Last week I spoke with author Jeneva Rose, about her upcoming book The Girl I Was. Rose is known primarily for her thrillers, which do numbers on the sales charts — The Perfect Marriage, its sequel The Perfect Divorce, Home is Where the Bodies Are and more.

But The Girl I Was isn’t a thriller. In fact, my copy came with a warning stating that exact fact, which I found kind of funny. Instead, it’s a cute coming-of-age story about a woman going back in time to meet her younger self. My conversation with Rose about the book will air on All Things Considered next week, but something that I couldn’t fit into the piece was a tidbit she dropped about the trouble she had getting the book published. (The book was actually her debut novel – she self-published it years ago and it is now being released by a commercial publisher.) “All the rejections essentially said ‘you’re known for thrillers, you can’t write in another genre,’” Rose said. “It was like, you have a brand, you have a genre, and that’s what you’re going to write in.”

The comment made me think of another writer – Liane Moriarty, who is mostly known for writing “women’s fiction.” In a conversation with Here & Now (which will be featured on the Book of the Day podcast feed next week), she talked about her back-and-forth relationship with the classification. On the one hand, it feels dismissive. On the other hand, isn't it inherently misogynistic to associate “women’s fiction” as less than? And so, she says, she learned to just embrace the title.

Rose, and other writers of her generation, found a different route – direct communication with readers via social media. Build an audience of your own, separate from the one your publisher helps foster, and you can tell them – hey, this is/isn’t a thriller, this is different from my usual stuff, etc. That’s what Rose did, and “after that, publishers were allowing me to write in other genres,” she told me. “So I have romance books out, a post-apocalyptic zombie romance coming out, and a horror novel coming out.”

Everybody is a brand these days. Who are the writers you think pull this direct-communication well? It doesn’t have to be IG/TikTok videos, it could be Substack newsletters, or posts on X/BlueSky/Threads/bathroom stalls/little scrolls in bottles drifting in the sea, etc. Does it help you to better understand their artistic choices, or is it just good content? Let us know – bookoftheday@npr.org.