It often pains authors to have to shoehorn themselves into a category or genre. It seems like an unfair constraint cooked up in some foreboding tower by a cackling publisher, who maniacally decreed one day that authors everywhere must sort themselves into groups before being allowed to enter the gates.
And sure, if you’ve let an original idea guide you rather than setting out to write in a particular genre, you may end up with a book that combines a little of this and a little of that until you find yourself with a vampiric unicorn novel set in a technologically advanced future, leaving you with absolutely no idea whether it’s fantasy, paranormal, science fiction, or horror. I saw many projects when I was an agent that felt like genre alphabet soup.
But it’s crucial to know where either a novel or a nonfiction book will sit on the shelf (or virtual shelf) before seeking either traditional or self-publication, and it’s helpful to figure this out relatively early in the process.
In this post I’m going to cover:
- What are categories and genres?
- Why you need to know your genre
- The bookstore test
- It’s important to understand the expectations of your genre
- How to find your genre
- Even if you mix genres, be firmly planted in one
What are categories and genres?
Three important words for your book publishing glossary: category, genre, and sub-genre. These overlap, but refer to slightly different concepts.
Categories are top-level buckets that determine where a book gets shelved at the bookstore. Think: Young Adult, Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Picture Books, etc. If you’re talking about where your book will sit on a bookstore shelf, you’re probably talking about category.
Genres are a sub-classification within a category that gets more specific about the style and flavor of the book. Think: Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary Romance, Self-Help, etc.
There are also sub-genres that get even more narrow, like Cozy Mysteries as a subset of Mystery/Crime; genre-agnostic stylistic sub-genres like Dark Academia, which can be applied to Literary Fiction, Mysteries, and Science Fiction; and market-oriented sub-genres like Upmarket, which connotes a degree of literary merit and a particular audience, but can be applied across different genres.
You must know your genre above all. If you simply say your book is a “Coming of Age” story, that’s not helpful to an agent because that could mean categories ranging from Middle Grade to YA to Adult and any number of genres from Historical Fiction to Science Fiction and everything in between.
Yes, of course, not all books slot neatly and tidily into a specific genre, and it’s okay to straddle genres to a point (more on this in a bit). But you still must know where your book falls on the book publishing rainbow.
Here’s why.
Why you need to know your genre
If you pursue traditional publishing, you need to know your genre for several important reasons:
- Literary agents and publishers specialize. In order to find a suitable literary agent (and later on a suitable publisher), you need to approach an agent who will accept projects like yours. When you are researching literary agents, knowing your genre will help narrow down the agents who might be a fit. As you move through the publishing process, agents will then target editors at particular publishing houses, who in turn have sales and marketing teams that are all oriented around knowing their area of specialty. And those tend to be highly calibrated to particular genres.
- Agents expect you to treat the publishing process like the business it is. One of the most crucial ways of conveying professionalism is knowing where your book fits into the marketplace. You should know (and ideally have read) your competition and know who your potential readers will be, knowledge that’s crucial when it comes time to market your book.
You must list your genre in your query letter. Full stop.
But that’s not all.
The bookstore test
It’s not just agents and publishers who care about genre, and this matters for self-publishing too. Because you know who else cares?
Readers.
Walk into a bookstore. You’ll see that sections are arranged by category, and some genres as well. Go to Amazon or BN.com. The sections are arranged by categories, and there are search mechanisms for genres and sub-genres. If you self-publish, you’re going to need to name your BISAC categories and have correct metadata.
These sections don’t exist as a means to torture authors. They exist because readers often know what they are looking for ahead of time and are browsing for something in particular. They are looking for genres.
Whether you go the traditional route or self-publish, your book will be very specifically categorized. And it’s best to know this in advance.
It’s important to understand the expectations of your genre
Readers have expectations, particularly ones who focus on a favorite genre. For instance, there are optimal word count bands for different genres.
These word count rules aren’t ironclad, and it’s okay if a book is long or short (to a point), but if you write in a genre with more particular standards for length and plot contrivances (such as Science Fiction or Romance), it is rather helpful to know these ahead of time. Romance in particular has a whole slew of subcategories and organizational rules that you should research heavily before you start.
And there are big differences in subject matter and sensibility between, say, Middle Grade (books for 8-12-year-olds) and Young Adult (12-18-year-olds), which are now increasingly shelved differently in bookstores.
Even if you’re planning to bend some genre rules and break new ground, it helps to know the genre conventions, and thus your reader’s expectations, ahead of time, so that you can break these rules to maximum effect.
Perhaps the greatest example of convention-breaking is George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Martin knew the High Fantasy genre backwards and forwards, which for decades had been dominated by hero stories and redemptive plotlines, such as a dishonored knight who saves his realm, or a young boy who finds out he has secret powers and defeats the evil bad guy.
Martin took those conventions, upended them, shocked his readers, and then he did it again. And again. And again. It was quite thrilling. But you have to know these conventions in order to break them.
