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    27Jul, 2023
    How to Keep Readers Turning the Pages of Your Cozy Mystery

    How do you keep readers turning the pages of your cozy mystery? I’m glad you asked! I have a list of 10 expectations cozy mystery readers have when it comes to reader satisfaction. Here we go…

     
    Genre Expectations

    All genres have specific reader expectations. They are what help authors ensure they provide a satisfying experience for the reader. 

    The cozy mysteries may have the clearest delineation of expectations of any genre. Cozy readers want and trust that these will be met. If they’re not, you will quickly lose diehard fans of the genre.

    Here are those all-important cozy mystery genre expectations:
    1. Cozies are low-key mystery novels with little to no blood and guts. All of the violence happens off the page. Readers don’t come to cozies to see the murder happen in realtime, so keep that in mind.
    2. Cozies feature an amateur sleuth. No professional crime-solvers, please! The professional law enforcement characters come in the form of supporting characters only.
    3. Cozies center around a puzzle both the sleuth and the reader try to solve. All mysteries are puzzles. Cozies are of the feel-good variety.
    4. Any sex is off the page. There can and probably should be romantic subplots. Who doesn’t like a little romance, after all? But keep your cozies clean!
    5. Cozies are typically set in a small town, neighborhood, or village. This doesn’t mean it has to be set in the perineal small town. You have leeway here. A defined area within a city works fine. A NY borough, for example, can easily fit the bill. 
    6. The sleuth’s community plays a significant role in the story. A tight-knit community is a really important element of the the cozy. This is why a neighborhood setting can work. The appeal is partially the definable area in which the sleuth lives and in which the crime takes place, but the community gives the setting personality and charm.
    7. Cozies are usually part of a series and have a series arc. Cozy readers love their favorite genre. Give them a series to invest in.
    8. Cozies have a ‘hook’ (or theme) of some sort as a distinguishing feature of the series. Culinary cozies, pet-themed, fiber-based like sewing, knitting, needlepoint, and crochet, and bookshops are just a few. Check out Cozy-Mystery.com for a comprehensive list.
    9. Deductive reasoning, common sense, logic, and observation are used to solve the murder. The sleuth has to be clever and use the aforementioned skills. No bumbling through the crime-solving, please!
    10. By the end of the story, the crime is solved and justice is served. Justice doesn’t always prevail in real-life, but it definitely does in the cozy mystery. Readers expect the criminal to be held accountable for their crime(s).
    Keep them in Mind

    It’s important to keep these reader expectations in mind as you write your cozy mysteries and your readers will keep clamoring for more.

    Also, remember to check out the resource books for writing a cozy mystery.

    WriterSpark’s Field Guide to WRiting a Cozy Mystery is a comprehensive online, self-paced course that will take you from dreaming about writing a cozy mystery to actuall doing it. Check it out!

     About the Course

    Examples and images to make your plot high concept
    25Jul, 2023
    Do you know How to Make Your Plot ‘High Concept’?

    High Concept is a buzz phrase that’s both abstract and difficult to wrap your brain around. What does it mean exactly? In a nutshell, a high-concept idea is a hook and a high-concept story is a great hook written with unique details that give flight to the idea and make it original.

    High-concept ideas are what agents and editors are looking for, the one-line pitch that sparks interest and defines a book. If you can sum up your book in a tantalizing way, you’re on your way. Let’s look at some of the characteristics of a high-concept book.

    🪄It will have mass commercial appeal.

    🪄It can be summarized succinctly (preferably in one sentence) so that it is immediately clear what the book is about. This is the hook and is important to the publicity and marketing team. Give them a concrete idea that they can run with. Think Buffy the Vampire Slayer grows up to be a suburban soccer mom. Easy to grasp, and therefore easy to market.

    🪄It has exceptional details that turn a good idea into a unique story that can take any tone, be it scary, thrilling, funny, chicky, sexy, dark, light, or anything in between.

