Or, what if unlike the ones Cedar discussed, the book is spoiled before it’s even published, because the market changed?

I have the goal of publishing two books this year, and I have two written books that weren’t my usual style. The first, a romantic suspense, proceeds apace – I have an awesome cover, a decent blurb, keywords, and the last things that need to happen are the two interior illustrations and formatting. Yes, line art inside… my cover artist has this grin she’s getting as she’s contemplating the parameters I gave her. Which include: “I don’t really expect this to be a commercial success, so I’m not going to constrain you to what is most marketable. You get two pieces of interior art, and no constraints. Please experiment and play.”

(Note: just because it’s line art instead of a cover doesn’t mean it’s fast, cheap, or easy. Interior art is about half the work of cover art per piece, because it still has almost all the setup, and a good chunk of the same initial work. Think of it more like something that you pulled out of the oven early because you wanted it baked but not browned… the total time from deciding what you’re going to bake to food on the table is not that significantly different.)

Publishing the second book was always going to be harder; the story was never going to fit neatly into the reverse harem subgenre because it’s a deliberate deconstruction of the tropes, all played straight, with a lot of attention to things that make scifi readers happy (worldbuilding, economics, politics) but not so much for many romance readers. I haven’t read reverse harem in years, except for one guy who essentially started the genre and still puts out very fun books (Jan Stryvant), so I started hitting the bestseller list to see what it’s currently doing for marketing, cover, blurb, etc.

And I discovered that the subgenre has gone weird, strange, and devolved to mostly being a thin veneer of romance over blatant erotica. The current trend is to spend half the book obsessing over how one got into this fix, with pages and pages of formatting to make it look like you’re reading a text conversation (between two people who are both carrying the idiot-ball for an idiot-ball plot), and then half of it with the plot just as threadbare and idiotic, but instead of text messages and all the white space inbetween (twenty words in a page), it’s filled with erotica instead.

I feel like when I left the new genre of urban fantasy and it was full of Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, Terri Windling’s Borderland, and Charles De Lint’s Newford… and coming back a few years later when life settled down with more time to read… only to find that except for Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, it was now all Grrrl power being emotionally abusive to prove they were Strong Female Characters while sleeping with the monsters.

So, yes, the book is spoiled before it’s even out, because it may have been an odd take on what the subgenre used to be, but the subgenre has nothing in common with it now.

Dear friends who are alpha readers have pointed out that I don’t have to drop publication plans entirely: the book was already heavily slanted toward reader cookies that make scifi readers happily instead of romance readers, and scifi has a long history of playing what-if on sex and culture. After all, Sarah Hoyt just put out a lovely deconstruction of the Left Hand of Darkness with her Chronicles of Lost Elly…

So in this case, regrouping, retrenchment, and a vastly different cover (and likely title) to signal a completely different genre may yet help it find a home. Unlike spoiled fruit, my spouse doesn’t agree with me using it for a reactive target and then walking away…

And maybe, if I can correctly manage expectations, it’ll find the right reader… the one for whom it’s not ‘spoiled fruit’, but instead is ‘hard cider’, and gleefully enjoyed!