How to find your genre
Don’t know your genre? Well, that’s probably due to one of these reasons:
- You aren’t reading enough. Just want to write a book without worrying about what else is out there? No one’s stopping you! But when it comes time to pursue publication, you need to be reading the competition.
- You haven’t done your research. It really only takes an hour or two of dedicated research to identify your genre and some helpful comp titles published in the last 5 years. Here’s how to do it.
- You’re unwilling to be categorized. Some authors I’ve worked with are simply allergic to being pigeonholed and don’t even want to try to narrow themselves down. But unless you have invented a genre whole cloth (which, to be fair, really does happen once in a while, most recently with LitRPG), your book can be categorized.
Just remember: Your book is going onto a particular bookshelf and will be marketed to specific readers, whether you like it or not. Might as well just go ahead and figure out which ones.
Even if you mix genres, be firmly planted in one
It’s totally fine to blur genres, and many successful novels do this, but even if you do some mixing, it’s extremely helpful to have a base.
You can have a Fantasy novel with Science Fiction elements or a Literary novel that utilizes a Horror plot, but whatever approach you choose should fit squarely in one genre even if it branches into another. This way, it will not only rest comfortably on the right shelf in the bookstore, but it will also be easier to market the book to the hardcore readers of a particular genre. These readers will be the evangelists who will help spread the word to a broader audience.
So yes, it’s not romantic to be forced to think about genres and genre conventions before you’ve really gotten going, but a bit of thought and preparation will help save you from the heartache and the time-consuming revisions that stem from writing a book without a natural home.
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Art: The Virgin with the Unicorn by Domenichino
It was your ‘genre’ comments that caught my eye. Having written a dozen books that seem not to fit comfortably into any one genre, probably because I told the story I wanted to tell, without worrying how to label them. Still, I’m comfortable with what they are.
Is that unicorn rather small, or the virgin rather big? Also, the unicorn seems to lack fangs, so maybe it uses its horn to puncture the virgin’s vein before she can run back to her spaceship which is parked behind one of the trees. I think Domenichino died before he could paint that scene…
But seriously, thanks for this, Nathan! I call my WIP YA Dieselpunk, even though Irish bookstores don’t have such a category, just ‘Teen’ and ‘SF & Fantasy’ sections. Dieselpunk is descended from Steampunk, which is descended from SF, as is Dystopia. Such hiving-off makes SF seem less popular than it really is, particularly in this century.
Hi Nathan: Learned of you through my writing mentor and coach, Beth Barany. Very informative Post. Thank you for sharing. I signed up to follow you. Take care. Mary
I can see I have some work to do in defining my novel. I have always thought it was just a literary novel, but today I’ve learned that term doesn’t mean what it used to. I have been told t’my novel is a Women’s Fiction Coming of Age story, but I will have to do some further research. Thanks for a great post.
These days, writers love to straddle genres, and their agents often pitch them to publishers as “ABC meets XYZ”. I find that almost perfectly draws an instant picture for both publisher and reader (and agent when the author uses it) of the overall flavor of the story without pidgeon-holing it into one genre or two that, on first look, don’t seem compatible or play well together. I love the idea of writers creating new genres.
(As for LitRPG, I had no idea what that even was until my publisher, Aethon Thrills, an Aethon Books imprint, offered me a contract. Aethon is the most popular and most successful publisher of LitRPG.)
As someone who catalogs books for a living, I can confirm that providing SOMETHING to categorize your book is EXTREMELY helpful. At the BARE MINIMUM, please indicate if the work is fiction or nonfiction (or, if something in between, still include a label like “creative nonfiction” or “autobiographical fiction” or “folk literature” etc., so we can identify the basic form of whatever you’ve got going on). Other aspects of the book, like target audience, genres/subgenres, subjects, etc. are also very good to put upfront and will be very important in making sure your book can be found in the mountain of literature that exists out there. If you can give your book a very specific label, that’s all the better, as it means that the people looking for something to read in this highly specific niche will have an easier time finding it.
One additional point: if your book falls under multiple genres, that’s not necessarily a bad thing nowadays, as it’s become a LOT easier to label a book with multiple distinct tags on a digital platform. I’d still advise having NO MORE THAN 5 of these labels (even above 3, it all starts becoming noise) and to still identify a predominant category/genre (since most libraries aren’t going to bother with shelving the same book in multiple sections of the library), but I wouldn’t agonize too much about feeling like your book doesn’t fit cleanly into ‘the one correct genre’–just give us enough information so the people who want to read your book can still find it.
Thanks for weighing in with this inside view!
Authors should also know the difference between the genre of a book’s setting and the genre of its story. (I have an unpublished blog post about this.)
For example, the first Terminator movie is a horror story in an SF setting. Or, to give you another example, the author Lois McMaster Bujold uses a space opera setting to write romance, mystery, and space opera novels.