    🪄It takes something relatable and familiar and gives it an interesting, creative, original twist that can lead the reader on an exciting, escapist journey.

    Easy to do? Heck no. But it is possible. Who’s done it lately?

    Cinderella Lopez, by Berta Platas. A fairy tale that’s been changed up and done with a Latin flavor. Platas takes the tried and true Cinderella story and mixes it up with the glamorous world of television and powerful businessmen, with a Latina as the heroine. It’s a high-concept idea that she’s worked into a fabulous high-concept story.

    Meggin Cabot’s The Boy Next Door. Cabot wrote the entire book using emails as the format, a very unique story-telling twist, and certainly not easy to do. Every Boy’s Got One and Boy Meets Girl have equally unique hooks, with letters, to-do lists, and instant messaging.

    Carpe Demon, Julie Kenner’s Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom. Kate has to reconcile the job of her youth (demon hunter with her late husband) with the responsibilities of her new life (married to a politician and mom to two children). Same outcome–she succeeds–but the adventures she has? Demon-hunting is a little more inventive than, say, rejoining the workforce and going back to a state job. Throw a dead demon in the pantry, make the fate of the world rest squarely on your heroine’s shoulders, and now you have a part-ee.

    Allison Brennan’s The Prey. Allison’s book goes high concept from the get-go with a killer copying the murders from the heroine’s fictional books. It goes further by offering such deep characterization and layering of characters. A high concept idea is great, but it’s the details and the way the idea is executed that sustains the high concept idea and takes it into a high concept novel. Brennan’s killer combination of a great idea and deep characterization took the book all the way to the New York Times Extended Best Seller list and the USA Today Bestseller list.

    Gregory Maguire’s series of books, beginning with Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and Wicked-The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. They take fairy tales and put a different spin on them by telling them from an alternate point of view. (Note: this was also done with the children’s picture book, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, as told by the Big Bad Wolf. High concept crosses genres and reading levels.)

    The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares. Magical pants and how the lives of four girls are forever changed because of them? Clever. It’s a good hook–so much so it’s been made into a movie.

    My first book, Living la Vida Lola, the first in the Lola Cruz mystery series, started with the premise of a typical mystery book. Nothing original there. But I wanted to have a Latina heroine, I wanted it to be written in first person with a light-hearted, witty, somewhat self-deprecating tone, and I wanted there to be a central romance that would arch over the series. So here’s the hook:

    Lola Cruz juggles the responsibilities of her close-knit Mexican family, her attraction for hunky Jack Callaghan (her brother’s old high school friend who’s suddenly demanding her attention) , and her commitment and passion for her career as a PI–and she’ll do whatever it takes to keep all the balls in the air.

    What makes Living the Vida Lola different is the blend of the mystery and chick-lit sub-genres. Add to that a feisty Latina heroine and my book just might have the propensity to take off on its own, without a big name like Janet Evanovich, Jennifer Crusie, or Sue Grafton having written it. The book has familiar themes, but it’s unique enough to stand out from the pack.

    There aren’t hard and fast rules surrounding a high-concept book. It’s up to you to take something that interests you, turn it upside down with creativity and uniqueness, give it a zippy title that the public and publisher will glom onto, and you’re on your way.

    A quaint bookshop with 10 Reasons to Write Cozy Mysteries
    22Jul, 2023
    10 Reasons to Write Cozy Mysteries

    There are so many reasons to write cozy mysteries. In my book, there are 10 of them.

    The mystery genre is huge. From thrillers, suspense, and police procedurals on one end, domestic suspense and straight mysteries in the middle to capers and cozies on the other side of the spectrum, there is, literally, something for everyone.

    No matter the sub-genre, mysteries draw you in with the promise of a puzzle. That and the promise of justice being served, something which doesn’t always happen in real life.

