So you want to publish in multiple genres

How to plan your career if you want to write literature and erotica and cookbooks and board books and history and and and. (Hint: it's a little more complicated than "just use pseudonyms.")

Documentarian. Storyteller. Concert pianist. Muse. Possible automaton. Just-confirmed Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, over there living her best life with the clocks and the chocolates and the edelweiss while the rest of us swirl screaming down the toilet of our own dignity. Before that? Ambassador to the Holy See.

Callista Gingrich, third and most unsettling wife of Newt, enjoys a life of which even the most delulu authors dare not dream. Long before she enjoyed regular soirees with the planet’s most important people, she published books in sundry categories: essays, photography, and Ellis the Elephant, a bestselling children’s series in which a plucky pachyderm learns from various (mostly white) people how America “became a free and exceptional nation.”

If you’re an author who dreams of doing the same, I can see your eye twitching from over here. No doubt some knowledgeable person—agent? Editor? Writer friend?—has already told you it’s a bad idea to publish in multiple genres. Maybe they said, It’s hard to build a platform from incompatible materials. Or: When it’s time to promote your memoir, publishers do not want you distracted on deadline for a diet book.

If it’s all so impossible, however, why has seemingly every problematic person on Earth already done it? Why can’t you be the next Callista Gingrich—or for that matter J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl, Orson Scott Card, Bill Bennett, William S. Burroughs, Ezra Pound, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, C.S. Lewis, or Virginia Woolf? Why can’t you be Gertrude Stein, all but pioneering the genre of board books for babies between the modernist poems and the intimate dinners with Picasso and the unfortunate fangirling for Pétain?

Here’s the truth: you can! Even if you’re not a Vichy collaborator, you can. It’s not impossible to publish in multiple genres; it’s just really hard, and it’s a bad idea for many authors, especially at the beginning of their career.

What you can’t generally do is publish in a lot of genres at once—or without leverage. This is especially true if your preference is to publish everything under your own name vs. pseudonyms. Authors who succeed in multiple genres tend to do so armed with celebrity, institutional clout, or abiding love from one particular demographic. (I’ll tell you which demographic after the paywall—mua ha ha.) First you build the platform, then you cast your confetti all over the bookstore.

You yourself might not have the time, patience, or realistic prospect of waiting for fuck-you fame. If that’s true, how do you give shape to your sprawling ambition? Will it be possible for you to publish your novel, memoir, board books, romance, and collection of satirical essays in the next 5-10 years? Maybe even sooner than that?

My answer is: maybe. Probably not, but maybe. A successful multi-genre career requires lots of sophisticated planning: order, optics, paperwork. Rush through any of it and you might fatally sabotage your career. You might also get sued. We don’t want that for you.

Before you burst out of the gate in all directions, therefore, please take a breath. Let’s run through a concrete plan for giving all your ambitions their due. There are four different paths to becoming a successful multi-genre author, and we’re going to tour each.

Before we start, however, please be honest with yourself: are you really ready to publish in every category you think you might be?

Really?