I don’t have a lot of career regrets but I I do have one:

-I wish I had conformed just a bit more with genre conventions.

Having work where everyone is like “it’s kind of contemporary but kind of not” isn’t quirky & unique like I thought. Its devastatingly terrible marketing.

Am I a contemporary author? Am I a thriller author? Am I a cozy sci-if author? Who knows.

I inadvertently created a situation where my entire brand is my personhood. And people without access to that have a hard time getting exposed to why they should pick up my work.

And like....my personhood is pretty ok, like you guys all seem to like me fine.

But I think it might have been smarter, as a midlist author, to be able to build on a tower of reader expectations with a strong singular genre convention for my work, than what I decided to do.

And what I decided to do was “whatever I want” and that absolutely had a price.

I just wasn’t really as cognizant of it until today.

Additionally, I get a ton of “I can’t describe it it’s so good just read it” reviews which I 100% deserve and understand. TWK & TWOTS were wild.

But maybe if I wrote stuff that people COULD actually describe, my reviews would function a bit better as marketing.