The most disheartening rejection I ever received was also the most honest. Two publishers looked at The Unseen Hand in their boardrooms, a book my co-author and I had spent years writing, a book we believed in completely, and said, simply: We don’t know how to sell it.
Not: we don’t like it. Not: it isn’t good enough. We don’t know how to sell it. The book was too dark for romance. Too romantic for dark fantasy. Too literary for genre fiction. Too explicit for literary fiction. Too complicated for the readers who wanted simple pleasure and too pleasurable for the readers who wanted complication. It sat in the middle of four or five categories and did not belong entirely to any of them, and the publishing industry, which is built on predictability, did not know where to place it. So they put it on none. We self-published. It took two additional years to lay the book out, get it printed, and run a Kickstarter campaign. The project was funded in three days.
When we were shopping the book in 2018, the word romantasy did not yet exist as a marketing category. The shelf that The Unseen Hand was built for had not been built yet. Within two years, books with similar DNA (dark, romantic, fantastical, adult) were selling millions of copies, winning awards, dominating BookTok, and generating a genre label that suddenly made sense of what we had been trying to describe to publishers. The shelf arrived. It arrived too late for our book, but it arrived. And even now, with the label available, The Unseen Hand would still be a hard fit. It has threads of romance, but the plot is closer to Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon than to anything the romantasy shelf currently holds: too complex, too adult, too uninterested in hand holding the reader. Being ahead of a genre is functionally identical to being outside of it. The market does not reward you for being early. It rewards you for being timely.
The truth is, I have always read across boundaries, between shelves, and in the spaces where genres bleed into each other. The books I love most are the ones I cannot describe in a single sentence. They are the ones that make me reach for three or four genre labels and then give up and say just read it. I write the same way I read. That is either a strength or a marketing problem, depending on who you ask.
At this point, I have made my peace with it. Writing a book is hard enough. Writing a book that works, that holds together across 220,000 words and earns its darkness and its beauty and its theology, is the labor of years. I am not going to spend those years pigeonholing myself to fit a shelf that someone else built for someone else’s book. I write what calls to me. I follow the thread where it leads. If the result does not fit neatly into a genre, that is not a problem I am interested in solving anymore. Let the chips fall where they may. The book is what it is, and so am I.
I am telling this story because I am about to do it again.
Daevil’s Tears, the book I have been writing on and off for seven years, the book these blogposts have been slowly circling, does not fit on a shelf. It is dark fantasy. It is erotic fantasy. It is literary fiction with explicit content. It is Gothic Horror with a love story inside it. It is a theological novel about a cult that happens to be a sex cult, Bacchic, ritualized, theologically coherent, and the scenes of graphic sexuality are not interruptions to the story. They are the story. How do you write a book about a Bacchic cult while cutting to black every time the theology becomes physical? You can’t. Or at least I can’t. I have read books that tried. Richard Adams’s Maia is a novel about a sex slave that cuts to black so persistently it feels like a betrayal. It’s a book that chose its protagonist’s suffering as its central premise and then flinched every time the premise arrived on the page. I did not want to write that book. If the explicit content is where the power lives, then the prose has to go there and stay there and do its work in the light. It is a romance in which the romance is the mechanism of the tragedy. It is a 220,000-word literary novel with satyrs in it. Try putting that in a query letter. Try fitting that into Amazon’s category dropdown. Try explaining it to a bookseller who needs to know which table to put it on. Try telling your mother about your latest book.
The instinct, when you have written a book like this, is to sand down the edges until it fits. Pick a genre. Lean into it. Suppress the parts that don’t belong. Make the literary parts less literary so the romance readers don’t feel alienated. Make the erotic parts less explicit so the literary readers don’t feel embarrassed. Make the dark parts lighter. Make the complicated parts simpler. Make the book smaller until it fits on the shelf the industry has already built.
I tried this. It does not work. It does not work because the edges are not decorative. They are structural. The literary register is not an affectation layered over a genre romance. It is the instrument the book uses to do its work: the slow, patient, architecturally precise prose that lets the reader sink into a world so gradually that she does not notice the water rising until she is already submerged. The explicit content is not fan service bolted onto a fantasy plot. It is the mechanism by which the cult operates, the currency of its theology, the thing the protagonist is being seduced by and into. The darkness is not atmosphere. It is the argument. Take any of these away and you do not have a more marketable book. You have a different book, and a worse one, and one that no longer does the thing it was built to do.
