26 June 2007

REPOST 1/28/2007 Inter-racial romance?

It's amazing the mistakes people make in this business. Let me fill you in on the latest I've seen.

Publisher A (nameless for the protection of the poor authors with her) INSISTS that inter-racial romance/erotica includes paranormals like weres and vampires. Not CAN overlap... That a human with a were or vampire is inter-racial romance. NOT!

Okay...let's start at the beginning. You CAN have overlap, and I won't deny it. If your werewolf is an Apache, and your heroine is a Caucasian, you have an inter-racial mix in a paranormal setting...and at least the potential to have racial strife, if it fits your characters. If both are Caucasian, you don't have it. I don't care what color the were's pelt is!

Weres, vampires and other fantasy/paranormal creatures, whether they were born to their fantasy form or converted from human form, are a different SPECIES than humans are. If you have a vampire with a human, a were with a human, a vamp with a werewolf...an alien in the mix somewhere... You name it... What you have is inter-species romance/erotica. (No jokes about inter-species erotica, please. I saw Clerks II, as well. Grinning...)

Now, as I said, it is POSSIBLE to have both inter-racial and inter-species in the SAME book. But, just because a couple is human and non-human does not make the book inter-racial. It makes the book inter-species.

The last thing you want to do is hack off the readers by calling your book the wrong thing. There are expectations to genres. Do yourself a favor and use them correctly.

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