The Heart of Our Site: The Genre Guides
Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardour and attended with diligence.
Abigail Adams
This is where Written Well really outshines its competitors. We understand that from genre to genre, there can be big differences in how to effectively approach writing, designing, and advertising a book. That’s why we have complete guides to every major genre and most of their subgenres. We show you how the bestsellers in that genre are structured, what POVs and tenses they commonly employ, and how long they typically are. We list the tropes to use, what cliches to avoid, and the elements a book must have to be considered part of the genre.
We examine the covers closely, tracking font and color trends, size and placement of author name and title, and what these and the other cover components signal to potential readers. We list popular story structures and provide blueprints and story builders to get you started. We look at top sellers and break down their Amazon listings, looking for commonality in their descriptions and blurbs’ tone, structure, and use of bolding and italics.
And we do this for every genre.
But we’re not done. We examine the business, breaking down the last twelve months of the genre’s performance to gain perspective on where it’s trending and whether it’s a good genre for an indie to work in. We do a monthly live industry report detailing the trends and opportunities we’re seeing, both short-term and long, with time for questions at the end — because learning is at its best when it is interactive.
And we’re still not quite done.
Finally, for every genre, there are further study materials: books to read, sites to visit, resources both live and virtual that will be of help for a writer working on a book in that genre.
We spent a lot of time putting these guides together, and we update them constantly so that they stay current. If you’re writing a book without the information we’ve gathered — and continue to gather — for you, it’ll be like you’re typing with one hand behind your back.
No matter the genre, we can show you how to write and sell it.
