Our super talented intern Laurel Janeen Smith is back at it, and getting saucier as she goes. For those of you who missed the final party, she's got a blog slated for that as well... Thanks, all, for making this the biggest, best Lit Fest ever.
[caption id="attachment_558" align="alignleft" width="510" caption="Carleen Brice, Mario Acevedo, and William Haywood Henderson speak to a narrow room about narrow categories."]
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Andrea opened up the salon with a very controversial question: Is it niche (nitch) or niche (neesh)? The audience was split which surprised me because we all know its niche (nitch) right? This was not the only unanswered question of the evening. I myself left the Wynkoop brewery wondering if the advantages of having niche outweigh the often pain in the ass expectations it can bring with it.
We all just want to write, but in this day and age writers are expected to help with the marketing of their own books. Putting a book in a niche helps to market to a very specific audience that is more likely to be interested in the book than if it was marketed to the masses. But as writers we don’t to want to write to fit a formula, we just want to write what compels and obsesses us.
The salon In and Out of the Niche featured three panelists who have all been niched and lived to tell about it. Author Carleen Brice’s niche has less to do with her writing, and more do to do with the fact that she’s black. She writes fiction, a lot of which, according to her readers, has nothing to do with race. Sill her books are usually found snuggled in the black author section of bookstores.
Mario Acevedo, accomplished vampire writer and president of the local chapter of Mystery Writers of America, almost suffered the same fate as Carleen, only instead of the black shelf, he was destined for the Latino shelf via his imprint, Rayo. Fortunately, after trial and error Mario’s publishers realized Latino readers, even though they are Latino, don’t look for vampire books in the Latino section and Mario ended up being more appropriately categorized as “urban fantasy.”
Bill Henderson’s self-described niche is gay/straight/western/woman’s/cowboy/historical/landscape, whatever that means. When Bill went on to publish his first book he had the choice of what bookshelf it would end up on. A small press and a gay publishing company were both interested but he went with the gay press because they had more money. The book wasn’t exactly a typical gay novel, it just happened to have one gay character.
The authors all found creative ways to either get past their niche or embrace it. Carleen embraced it creating the blog White Readers Meet Black Authors which includes a very funny video officially welcoming white folks like me to the black author section of the bookstore. This way Carleen is able to keep her key marketing group and appeal to a wider audience. Mario took a less subtle approach to getting past his niche with his book titles. Anyone browsing titles like The Undead Kama Sutra, Jailbait Zombie and The Nymphos of Rocky Flats knows that they can’t be just your average vampire stories. Mario does admit that his book titles keep him out of high school libraries but who cares; they’re brilliant. Bill’s approach to escaping the niche is probably the simplest: he just keeps writing what he loves to write. His second book had no gay characters in it and is set in the West, but is not a western and publishers had a hard time categorizing it and that’s just the way it should be. Bill sometimes regrets going to the gay press for his first book, but in the end does it matter? Bill is a successful writer, great teacher and writes what he wants. Enough for me.
Whether or not taking on the niche is right for you I don’t know, I think that’s a rather personal question. All our panelists did it and managed to not be too constrained by it. Bill wrote two books after is first “gay” novel, neither of which are “gay.” Mario has considered the young adult genre and Carleen is looking at doing a graphic novel.
Keep up with these guys because I expect we will be seeing a lot them in the future. I highly recommend checking out Mario’s Zombie Lego videos . You can catch Bill's website here.
Cheers,
Laurel
