Genre Issues: Why I haven't published anything in a while.
In 2014 I decided to try my hand at writing a book. I did, and it was terrible. Then in 2018 I tried again and wrote something not terrible but not great. Neither of these books had anything in common. In art school you are told you need to pick a style, or create a style. That way you stand out and become something marketable. The same thing applies in writing but you also have to choose a genre as well.
Most people use Steven King as an example for this. He writes horror novels. If you picked up a book that just said Steven King on it you would expect a horror story inside. So if he wanted to write a children's book he would need to publish it under a pen name or else you end up with a conflict of reader expectations. Even if the book looks like a children's book and is written like a children's book, fully illustrated, and all that, the "Steven King" bit will cause readers to be angry that it's not a scary adult book.
So, my dilemma is that I have like, four or five half baked novels on this computer. And all of them are in a different genre. We have the isekai story, the time travel story, the hacker thriller, and cat girl headphones story. The only thing these have in common is a female lead.
Technically this would just put me in the "Upmarket Women's Fiction" section. None of them contain romance arcs and only the cat girl story and hacker thriller have scenes where the MC goes on a date because it moves the plot - not for character development. Not all of them survive the ending. They do things that readers might have trouble relating to personally. These are all things that kick these stories out of contemporary genre fiction which can have strict reader expectations.
So if I write one and it does well, readers will expect similar for the next few books even if the stories are different. I am wrapping up the isekai first because people are going nuts over Dungeon Crawler Carl and that's a little wave I could ride for folks who want to read similar but with a female protagonist. At least that is the goal. The fear is that readers who like the isekai won't like the time travel story because it's not the same.