Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

Today’s guest post is by author Ann Garvin.

I’ll never forget the mortifying moment I realized that I’d written a book that crossed genres and was going to be hard to pitch to agents. I’d flown from Wisconsin to New York City for a conference, and it was my turn to talk.

Picture a poor-man’s American Idol situation. Two agents sat at a head table in a room typically used for dance practice and auditions. A cavernous place with shiny wood floors, tall velvet curtains, and an intimidating skyline said, Give it your best shot, Newbie.  My footsteps echoed as I walked toward them, my smile jittery, my palms wet.

“Hello,” I said. “On Maggie’s Watch is a book about a woman who lost her child in utero, is pregnant again, has moved back home because she thinks it’s the safest place to raise a child, and learns there’s a sex offender that lives on her street. One night, she decides it’s time to get him out of the neighborhood, and her plan is spotty at best. And “Oh,” I said, “It’s sad and funny.”

Silence.

The first agent blinked at me then said, “Sex offenders aren’t funny.”

“No. They are not funny,” I agreed. “Not at all.”

The other agent said, “There is no such thing as a funny book with these topics.” 

I thought, Yes, there is, it’s my book.

As I retreated from the room, no agent agreement in hand, I also thought, Never write another book that is funny and something else.

Although I am usually a fast learner, I did not take that American Idol moment to heart. When I sat down with a new idea the story came out exactly the way prose emerges from my brain—funny next to things that are decidedly not funny.

In 2016 I finished a book that was funny, sad, and scary. I no longer had an agent at that time and when I went out with it, I was told to pick a lane. Too many genres. Where would this go on the shelf? Nobody wanted it.

I shelved the book but never once forgot about it. I wanted that story out in the world and I was going to lay in wait with it until the right moment.

Fast forward to 2025. I’d published six funny and sad books with a large publisher, all with a little bit of a puzzle inside of it. A bit of mystery. A bit of crime.

I don’t think that readers suddenly discovered the ability to enjoy more than one emotional register at a time. I believe the market became better at naming and selling combinations that had previously been considered a positioning problem: Romantasy, Dark Romance, Cozy everything. Publishing had developed more language for telling readers what kind of experience they were buying.

I pulled out my shelved book and sent it to my agents with this description.

In 1990, college senior Jane Baye wrote to an incarcerated woman because she thought it was a nice thing to do. Twenty-five years later, unbeknownst to Jane, that felon is actually a man who has moved next door. He’s watching her every move, with a decades-long plan for Jane—a plot that a nice person, like Jane, would never see coming.

With an additional sentence, it’s funny.

My agents asked me why I wanted to write this book and I said, “Ultimately it’s a story about a woman who lost confidence in her ability to judge people. And how does a woman like this save the day, even though she’s not a Ninja and can’t stop dropping her keys. I think all of us need stories that make us laugh about ourselves because we are doing our best to keep our worlds spinning.”

My agents pitched it. My editor loved it and Tell Two Friends is being published on September 8, 2026, and you can buy it wherever books are sold.

Yes, this is a happy end to a long game of getting a story out into the world, but it begs the question. Ann, why do you insist on writing books that straddle genres and make publishers give you the side eye?

Here’s why.

I can’t not do it. It’s my voice, my brand, the only way I can write. I don’t intentionally set out to mix genres. Life can be very uncertain and often frightening and I tend to view most things as a little bit funny and a little bit sad. If I had to pick a lane I wouldn’t write. It wouldn’t be my point of view.

In publishing and writing, art imitates the life of readers who are living with mixed emotions every day. They can laugh on one page, worry on another, and not look askance at the genre and enjoy it all the same.

To be fair to publishing professionals, they must ask practical questions when considering a book for purchase. Who is the book for? How do we describe it? What books are comparable? How do we sell it? A cross-genre writer is asking publishing to do something hard.

If you’re going to write something that’s difficult to categorize, you need to become especially good at articulating what you’ve written. Understanding sales, marketing, and the business is as important as writing the stories you want. And it’s up to the author to figure out how your work fits in a market, and why the work fits in the market and why it matters. Being able to answer those questions makes it easier to pitch, position and advocate for.

I want to be clear: knowing how to position your book doesn’t mean changing the book to make it easier to position. Art is about pushing boundaries. Selling is about using language to set the stage, to make the unclear clear, to give our stories context and explain why we think they are important in the world.

Which takes me back to Tell Two Friends.

The manuscript that nobody knew where to put on a shelf hadn’t changed. The shelf became more flexible. Readers spoke with their purchasing habits, buying books that blend genre. Language became flexible and a book that was described as confusing is launching this fall.

When I tried to coach my younger self to never write another book that pushed the boundaries of bookshelves, I’m glad I didn’t listen. If I were to give advice to myself and others I’d say, write the book that sounds like you, that only you can write. Learn how to help people understand what you’ve written and where it will fit in their bookshelves.

It might take a minute for your time to come, but it’s worth the wait.