    Now I love the tense emotional build-up, the back and forth of the cat and mouse chase, and the heart-stopping suspense that comes with the darker side of mysteries, particularly domestic suspense. But cozies…ahhh, cozies…they offer something so much more than just the mystery.

    As a writer, I love the fact that I get to hang out with a cast of characters that are interesting and unique and would be my friends in real life (well, not the killer, but almost everyone else). I love the challenge of figuring out how to write what I like to call ‘happy murder’, because cozies aren’t dark and brooding. They aren’t sad and filled with distress and the dark side of things. They are…funny and warm and…cozy.

    Striking a balance between the gravity of murder and the tone of a cozy takes some deftness. I’m always up for that challenge!

    As a reader, I love so many other things about the cozy genre. They are about so much more than just the solving of a murder. They are about community. Relationships. Setting. These things give them a wide-spread appeal because they speak to our collective consciousness in terms of what we’d like our world to look like, both in the place we live and with whom we live our lives. They give us a community we’d love to be part of, and through the immersive writing of so many wonderful authors, we get to do just that. We get to visit with friends and be alongside them in their lives as well as during crime-solving adventures.

    Here are just some of what readers love about cozy mysteries, which you, as a writer, need to think about.

     

    10 Reasons to Write Cozy Mysteries

    The Punny Titles and Charming Covers

    The first thing you notice about cozy mysteries is that the majority of them have punny titles, and they also have wonderfully appealing covers. They show readers a glimpse of the world they’re about to enter and the charming life that lives between the covers.

    Flour in the Attic, from my Bread Shop series, was named one of the best title one year in a cozy title round-up. A Murder Yule Regret and The Walking Bread are other favorites from that series. Yes, I had fun naming them.

    Pleating for Mercy is the first in series book for the Harlow Cassidy Magical Dressmaking series, which is a paranormal cozy series. Bodice of Evidence and Bobbin for Answers are two other favorites. Punny titles are the best.

    When you write cozies, you get to get your pun on!

    Your Cozy Characters Become Friends

    Cozy mysteries are flush with warm and caring people. The sleuths are smart, clever, and appealing. They may be unique and sassy. The sidekicks are equally winsome. There usually is some sort of love interest with someone who compliments the sleuth perfectly. These people truly feel like friends to loyal readers, which is what makes a long-running cozy series so wonderful. Readers get to hang out with these folks and it’s so satisfying.

    When I sit down to write, it is truly like hanging out with friends. I get to play PI with Lola Cruz, or sleuth with Harlow Cassidy or Ivy Culpepper, or do some bibliomancy with Pippin Lane Hawthorne. Friends on the page can be just as important as friends in real life.

    The Locales You Get to Call Home

    Beach towns. A mountain oasis. A close-knit community in the city. An English moor. A rural farmhouse. Wherever cozies are set, there is sure to be a ton of charm, and it will likely be incredibly picturesque. Being inside the pages of a book with a charming local is akin to visiting the place in real life. It’s almost like having another (or many) home.

    My Bread Shop mystery series is set in a fictional town (named Santa Sofia after my daughter) on the central California coast.

    Bliss, Texas, from my Harlow Cassidy Magical Dressmaking series (a paranormal cozy) is a fictional small town in Texas.

    Love Alaska? Crazy about the Outer Banks? If you have an affinity for a particular type of locale, you can set your cozy mystery there and be there in your imagination.

    A “Happy Murder” that Let’s You Sleep at Night

    In a cozy mystery, blood, violence, and sex happen off the page. A murder is a murder, of course. In a cozy, by definition, there is death. There might be people put in harm’s way. There probably will be a progression in a relationship. But cozy readers don’t have to get the down-and-dirty details of these things—and neither does the cozy mystery writer.

    The bad stuff exists and we know it exists, but we’re slightly removed from them in a cozy.

    Inevitably, someone stumbles upon a body that has some connection to the sleuth, either directly or peripherally. That’s typically as dark as it gets.

