How do you describe a book that crosses over into multiple genres? It’s a question that many authors have as they start to package and market their books. Today author Chet Williamson shares his experience in launching Second Chance as a NOOK Book, and how republishing his title gave him an opportunity to expand his audience:

When I finished Second Chance, I felt I had done something special. It was a book that was very meaningful to me, since there was more of my own personal history in it than anything I’d written before. It dealt with the broken dreams of my generation, and with the perils of ignoring what we were doing to the planet, all of which was framed in an alternate world fantasy in which two people who had supposedly died in the late sixties were miraculously brought back to life. Their existence in a world in which they had previously been dead changes everything, not only for the main characters, but also for the future of mankind. The love story, based on the myth of Orpheus bringing his love Eurydice back from the land of the dead, was a central part of the book, as was the search for and the scheme of the ecoterrorist known as Pan.

All well and good, but there’s one problem: how do you slot this title?

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define. Was it fantasy? Well, of course — the basic time-travel/alternate world plot was proof of that. Was it horror? It certainly had some horrific moments, yes. Was it suspense? Absolutely, with its search for a ticking human time bomb. Was it a love story? Yep, since Woody’s love for his dead girlfriend sets all the gears in motion.

So what do we call this? Well, how about an ecoterrorist time-travel fantasy thriller romance (if you didn’t run out of breath)? There was so much here, so many elements that would appeal to so many different readers, that I thought publishers would be able to stifle their usual preference for single genre novels. So did my agent at the time, a hardened New York pro who said that this book was one of only a few that actually brought tears to his eyes, and that he was going to sell this one big.

He was, alas, wrong. I knew the book was going to be a tough sell to publishers. Although my short fiction spanned many genres (I sold humor to The New Yorker, mainstream stories to Playboy, science fiction to Magazine of F&SF and Twilight Zone, and mysteries to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine), my previous novels had been mainly in the horror genre, and I knew that once you were linked with a certain genre, editors (and some readers) expected you to continue there. To prove me sadly correct, in came the letters from editors who agreed that the book was something special, but therein lay the problem. They confessed that they wouldn’t know how to market it.

It eventually sold to a top-tier small press that specialized in horror, and was published as a limited edition hardcover to uniformly positive reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, Locus, Magazine of F&SF, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and others, necessitating a rare second printing. The book later sold to a mass market paperback publisher, who published  it as (you guessed it) a straight horror novel. And now it’s available as a Nook ebook, where I’m sure it feels right at home on Nooks that hold hundreds of different books and genres, be they thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, or romance. Second Chance, my personal favorite of all my novels, has found a multi-genre home at last.

Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking. When I read a book, I like to be surprised. I don’t want to read the same genre formula that I’ve read a hundred times before. And, I’ve discovered, those are the kind of books I like to write as well. If I had stayed purely a horror writer or thriller writer, I might have more of a presence in those particular genres, and I’d certainly have more individual titles to market, since it’s much easier to write pure genre fiction than it is to create something different. But if I did that, I think I’d be shortchanging not only my readers, but myself as well. Selling lots of books is fine, but what’s more important is writing books that you can be proud of, that take readers somewhere they haven’t been before, places to which they didn’t even know they wanted to go until they arrive.

If you’re that kind of reader, come join me. If you like fantasy, romance, suspense, adventure — all of the qualities that make for an exciting and involving story — give Second Chance a chance. I’d be honored to have you read it and let me know what you think.