What if vampires and werewolves were really best friends?

When people hear that write paranormal romance their immediate reaction is always one of two… “Oh I don’t care for those vampire stories” or “OMG! Like Twilight?! I loved Twilight!…”

The problem is that my paranormal romances have nothing to do with vampires or werewolves or shapeshifters.  Not that I have anything against those books.  I didn’t particularly care for the Twilight series after the first book but that was more because in my opinion they were not well written. I love Christine Feehan’s Carpathian series (as well as her other series) and Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunters.  Lynsay Sands Argeneau series is fabulous as well.  There are other wonderful authors I could add to the list who do wonderful things with vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters and fae creatures as well.  I, however, am not one of those authors.

My characters are normal people with normal lives (well as  normal as those with law enforcement type careers get) who happen to have extraordinary psychic abilities. Unfortunately there really isn’t a genre out there to fit what I right…sort of like the rest of my square peg in a round hole life.Contemporary or adventure genres are’t quite right because of the psychic aspects and while they are definitely for adults they really don’t qualify as erotica either.

The reason I bring this up is that it illustrates another reason why I self publish and another important issue for those seeking traditional publication.  You have to know who your audience is and what section of the market you are trying to get a piece of. 

You can’t write a story or an article or a novel and shop it to the four corners of the publishing world hoping for the best.  Utilize the internet, the Writer’s Market and other such publications to research the parameters of the genres you feel fit your writing.  You don’t want to submit a query for your sci-fi novel to an agent who handles romance short stories anymore than you would submit an article on dentistry to an architecture magazine.  All fiction is not the same and no matter how well written and interesting your work may be you will be wasting your time and energy if you don’t do your homework before submitting it.