against what I know and the research I’ve done.

Because I read only historical romance when I was young, that’s what I tried writing. My problem was that not only did it come across as very juvenile (using all of the historical romance cliches found in YA books—the girl and her horse, the swooning, the mandatory complaining about the corset, the 20th century girl in costume, etc.), I got so caught up in the research that I’d “lose the plot” as the Brits are so fond of saying. I was more concerned about making sure I got the history right that I couldn’t mesh it with the fiction.

If I love reading historicals so much, why did I ever decide to try writing contemporaries?
In 1992, a fateful remark from my college best friend started me on a path that would eventually lead to Stand-In Groom—when out running errands one night we were merrily chatting about mutual friends, and Amy made the very innocent comment, “I wonder where we’ll all be in five years.” That night, I had a very vivid dream and spent most of the next day writing—about where she and I and these friends of ours would be five years down the road. I wrote about those characters for the next ten years—changing the names and location (that was the birth of Bonneterre) and coming up with hundreds of peripheral characters. . .including the ones who would become the main characters of the first two manuscripts I ever completed in the early 2000s. But even though I worked on that “story” for ten years that story was just for me—something entertaining but nothing I’d ever consider sharing with anyone else. I was still trying to write historicals—and reading only historical romances.

When I attended my first writing conference in 2001, I was developing these new Bonneterre characters while still writing the college-inspired “epic” (already at 200k words with no end in sight, as it was an episodic/follow-the-lives-of the-characters piece). When I left that conference knowing that God was calling me to pursue publishing, I came to a couple of decisions. First was that I needed to learn a lot more than I knew about writing, and to do that, I needed training—in the form of writing. Could I write something from start to finish? Could I do it using only one character’s viewpoint per scene? Could I actually finish a manuscript? Those questions led to the second decision—I needed to write something that would allow me to focus on the writing, not have me pulling out research books every five minutes to look something up. So I decided since I had a strong story idea with these new characters that had grown out of the college-story idea, I’d write their books.

But I’d never read a contemporary romance novel before—so how in the world was I supposed to write one? I went to the Christian bookstore and found a book called Danger in the Shadows. Sure, it was romantic suspense, but it was the only contemporary-set novel with some kind of romance premise that I could find. And I loved it. As I loved the remainder of the O’Malley series. And Susan May Warren’s first Deep Haven series. And Linda Windsor’s romantic comedies Along Came Jones and It Had to Be You. Suddenly, finding contemporary romance in the Christian market, I discovered I liked it. But I was still finding that I enjoyed reading historical romance just a little bit more.

It wasn’t until 2005, after I’d finished the first draft of Stand-In Groom—my fourth completed manuscript (all contemporaries)—and had a much better handle on what it takes to structure a story and write it from beginning to end, that I had an idea for a historical romance novel I thought I could really write. It was a different time period/setting than anything I’d ever tried before. And as I did research (already started a couple of years before when I wrote my senior literary criticism thesis, “Wealth and Social Status as a Theme in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice”), even though I got caught up in the research, it wasn’t for the sake of the history itself—everything that caught my interest did so because it was tying back into my characters or my plot or my setting. The difference was that I had come up with the story first—the history was just there to make the story better. (Whereas before, I’d been trying to come up with stories to fit the history I loved so much.)

Which do I now prefer reading/writing?
I can honestly say I enjoy writing the historicals as much as the contemporaries. Sure, they take a little more work—but it’s work that I thoroughly enjoy (especially when I can take my time doing it!).

As far as reading . . . by just looking at my bookshelves, it’s easy to see that I still enjoy reading historical romance more than contemporary romance—in my office, I have about one and a third shelves of CR and three shelves of HR. On my Kindle, I have 116 titles of historical romance (at least half of which are samples, not full books, only about 1/3 of which are Christian fiction) and 29 titles that are contemporary romance (most of which are full books, about half-and-half general-market and inspirational, but which also include four of my own books as PDF galleys).

Would you follow a favorite author over into another genre, even if it’s a genre you typically don’t enjoy reading? Writers, would you try writing a genre you don’t usually enjoy reading?