Know Your Genre… or No One Will Find Your Book

In my last blog, on comparing your books to others for your greatest success in both writing and marketing, I touched on a term I use a lot around here: genre.

I ran a search on my blog, and the term pops up everywhere. In fact, I even use it on my website’s main navigation bar, for a page titled “Genres I Work With.” Dozens of blogs discuss it, written for both writers and fans of specific kinds of books; books have been written about it; publishers and literary agents sort books by genre. That’s how fundamental this term is.

Let’s take a closer look at why this term is so fundamental, both easy to grasp and hard to apply to your own writing…and why you absolutely must do so.

Genre is fundamental

Do you have a buddy who likes to watch comedies? A group of friends who are always down for an action movie? You, on the other hand, prefer hard-hitting documentaries.

Or what about your brother who loves hip-hop and your best friend from high school who only listened to country music? The kid in your class who played the violin and had classical concertos on repeat?

All of these, as well as your cousin who hates modern art and their significant other who is obsessed with landscape photography, are talking about genre.

At root, genre is a label we apply, a shorthand that let’s us know immediately what kind of artistic work we are dealing with.

Does that mean genres or the books they are applied to are undisputed? No. At the edges of any genre, you will find fans debating this topic (sometimes hotly). But does genre give you a starting point for immediately knowing what kind of book you are talking about? Yes.

I really hate using the cliche of the dictionary definition, but in this case Merriam-Webster couldn’t have put it any better: genre is

a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content; e.g. “a classic of the gothic novel genre”

Genre is the most fundamental label you can put on your book.

What kinds of genres are out there?

So, so many.

In Book Land, the most basic genres are:

Fiction
Nonfiction
Poetry
Drama (e.g., plays)

This doesn’t tell us very much, though. Beneath these you have all kinds of sub-genres, and these are the ones which provide the most information.

Style, form, and content. They all play a role.

• You can break them down by style: comedic, dramatic, realistic, light-hearted.
• You can break them down by topic: fantasy, horror, memoir, leadership, true crime, westerns, how-to, self-help, historical, SciFi, business, health, and so on.
• You can break down your genres by age: adult, YA (young adult), middle grade, children’s books (and even here, there are distinctions!). Age influences the form a book takes.

You can and you should break down what kind of book you’re writing in all of these ways. Why? Because this is how you find your audience (or how you lose them). Because the audience has expectations of certain genres, and you need to know what those are.

What I’m sharing here is only the tip of the iceberg. Genres can get really granular. Check here and here for more info.

Applying genre to your own work

While most people can agree on genres as readers or in the abstract, what has a lot of writers in knots is figuring out what kind of genre their book is.

Maybe for you it’s totally obvious. We all knew that kid who was sure, at 10, what he wanted to be when he grew up—and followed that dream. Most of the rest of us muddle around quite a bit, though. If this is you—you think your book is a little bit of this, a dash of that, and not quite the other—welcome to the club.

You still have to pick a genre, though.

You have to pick because readers will most certainly pick for you, and judge your book for it. Readers include the wide masses of citizens, but also literary agents, book reviewers, publishers, wholesalers, and lots of others who make your book’s success possible (or not). Without a genre, your book is basically invisible. With the wrong genre, readers may judge your book a failure, even if it’s not—it could be an excellent book, just mislabeled. Whoops, that ship sunk.

First, consider the age group of your readers. Then think about the other elements of genre. Content is the easiest to start with.

Finally, consider the style and form your book is taking shape as. Now put those items together, and pick the label that most closely suits. The fit may feel awkward at first, but it will help you both to write the book AND to find readers to read it.

Did I just say picking a genre will help your writing?

Why yes, yes I did. Nothing is as beneficial to creativity as certain constraints. Ask anyone who has sat in front of a blank page.

Bottom Line

Genre is the most basic kind of information attached to your book. The more you know about your book, the more you can do with it. It’s that simple.

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Want to talk through what kind of book you are writing?  A book structure intensive could be for you.

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Don’t be a lonely fish no one recognizes. Know your genre—the most basic kind of book information. CC image “The Only One Organism with Me Tonight” courtesy of Tim Wang on Flickr. Some rights reserved.