My Indie Author Journey: Cozy Mystery Category

Daily Diary, August 1, 2023, Day 1066

Hi, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series, and I do a daily post on my life as an aging author. Every so often, I will expand within one of my daily posts on my experiences as an indie author, which is what I am doing below. If you want to read some of my other posts that feature this topic, go to the Authors Corner tab.

Short Check in: Got in my daily cleaning and 30 minute walk early, before it got too hot, and have been spending the day going over the feedback from my last beta reader and doing any more edits I feel still need to be done before sending draft on to my copy editor.

Authors Corner:

After the my earlier post about setting categories, it seemed fitting to resurrect a post I did early on in my career as an indie author about why I saw my Victorian San Francisco mysteries as fitting in the cozy mystery category. This post was written nearly ten years ago, yet it is a good example of why authors need to think about the genres or sub-genres their books best fit in. It also demonstrates why authors need to be flexible, particularly when they are indie author who actually have some control over categories, because one constant I have found about self-publishing, is that things change.

When I first published Maids of Misfortune late in 2009, the only two mystery sub-categories on Amazon that existed were the historical and women sleuth mystery categories. Amateur sleuth wasn’t available then as a category, although it exists now and would be perfectly appropriate. However, perhaps more surprising, there wasn’t a cozy mystery category, and I didn’t really think about that as a possible category, not even including it as a key word for search purposes. The reason for this was that the mysteries I read that called themselves cozy were all contemporary mysteries with some sort of theme: like baking, quilting, or cats. To a degree, I wasn’t wrong in thinking that, since when Amazon created the cozy mystery sub-category in 2013, its three sub-divisions were: animals, crafts and hobbies, and culinary, and most of the books in 2013 and now ten years later, still are predominantly contemporary.

Nevertheless, as I began to understand my audience and discover what people liked most about my books (the upside to reading reviews), I realized that many of them saw the books as cozy mysteries­­––and that this element was as important as the Victorian setting in explaining the series’ growing popularity.

Now, of course, most retailers do have a cozy mystery category, and it is one of the most popular sub-genres within mysteries as a whole.

So, why are my Victorian San Francisco mysteries considered cozies?

The definition of a cozy mystery is pretty consistent. Most commentators agree that the origins can be found in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series. The common characteristics of cozies are: the main protagonist is an amateur sleuth (usually female), the sleuth frequently has some connection (often a love interest) with a professional involved with the law (police, medical examiner, lawyer, etc.), the people in the book are part of a small or close-knit community, the main characters are “likable,” and the secondary characters (including animals) provide some sort of comic relief. See Cozy-Mystery List.

In addition, in cozies there is little graphic violence or sex (and limited profanity), and good triumphs over bad, so that, as one former agent put it, “…when you finish you’ll have a smile on your face.” Nathan Bransford

While it is pretty obvious how contemporary mysteries that feature wacky families and small towns (such as Donna Andrew’s Meg Langston series, Lorraine Bartlett’s Victoria Square series, and Elizabeth Craig’s Southern Quilting series) fit this description, it isn’t as obvious how a mystery about Annie Fuller Dawson, a 19th century woman, who starts out without any family, and who lives in the city of San Francisco (with over 200,000 residents) fits the cozy criteria.

But it does. Let’s take those common cozy characteristics. My main protagonist, is definitely an amateur sleuth, since her main source of income is running a boardinghouse and giving financial advice (initially as a pretend clairvoyant), not investigating crimes. Annie also has help from persons in law and law enforcement: Nate Dawson—her romantic partner and later husband, a police constable Patrick McGee––her maid’s boyfriend). Like most amateurs, she gets drawn into solving crimes because someone she knows is murdered, in danger, or accused of a crime, and her major attributes are that she is “intelligent, intuitive, and inquisitive.” Nathan Bransford

While Annie Fuller lives in a city, not a small town, San Francisco in 1880 was still limited geographically enough for a person to move across it by foot, and the boardinghouse she owns provides the same sort of cast of quirky characters that a small town does. These boardinghouse residents, like the elderly dressmakers, Millie and Minnie Moffet, and the standard cozy side-kick, Dandy, the Boston terrier, do provide much of the comic relief.

Perhaps even more crucial to determining the “coziness” of my mysteries is their lack of explicit or gratuitous sex or violence. Much of the actual “wrong-doing” happens before the story starts or occurs off-stage. When violence is described, there isn’t a lot of blood and gore. In addition, as with other cozies, the solving of the mystery and what it reveals about the characters is more important than non-stop action scenes. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be a sense of danger or even a good fight, but to paraphrase one of my reviews, you can read my books right before you go to bed and not worry about bad dreams.

The same goes for sex. What I am primarily interested in is the course of the romance between couples not their sexual practices. Since my books are set in a time period when women knew that even the whiff of sexual activity outside of marriage could ruin their reputations or their employment opportunities, I am being historically accurate as well. But even when I write about people who challenge those social mores or I describe the intimacies of a married couple, it doesn’t serve either my plot or my character development to give explicit details about the bedroom, so I don’t.

So, when someone who likes cozy mysteries, discovers my books in a cozy category on line, I can be pretty sure they won’t be disappointed.

Conversely, because the romance within my books tends to be behind closed doors, and my couples don’t always end up in a happily-ever-after resolution in every book, I have also had to learn not to promote my books as Victorian romances, or at least not to feature this category above mystery and historical fiction designations, because I am less confident of meeting the expectations of readers looking for a typical romance.

In short, it is all about knowing what categories stand for, making sure your book fits the categories they are in, and being flexible when those categories change. If you do all three your readers are much more likely to have a good experience when they buy your books (and you are more likely to get good reviews!)