Changing Genres: From Romance to Sci-Fi Debut, by Alexis Hall

I’ve written over thirty books.

Most of them have been somewhere in the romance space. And I’m going to level with you,

whenever I write something that’s not pitched into that space, I always get a bit twitchy. Because I’m very aware that romance is, in some circles, seen as a rather deprecated genre and so when I get asked “what’s it like moving out of romance and into this other field” I can’t help but hear it with undertones of “what’s it like to have written a proper book?”

It's very possible that this is a me problem.

If it is a me problem, though, then I think part of the reason I get it is that I actually find it quite hard to talk about the differences between writing romance and writing, say, fantasy or cosy mystery or that one short story I did about superheroes because the honest answer, the totally honest answer, is that it’s about 96% the same and of the 4% that’s different, 3% is probably more to do with working for a different publisher than working in a different genre. Writing, at the end of the day, is a job like any other and differences in workplace culture can have an enormous impact on how doing the job feels.

I suppose I’m exaggerating a little. On a very literal level, there are some very clear and obvious differences between a book about a single mother who goes on a TV baking show and a story about hunting space whales in the storm-wracked atmosphere of Jupiter. One of them has more buns, the other has more spaceships, but those differences are almost entirely cosmetic.

If you want to get really inside baseball about it, there are some quite high-level industry-style distinctions between working with an SFF publisher and working with a romance publisher, and I suppose there’s actually some quite interesting things to think about there. I started out not only in romance, but in small press romance nudging up against the borders of self-publishing, and that’s a market that sets a very high cadence for publication. My SFF publishers, I think, honestly feel that I’m pushing it a bit with one book a year, whereas I started out in an environment that assumed you were dead if you didn’t put out something new at least every six months.

But in terms of the actual meat and potatoes business of writing, the words-on-paper stuff,

the—and I’m slightly too British not to feel slightly self-conscious about this language—art

stuff, that’s the same no matter what. I don’t approach the basic act of storytelling differently

when I’m writing about kissing than when I’m writing about swordfights, and I think it would

be rather odd if I did.