One thing I struggled with when I first started marketing my book was that I was marketing it as a dark fantasy romance.
Which, yes, it’s dark fantasy.
There are:
- Vampyrs
- Demons
- Fallen angels (these are different!)
- Demi-gods
- Angels
- Fae
- Floating skulls
- Purple skies
- Wolves
- Heavy world-building
- And various other cryptids and creatures that probably shouldn’t be allowed unsupervised.
But romance?
There is romance in the book. There is yearning. There are relationships that are incredibly important to the story.
But Tome of Talula isn’t a romance.
And one thing I wasn’t being very open about when I first started marketing it was that this is a dark fantasy written by a Christian author.
There is very little to NO spice.
(We just don’t talk about Chapters 60 and 61.)
And if you know me in real life and try to bring those chapters up, I will simply walk away.
But eventually I realized I wasn’t being very fair to my readers if I wasn’t open about what kind of book I actually wrote.
Because my book isn’t for everyone.
There is Scripture.
There is heavy world-building.
There are dark themes.
There is Hell.
There is cussing.
Also blood.
…
A lot of blood.
So if you are looking for something spicy?
Yeah, that’s not me. I don’t write that.
But if you’re looking for something high-stakes, I do have a found family featuring a disastrous goat man who would destroy a continent for his wife.
I have a wolf who somehow became the only actual adult in the group.
I have a fallen angel who is mostly confused about why a dragon is yelling at him while simultaneously healing him.
And I have a purple-haired main character who apparently adopted a floating skull that is now obsessed with her.
Together, this disaster family is trying to fight a tyrant.
Except the tyrant’s own spawn keeps making the entire book about them.
That’s about all I can say without spoiling anything.
Because my ending is…
A lot.
But the story isn’t finished.
Tome of Talula is only the first installment of what I am currently planning as a six-book series.
It took me a while to realize that I didn’t need to market this story as something it wasn’t just because a particular genre or trope was popular.
I needed to tell readers what I actually wrote.
And what I wrote was an epic dark fantasy about a deeply dysfunctional found family trying to save their world.
There happens to be some yearning along the way.
A lot of yearning, actually.
But this isn’t a romance.
This is an adventure.
Welcome to Amblem.
