If there is one thing I’ve struggled with during the process of writing Tiny Shadows, it’s genre. I used to think of genre as a pretty straight-forward thing. Dumbed-down, agents tell you that genre is the shelf in the bookstore on which your book sits.
But genre has gotten more complicated than that. With the explosion of e-readers over the last decade, writers have challenged and defied those barriers more than ever. It’s no longer as simple as Horror, Sci-Fi, and Romance. Distinctively unique stories that have soared through traditional publishing hurdles may have no clear-cut shelf space at Barnes & Noble, yet there is a real and pressing demand for these genre-bending books. Take Warm Bodies, for example: a comedic post-apocalyptic zombie love story. If readers can find it in their hearts to accept a “zom rom com,” surely the shelves at Barnes & Noble are a bit dusty.
But alas, if I learned anything at the writer’s conference I recently attended, it’s that you need to be able to tell an agent who they can sell your book to–and that means telling them which garden-variety shelf it sits on at the bookstore.
It’s a little insulting, isn’t it? That we can pour our hearts and souls into telling a unique and gripping story, only to be bullied into changing it to meet antiquated industry standards in genre, or else face the prospect of never seeing it on a shelf at all?
Of course, there’s always self-publishing. Self-publishing has changed the writing experience as much as e-readers have changed the reading experience. But self-publishing, of course, is not without its own drawbacks. It has to be done right, and doing it right is hard, especially if you’ve never done it before. You have to get really good cover art and hire a slew of editors, and find creative ways to make your book stand out in the shitstream of authors who are publishing the first draft without so much as having a beta reader point out their misuse of apostrophes in the word “it’s.” You have to find exactly the right key words that will appeal to your readers, and you only get to use so many of them. And even if you somehow, some way, manage to catapult through all those obstacles and get your book in front of readers, how many readers are narrowing their search to “zom rom com?”
Genre is a brutal journey. But if we are true to ourselves as writers, we can’t let in-the-box genres keep us from writing our sui generis story. Not if there’s a chance that someone, somewhere, will forever keep it on his own bookshelf–even if it will never be on a shelf at the bookstore.
Yes, genre labels are very clumsy and approximate, and as far as I know, publishers haven’t yet embraced cross-genre as a category. The sub-categories on Amazon do offer some flexibility, but the pitch / blurb may be what really counts in getting the full message across. But it’s so hard to write!