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I have yet to meet a writer who hasn’t at some point wondered “What’s the genre of my book?” so let’s tackle this question and see why (if?) it matters.

The genre of a book is an issue that plagues writers, readers, librarians, publishers, and generally everyone dealing with books and literature.

In today’s post we’ll see how you can define the genre of your book. But here’s a twist in the plot: I’ll also inspire you to ask yourself whether determining the genre of your book is something you actually need to care about at all.

Who Decides the Genre of a Book?

The genre of your book is a marketing decision. In other words, the genre of your book is something you decide in order to aim it at a certain audience.

Some authors struggle with this because it feels wrong in some way. Most likely, such writers consider the idea of genre as something that’s somehow embedded in the narrative and, as a result, isn’t something you can just “decide”.

Only, it is…

The misunderstanding arises from the fact that some writers fail to appreciate how their choice of genre informs their creative process.

The Dance of Marketing and Writing

In other words, when you begin to write a novel having a certain story in mind, you generally have a vague idea of your target audience. Let’s see this with a couple of examples. Think of each as a novel premise, that is, a story you might have in mind.

Premise A:

“The Opalescent Amulet” will be a story about a child who disappears one night, to be found two days later in the nearby forest, holding a peculiar amulet. But that’s only the beginning, as unexplained phenomena soon begin to affect the rustic nearby town.

Premise B:

“The Summer We Learned how to Love” will be a story about a middle-aged woman who feels distant from her husband after their only son leaves home for college. As old secrets are revealed, their marriage seems to be hanging by a thread.

OK, a couple of parenthetical observations here, before we talk about genre and target audience.

Firstly, notice how important titles are for conveying the concept of genre. In these two (entirely imaginary) examples above, the title should give you a pretty strong clue about genre. “The Opalescent Amulet” makes me think of fantasy; maybe even horror, if you want to be a bit ambiguous about them.

On the other hand, “The Summer We Learned how to Love” has a far stronger literary-fiction ring to it. Definitely nothing supernatural about it.

The second observation has nothing to do with genre, but it’s still an important one: Notice how, ideally, you should be able to tell someone what your story is about in a couple of sentences. If you need whole paragraphs to do it, it probably means you’re setting yourself up for a disastrously convoluted plot.

And now that we dealt with those, let’s close the parenthesis and focus on genre and the creative process.

One Eye on Creating, One Eye on Marketing

I’m perhaps being tongue-in-cheek saying this, but one of the reasons I write literary fiction is so that I won’t have to bother about audience reception – let alone generic conventions.

In other words, genre fiction has certain constraints that affect the literary process.

• Is your romance fiction novel suitable for (lower) middle-class, middle-aged women who seek escapism? Is its language accessible, are its characters stereotyped? You can’t start talking about Schopenhauer or Epicurus in romance fiction, neither can you have complex, abstract, unpredictably deep characters (or plots).
• Are tropes in your novel consistent with expectations in terms of its generic ecosystem? In simpler terms, are metaphors, mood, and motifs in your book something a reader would expect in another book of the same genre? Hard-boiled detective fiction without an abrupt protagonist (that may have an alcohol problem) and noir settings will likely not appeal to the audience it’s marketed at.

There is a continuous balancing act here, one between creating and marketing. Ideally, each author wants to write a book completely free of all outside influenceOf course this is impossible; most writers do not realize this. I also sometimes hear nonfiction or even academic writers claim they write without having an ideological agenda. Utter hogwash. We all have agendas, because we are all products of (parts of) our society. The only question is whether you realize it or not.. But once you write in a genre framework (as opposed to literary or experimental fiction), you must abide by the rules of the game; at least if reaching an audience is something that’s important to you.

On Genre Decisions and Mixes

If you publish books on Amazon, you are asked during the process to designate the genre of your book. I don’t know about you, but I laugh (so that I don’t have to cry) whenever I see genres such as “Amish & Mennonite Fiction”, or “Scottish Historical Romance”.

Talking about a niche…

Meanwhile, although there is “Contemporary African-American Women Fiction”, “Contemporary Women Fiction”, “Contemporary Fantasy Fiction”, and “Contemporary Romance Fiction”, there is no such thing as… “Contemporary Fiction”.

There is “Literary Fiction” (that’s something), but not all contemporary fiction (that doesn’t include witches or vampires) is literary. Needless to say, not all literary fiction is contemporary, either.

But wait, there’s more.

Some time ago I saw an ad online looking for writers with experience in the “historical romantic fiction late 1800s western mail order bride” genre.

I’m not joking.

You might be wondering what’s the moral of this story. It’s simple, really: Genres are artificial constructions.

Genre Is a Marketing, not a Creative Problem

In the introduction of the post I suggested that picking your book’s genre might not be something you need to care about.

Let’s put it this way: picking your novel’s genre is something you need to care about if you care about having a large, well-defined audience that you need to address. If you write for other reasons, then defining a genre is pointless.

I said at the end of the previous section that genres are artificial constructions. In other words, a book’s genre is an arbitrarily set category that functions as a facilitator for marketing. The more narrow the scope, the harder it is to promote it. However, it’s easier then to reach the right people.

Let’s take that hilarious example again. “Historical romantic fiction, late 1800s western mail order bride genre”. If this doesn’t convince you that genres are artificial constructions, I don’t know what could…

Such a “genre” rightly feels bizarre because it is exceptionally narrowed. Picking this as a novel’s genre (instead of, say, “Romantic Fiction”) makes it harder for the author to promote the book. On the other hand, however, if we assumed there were an audience for such books (I don’t know and I don’t want to know), then the author can target them very precisely.

In the end, it’s a matter of priorities and balance, once again. To which extent marketing should influence your creative process? If there is a genre such as the one right above, should you include… witches in it just to be able to target that audience? And what’s the difference between “Romantic Fantasy” and “Fantasy Romance”?

The questions will be endless. Just like genres!