No Pneumonia Here

"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." Kurt Vonnegut

Life is constant reinvention, at least for some of us intent on growing and exploring as much as possible. The same is true with writers not content to stay in a pigeon hole some publisher creates. Those who are content to do so generally do well with it, and that's great. There's a big audience for those well-promoted genres. The rest of us ... well, we have to figure out how to find an audience for our not-so-well-promoted little niches.

That's a long-winded way to say I've been playing with a new tagline for my LK books. I recently updated the artwork (headers and icon) for EMK, plus the tagline. Now it's on to revamping LK a bit. No, I've never been one to sit still well. I'm always looking for different and better. My daughter says "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" was written for me. As Loki said in in Thor: The Dark World, "I don't do satisfied." (from memory - could be a bit misquoted, but the gist is the same) I liked Loki better from that line forward. I get it.

I like my current tagline: Literary Romance with an Artsy Twist, but I don't think it's coming across well. "Literary" tends to turn people off, unless they love 700 page rambling insightful slow books (yes, I am one of those, at times). "Romance" turns people away unless they like the bodice-ripper kind of stories, or 100 page fast meet-and-fall in love books. I like romance. I'm a romantic. But I'm not really THAT kind of romantic. I'm somewhere between the two, which is what my tagline was supposed to say. I don't think it's working. So, my new tagline:

Conservative Fiction for the Intellectual Romantic

What do you think?

I put it out on my personal Facebook page to a limited group of people to ask their thoughts the other day. Most who replied loved it, said it made them stop and think, which is part of the idea. I did get some dissent, a good point that it would likely turn off more liberal readers. That's probably true, and I did consider as much, but as I explained, any reader "liberal enough" to let the tagline turn them away is likely not going to enjoy my work, anyway. Not everyone will. It is on the conservative side, although I have characters on all sides of all lines providing point and counterpoint, wider POVs than just my own. I don't like to read preachy fiction, so I don't write preachy fiction. I do write societal and cultural fiction. My main characters do tend to be on the conservative side. And why shouldn't they be? Liberal fiction is everywhere; liberality dominates current fiction. I know. I read plenty of it. One of my favorite authors has bent so far that direction, I stopped reading him. Point: not everyone wants that. A lot of us don't. Whereas we may enjoy reading different points of view that don't agree with our own, and I do think that's important, we don't necessarily want everything we read to tell us we're haughty, greedy, evil, stupid, etc. (yes, I have read plenty of fiction that says exactly that) because we're more conservative than the current tide.

I'm not trying to make love to the whole world when I write. I'm trying to tell a good, deep, well-rounded story with thoughts I ponder often and questions I constantly have. Some of it tends to be a bit more liberal and not all conservatives will agree with me. Overall, though, it is moderate conservative fiction, and I'd rather those on either extremist side not bother than to rant and rave about expecting one thing and getting something else (kind of like the new Deadpool ad that tells parents PLEASE DON'T take your minor children to see the movie and then rant about how horrible it was for them to see when it's rated R for a reason!).

Why shouldn't we have "conservative fiction" that is not "Christian fiction"? There's room for all of us.

As for the "intellectual romantic" part of the line, yes, my books are heavy on romance, but it's not genre romance. It's relationship development wrapped around a societal story. It's the why of two people coming together, how they deal with conflicts that threaten them being together, why they decide to overcome them or not, how others interfere, including family and friends. It's supposed to make a reader stop and think.

In short, I'd rather put out the call to those who want to philosophize a bit as they read, who are interested in varying viewpoints and will consider them, and who love a good story with in-depth characters who understand the value of morality and have differing ideas about how to best love one's neighbors than to attract a wider group of readers who very well won't be interested. One of my characters is fighting the effects of pneumonia, but I'd rather not.

[If you prefer shorter and a bit less philosophical/intellectual love stories, I have that in my Ella M. Kaye line. ;-) ]

Of course this means I'll need new artwork to match the new tagline...