I'm delighted to have an author's interview featured today with Omnimystery News, the website that is the portal to all you'd want to know about mystery books, movies, television shows, and games.
It was a really fun interview to do. Here's an excerpt:
Omnimystery News: On your last visit we introduced Town Haunts as a cozy mystery with romantic elements. Is that an accurate description?
Photo provided courtesy of
Cathy Spencer
Cathy Spencer: I would categorize my Anna Nolan mystery series as a cozy mystery, although I also label it as a romantic suspense on the e-retailer sites I use. My books are cross-over mysteries with romantic story lines, and I'm glad to be able to tap into the romance audience as well. The advantage to having a cross-over is that mystery and romance are currently the best-sellers of genre fiction. The disadvantage is that because the mystery and romance markets are so huge, it becomes harder for an author to be discovered. A nice little sub-genre in which you are one of a much smaller pool of authors ‒ mysteries thrillers where the police detective is a reincarnated Egyptian pharaoh, for example ‒ might ultimately result in more recognition and book sales. The problem for me is that I'm drawn to writing cozies with an amateur female sleuth who owns a dog, so, for this series at least, I'm a very small fish in a very big pond.
The other problem with being categorized by a genre is that you must play fair with the expectations of the readers. For example, in the second book of the series, Town Haunts, I was toying with two of the major characters having an important conversation during a sex scene. However, I polled readers on the Amazon and Goodreads sites and discovered that cozy mystery readers don't want sex scenes in their stories. Had I included that scene, I wouldn't in good conscience have been able to call that book a cozy, and since I didn't want to change genres mid-series, the dialogue was held over breakfast the next morning instead. So genres do impose restrictions on the author.
The other problem with being categorized by a genre is that you must play fair with the expectations of the readers. For example, in the second book of the series, Town Haunts, I was toying with two of the major characters having an important conversation during a sex scene. However, I polled readers on the Amazon and Goodreads sites and discovered that cozy mystery readers don't want sex scenes in their stories. Had I included that scene, I wouldn't in good conscience have been able to call that book a cozy, and since I didn't want to change genres mid-series, the dialogue was held over breakfast the next morning instead. So genres do impose restrictions on the author.
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