    Furry Friends

    More often than not, cozy mysteries sleuths have some sort of furry friend as a companion. Whether they’re dogs, cats, horses, teacup pigs, or goats, chances are good a much-loved pet will make an appearance. They’re often on the covers, too!

    In Bread Over Troubled Water, book 8 in the Bread Shop cozy series, Agatha the pug (named after the grand dame of cozies) is the one to discover the body.

    In my Harlow Cassidy paranormal cozies, Thelma Louise (the grand dame of Sundance Kids) is a cantankerous goat who adds some comedy. She’s also on every cover.

    Bottom line, furry friends are fun! If you’re a pet lover, writing cozies is a great opportunity to make them a big part of your book.

    A Touch of Romance

    Romance is never the focal point of a cozy mystery, but it’s usually an element. The typical scenario is a romantic prospect in law enforcement that forces contact with the sleuth. I tend to go the opposite way in my cozy mystery series. In the Bread Shop cozies, Emmaline Davis, Ivy Culpepper’s best friend is the law enforcement character. The romance comes in the form of Miguel Baptista, a restauranteur.

    In my Harlow Cassidy Magical Dressmaking series, the love interest is an architect with the town. The sheriff is not a relation, and another deputy is an old schoolmate, but not really a friend.

    Writing romance can be fun, especially when it is part of a secondary plot line. You get to sprinkle it in without it taking over.

    Amateur Sleuth

    The star of a cozy mystery is an amateur sleuth. They aren’t trained in law enforcement. They may or may not have some special skill that helps them with their investigation, but it’s typically not formal training. This makes it fun and easy for readers to follow right alongside the sleuth in the crime-solving. It makes the sleuth very relatable and easy to love because readers can root for their success. Remember, they’re like a friend!

    These are all the reasons they are also so fun to write. Your expertise doesn’t have to be in law enforcement because you, like your sleuth, are an amateur.

    A Cozy Hook

    Cozy mysteries have cozy hooks. That means there is always a hobby or creative interest or some other something that is the central focus of the cozy world in any particular series. Coffee or tea houses, culinary connections or bakeries (Yeast of Eden is the bread shop in my Bread Shop series), fiber or fabric tie-ins like sewing (my Harlow Cassidy Magical Dressmaking series), or other hobbies like photography, horseback riding, motorcycles, painting, knitting, or book shops. Whatever your jam (oh! Even making jam), you can make it the hook for your cozy series.

    The Puzzle of an Intriguing Mystery

    Every mystery on the mystery spectrum offers a puzzle to be solved. The reader may know what happened and know things the protagonist doesn’t know (as in suspense), or they may know just what the sleuth knows and be right alongside, or even ahead, in the crime-solving. Either way (or somewhere in between), the mystery drives the plot. The puzzle of the mystery brings a reader to the mystery in the first place. The other elements of a cozy keep those cozy readers along for the ride.

    As a cozy writer, you get to craft mysteries that intrigue or entertain readers.

    Justice is Served and Good Prevails

    One of the reasons mysteries have wide appeal is the underlying end result of the bad guys being brought to justice. Good prevails. In cozy mysteries, this is especially true. The crime is solved, justice is served, and the community and life of the sleuth get to move forward, with the reader in tow. This isn’t how it always happens in real life, but in cozies, it absolutely is.

    This means you always get to create a happy ending, no matter how many murders your sleuth stumbles upon. There is an automatic suspension of disbelief in the cozy mystery world. Who in their right mind would live in Cabot Cove, after all? You don’t have to worry about that as a cozy writer. All’s well the end’s well in the cozy world and your sleuth will soon be ready to solve another crime.

    🔎🕵🏻

    Cozy mysteries are a special mystery sub-genre. They are so fun to write. Give it a try!

     

    See all my books HERE

     

    Take my online course: Field Guide to Writing a Cozy Mystery

    Cozy Mystery Writing Course