{"id":6445,"date":"2021-02-19T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/why-genres-dont-matter\/"},"modified":"2021-02-19T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T13:00:00","slug":"why-genres-dont-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/why-genres-dont-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Why genres don’t matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plenty of writers stress over genres:<\/p>\n

What genre is my book? Yes, there\u2019s a death, but it\u2019s not really a crime story. And there\u2019s a romance, but it\u2019s not really a love story. And it\u2019s set in the 1980s, which makes it historical, but nobody wears a corset or says methinks, so it\u2019s not really hist fic either. Help!<\/em><\/p>\n

The answer, really, is simple. Genres don\u2019t matter, but readers do.<\/p>\n

To understand what I mean, just walk into any large bookstore. The nearest big store to me \u2013 Waterstones in Oxford \u2013 has fiction dominating the ground floor. There\u2019s a niche set aside for crime fiction and one or two other specific genres.<\/p>\n

Mostly, though, the label above the shelves is simply \u201cFiction\u201d. You\u2019ll see Jane Austen snuggling up with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Delia Owens making nice with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jojo Moyes deep in conversation with Saul Bellow.<\/p>\n

Most novels just aren’t sold under a particular category label. Readers are smart enough to know that Saul Bellow will offer a very different sort of read to the one provided by Jojo Moyes.<\/p>\n

That seems clear enough and yet agents \u2013 curse them \u2013 always want to know how to bracket your book. The result is that we quite often see query letters say things like, \u201cmy novel is a Coming of Age Novel \/ Romance with a fashion industry setting\u201d, with capital letters strewn around as though trying to manufacture a genre where no genre actually exists.<\/p>\n

And no: there isn\u2019t a genre like that. There isn\u2019t a category on Amazon which matches that. There most certainly isn\u2019t a set of shelves in any physical bookshop with that as its sign.<\/p>\n

And yet \u2013 there are books like that, The Devil Wears Prada<\/em> for one.<\/p>\n

And look, agents want to know something about your book before they start to read it, in much the same way as you want to know something about a film on Netflix before you start watching. Is it a thriller? Or a rom-com? You might be happy with either, but you just want to set your expectations before you start.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same with agents. If you tell them that a book is a thriller, they will read with their thriller head on. They\u2019ll be thinking, Does this feel like the start of a thriller that publishers could sell successfully to a large audience? If you tell them your book is a rom-com, they\u2019ll think about that market instead.<\/p>\n

And if your book has a nice clean genre, then tell them. My books (now) do. They are in increasing order of specificity: crime fiction, detective fiction and police procedurals.<\/p>\n

But most books don\u2019t have those nice clear categories. So just describe the book in a sentence or two, much as you would if you were describing it to any reader.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe novel tells the story of Andrea Sachs, who becomes junior assistant to Miranda Priestly, the fashion world\u2019s most powerful \u2013 and feared \u2013 editor. Andrea struggles to accommodate the demands of her boss, the fashion world, her love life and her own desire for a meaningful purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bingo. That\u2019s the book. You haven\u2019t described a genre, exactly, but you have successfully described what kind of read you are offering.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all agents need. They\u2019ll adjust their expectations accordingly and read with interest.<\/p>\n

Same with editors. When they read a manuscript, they\u2019ll be thinking, \u201cHow can I package this book to achieve a strong level of sales?\u201d They\u2019ll be thinking about covers and comparable authors and recent hits and possible marketing approaches.<\/p>\n

In order to get a good set of answers to those questions, editors do need a good two-line summary of the book \u2013 the sort that we\u2019ve just given \u2013 but they don\u2019t especially need any genre categorisation at all.<\/p>\n

As a matter of fact, I\u2019d go further than that. Genre descriptions can be so restricting that I\u2019d want to throw them off, at least partly. So yes, my novels are contemporary police procedurals with murder stories at their heart.<\/p>\n

But they\u2019re also not some of the things you might expect them to be. So although my novels are technically procedural, they show an almost total disregard for actual police procedure. There\u2019s not a lot of shooty-bang-bang stuff. The action is slow, not fast. And the crimes being investigated are, in many cases, so extravagantly unlikely that nothing like them has ever actually happened.<\/p>\n

So if I were writing a query letter \u2013 or an Amazon book blurb \u2013 I\u2019d want to hint at the ways in which my books run contrary to genre, not with it.<\/p>\n

Because, in the end, it\u2019s not genres that matter. It\u2019s readers. You do, I think, need to have a really clear idea of what kind of book yours is. What\u2019s the heart of its appeal? What\u2019s that appeal expressed in a sentence? What kind of cover sings about that appeal? Where on Amazon will your very best readers most likely gather? What other authors do those readers love?<\/p>\n

These questions matter. Genres don\u2019t. You will, I hope, find liberation in that thought. I know I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Plenty of writers stress over genres: What genre is my book? Yes, there\u2019s a death, but it\u2019s not really a crime story. And there\u2019s a romance, but it\u2019s not really a love story. And it\u2019s set in the 1980s, which makes it historical, but nobody wears a corset or says methinks, so it\u2019s not really<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJericho Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/why-genres-dont-matter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why genres don't matter – Jericho Writers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Plenty of writers stress over genres: What genre is my book? 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