I’m still bask­ing in the glow of the Pub­lish­ers Weekly review, but today, I want to talk about a cou­ple of things that are men­tioned in the review, namely this:

Bod­ies lit­ter the pages of this first entry in Estep’s engross­ing Ele­men­tal Assas­sin urban fan­tasy series … Fans of Estep’s humor­ous para­nor­mal romances (Jinx; Hot Mama) may be taken aback by the gritty vio­lence and steamy sex, but urban fan­tasy fans will love it. (Feb.)

In other words, Spider’s Bite is a dif­fer­ent kind of book than the ones in my Big­time series. Spider’s Bite is dark and gritty, vio­lent and sexy — it is not a light­weight comic book spoof like the Big­time books are. The main char­ac­ter in Spider’s Bite is an assas­sin, and Gin does kill peo­ple in the book — in fact, she kills a lot of peo­ple in the book. She wouldn’t be much of an assas­sin if she didn’t kill peo­ple, now would she?

So why am I bring­ing this up? Well, because I want read­ers — espe­cially those who enjoyed my Big­time series — to know what they’re get­ting with Spider’s Bite. Because it’s def­i­nitely a dif­fer­ent kind of book, and those look­ing for a more light­hearted read may be disappointed.

We’ve all seen blog posts bemoan­ing the fact that an author has switched gen­res, and I’m sure that I’ll get some e-mails from read­ers telling me that they don’t like Spider’s Bite and that I should have writ­ten another Big­time book instead. So why didn’t I do that? Well, there are a cou­ple of reasons.

First, my pre­vi­ous pub­lisher decided that they didn’t want any more Big­time books. As much as I love writ­ing the series, I have to eat and pay my bills just like every­one else. And in the book mar­ket right now, dark, gritty, urban fan­tasy and para­nor­mal romance is where it’s at — that’s what edi­tors are buy­ing and that’s what read­ers are reading.

Sec­ond, I had been want­ing to write an assas­sin story for a while now and pen­ning an urban fan­tasy gave me the oppor­tu­nity to do that — and really stretch myself as a writer. That’s impor­tant to me because I think that writ­ers who write the same kind of book over and over again get stale. I know that I’ve loved the first few books in a series only to be dis­ap­pointed by the later titles that just seem like retreads of those first great books (Janet Evanovich comes to mind).

But I hope that my Big­time read­ers will give Gin Blanco and Spider’s Bite a chance. In the end, I think that Spider’s Bite and my Big­time series have a lot of the same ele­ments in com­mon — a sassy, sar­cas­tic, kick-ass hero­ine, cool world build­ing, lots of fight scenes, and some siz­zling romance. Every­thing is just much darker in Spider’s Bite, includ­ing the humor. In fact, I’m billing the book as dark, fun, sexy urban fan­tasy — we’ll see if my Big­time read­ers and oth­ers agree.

What about you guys? Do you like it or loathe it when an author switches gen­res? Share in the comments.