30 Days of Fiction Writing Tips: 1

I am giving you 30 days of fiction writing tips. Here’s day one. My first tip is that you must understand genre expectations.

Each fiction genre comes with its own expectations. These are the things that readers think they’re going to get when they pick up a book in this genre. So for example, if you pick up a cozy mystery book, you are going to expect a very different vibe than if you pick up something that is a modern mystery thriller.

It’s really important as an author that you understand the expectations of your genre or you’re going to have very disappointed readers. This doesn’t mean you always have to play by the rules, but you have to understand the rules if you’re going to understand how to break them. If you try and market your book to a genre that doesn’t fit and you don’t meet the expectations of those readers, you simply aren’t going to get very good reviews or very many sales.

So before you even begin putting pen to paper or fingers on a keyboard as it may be, make sure that you look up the genre that you want to write in. Understand everything about it from the tropes to the most popular books of recent years and what kind of things they contained. If you’re looking up all of these things and you find that the storyline you had in mind doesn’t actually fit, this might be a clue that your book is not in the genre you think it is.

This blog post was transcribed from the following video: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7297965926840945952

To watch the rest of the videos in this series and get 29 more tips, head here for day 30 and click through the links back to each previous video: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7308720383413325088