So what do you do with a book that refuses to be sanded down?
You stop trying to find the shelf and start trying to find the reader.
This is not a sentimental claim. It is a practical one. The publishing industry sorts books by category because categories are how bookstores, algorithms, and marketing departments function. A book that fits neatly into a category can be described in a subtitle, shelved in an aisle, targeted to an audience that already knows it wants that kind of book. This system works brilliantly for books that fit. It does not work at all for books that don’t, and the history of literature is full of books that didn’t fit their moment and found their readers anyway. Sometimes years later, sometimes decades, sometimes only after the genre they belonged to had been invented by someone who came after them. The Marquis de Sade had to wait for the genre to be named after him.
Ouida’s In Maremma was too sensuous for the Victorians and too Victorian for the sensualists. It went out of print and stayed out of print for a century. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was too literary for horror and too horrifying for the literary establishment. It is now taught in every university in the English-speaking world. Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart was too explicit for epic fantasy and too epic for erotica. It built its own audience, one reader at a time, and that audience turned out to be enormous. The pattern is always the same: the book that does not fit is not a broken book. It is a book whose shelf has not been built yet.
I do not have the luxury of waiting for the shelf. I have a book that is nearly finished and a conviction, born from the Unseen Hand experience, that asking the traditional industry to figure out how to sell a book it cannot categorize is an exercise in futility. Whether I have a readership waiting for it is another matter. I honestly do not know. I have readers from my prior work, but prior work in a different register is not a guarantee of anything. I am toying with the idea of serialization. I have no idea if the book will be found. What I do know is that no one is going to find it for me, and no publisher is going to solve the shelf problem I have not been able to solve myself.
The question is not how do I sell this book? The question is who is the reader who already wants it and does not yet know it exists?
She is the reader who loved Kushiel’s Dart and wished it were darker. She is the reader who finished The Bloody Chamber and wanted more. She is the reader who keeps searching for literary dark fantasy on Amazon and finding books that are either literary or dark or fantasy but never all three at once. She is the reader who does not flinch at explicit content when the explicit content is doing real narrative work. She is the reader who wants a 220,000-word novel that trusts her intelligence, takes its time, and does not apologize for being what it is. She exists. There are more of her than the industry thinks, because the industry has never built a shelf for her, and a reader without a shelf is invisible to a system that can only see shelves.
This is why I am serializing Daevil’s Tears rather than querying it. Not because I have given up on traditional publishing. Because I have decided that finding the reader matters more than finding the shelf, and the tools for finding readers directly (serialization platforms, author blogs, audio narration, community) are now better than they have ever been. The shelf may come later. It may not. The reader does not need the shelf. She only needs the book, and a way to find it, and the assurance that the author did not sand anything down to make someone else comfortable.
I did not sand anything down. The book is what it is: dark and literary and explicit and theological and romantic and horrifying and huge and full of monsters both mortal and immortal. If that sentence makes you want to read it, you are the reader I wrote it for. If it doesn’t, there are other shelves, and they are well stocked, and I bear them no grudge.
The book that doesn’t fit on the shelf is not a failure of the book. It is a failure of the shelf. I would rather build a new one than cut the book to fit.
So here is what I will say about the book, since we live in the days of content advisories: the reader advisory for Daevil’s Tears is long. It is longer than I expected it to be when I started writing, and every item on it is there because the book required it, not because I was trying to shock anyone.
Content advisory: explicit sexual content, religious coercion, cult dynamics, engineered consent, drug use, power imbalance, ritualized sex, non-human partners, voyeurism, manipulation, violence, death, blood, theological horror, pregnancy.
The book starts slow. It earns your trust before it tests it. And then it climbs, and climbs, and climbs, and then it drops, and you will know when it drops because you will feel it in your chest. That is not a sales pitch. It is the most honest description of the reading experience I can give you.
Daevil’s Tears is Book One of The Laughing God. I am currently editing and writing forward. Book Two of the trilogy is already on its way. If you have been looking for a book that does not apologize for being dark, literary, explicit, theological, and patient, this is the one I wrote for you.
— Narcisse
