As we’ve started to talk about marketing, we’ve mentioned how important your genre is. Your genre gives you a built-in audience—with built-in expectations of books in that genre. Those expectations will vary with the genre. In genres that have a fairly standard plot formula—romance (cute meet, conflict, HEA), mystery (crime, investigation, unmasking the criminal), etc.—that’s certainly part of the expectation, but in every genre there are even smaller expectations that we must fulfill to give our readers a good reading experience.
On the macro level, as we talked about in marketing,
we give readers an experience they want: excitement, fun, connection, contemplation, novelty, etc. That “emotional interest” that nonfiction creates is built in for fiction: it’s emotion itself.
Or as author/blogger/marketer Kristin Lamb wrote also last week:
Why do readers buy fiction?
One of the reasons readers are so loyal to authors is because of how that author’s stories made them feel. James Rollins makes me feel like I’ve had an exciting adventure. Sandra Brown makes me feel love is worth fighting for. Amy Tan makes me feel hope and power. J.K. Rowling’s stories make me feel heroic.
Fiction authors are brokers of passionate emotion.
While these emotional experiences are important on the story-level, we need to remember the experiences readers want on each page, or we run the risk of readers giving up on our books long before we can show them the story-level emotional experience.
Rewards Per Page
While we might not be able to fully capture heroism or adventure on a single page, or on every page, there are many, many other emotional experiences that “reward” readers on every page. Vince Mooney points out that a reader “is buying a ‘basket of feelings'” (though he narrows this to romance readers, I really feel it applies to all genres). Beyond the overall payoff of the plot, Vince says that every page should hold “rewards” for the reader—and after studying more than a thousand novels (hello, corpus literature!), he’s come up with 100 types of page-level rewards for readers.
Here are a couple of my favorites rewards he shared on Prairie Writer Chicks and Seekerville:
- Give the reader new experiences, or interesting little factoids
- Anticipatory Events (AEs): create situations in which the reader looks forward to finding the resolution. (And paying them off, especially quickly.)
- Sparkle—beautiful, fresh writing
- Humor
Vince also suggests looking at your own manuscript to find how many rewards you’re giving to your reader per page.
While the ones he lists on those blogs are fairly universal, there are going to be many rewards that vary by genre. Just as the emotional experiences readers are looking for depends on the genre, the payoffs and rewards do, too.
For example, in a romance, a romantic gesture, especially one tailored to these characters and this situation, rewards not just the characters but the readers, too. (EX: after a fight, he sends her favorite flowers, rhododendron—or better yet, mindful of her flower and food allergies, he sends a GFCFSF cookie basket.)
In a mystery, on the other hand, finding a clue is a type of reward. It can be even better if it’s a clue only a very attentive reader would notice—if the main character is distracted or has a very good explanation for it (making your characters look dumb to make a reader feel smart is not a reward—it’s actually frustrating for the reader). This might be considered a variety of an anticipated event.
And as with all other genre expectations, the best way to figure out the rewards that are most applicable to your genre is to read widely within your genre.
What do you think? What kind of rewards do you see in your genre?
Photo credits: I <3 Mr. Darcy by Jamelah E.; rhododendron by D. Mott
