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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33237
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33237
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

What a fascinating question. I suspect that the answer is that you can't with perfect certainty. There will probably always be readers who will pick up your book hoping for one thing, thinking in the early going that they are going to get it, and then being disappointed in the end when they don't. In fact, I think we can see this happening quite often in user reviews of books and movies on many different sites. A lot of the low rating you see are attached to comments that say, in one way or another, "not what I thought it was going to be".

I'm not sure there is any way to avoid this entirely. A story is an experience and there are lots of experiences in life that we think are going to be fun at the beginning but then find we don't enjoy them as the experience progresses. For some people the roller coaster is great fun until halfway down the first hill.

But I think genre plays a huge role here. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I have talked about a genre being a promise just as much if not more than I have talked about stories being a promise. Each genre and sub-genre is defined by a set of conventions and those conventions promise a certain kind of experience. I think there is a tendency in beginning writers to think they can win an audience by defying the conventions of a genre, but in fact there are very few successful works that do that, and I would argue that most of the ones that are said to do so, don't really do so as much as people crack on that they do.

And this, of course, brings us back round to the perennial discussion about the role of originality in building a writing career. There is generally far more money in making a better burger than starting a highly original place selling monkey brains and fried scorpions. Fulfill the promise of the genre with a really well executed story and you won't disappoint your readers.

**EDIT:** Reading Lauren's answer puts a further thought in my mind. Sometimes the promise that the reader sees comes from the reader or from the culture. Sometimes a particular kind of story becomes popular and then every story that comes along that has elements of that popular story, people see the promise of that popular story in it. When that promise is not fulfilled, those same people can be quite vicious in their condemnation of the story for not being the story they wanted it to be.

Actually, this business of taking a story for the kind of story that the culture is expecting at a particular moment may be quite common. So many people took LOTR as being about the bomb because of the time when it was published. It is, in fact, a deeply Catholic examination of the nature of temptation and the role of love, (themes which clearly occupied much of the thought of Tolkien's circle, particularly Lewis as evidenced by _The Screwtape Letters_). But little of the book's reception and popularity seems to have had much to do with this. Instead many different groups seem to have found their own promises fulfilled it it.

There are other books, of course, were you can very clearly see that they fulfilled the expectations of the moment in which they were written.

Original score: 19