Genre

[alg]

Genre as a marketing category!
Publishers and editors do not think about genre the same way authors do. Here's an explanation.



... Now I write an ode to spinach:

spinach,
you
are green
and
i wish i had more
of you than
what I ate
(yum yum yum)
at five in the morning,
dawn
creeping
up
you are
(my sunshine and)
the perfect delivery method
for salt and
garlic.

Comments

Re: Urban Fantasy//Dark Fantasy/Paranormal

[alg.livejournal.com]

These are fantasy novels. Period. That is the genre. You will also hear "paranormal" or "supernatural" or "supernormal" -- those are not the official genre, but they are descriptors of elements within the novel.

Next you have the descriptors: contemporary, urban, dark. Other descriptors for fantasy novels include: historical, epic, high, quest, sword-and-sorcer.

Contemporary/urban fantasy is a pretty big subgenre -- fantasy novels set now, or close to now. John M. Ford, Terri Windling, Charles de Lint, Laurell Hamilton, Kelley Armstrong, Charlaine Harris, Jim Butcher... These are authors who incorporate fantastical elements (magic, vampires, fairies, etc.) into contemporary city-settings.

Where books are stocked in a bookstore isn't as black and white as I've made it seem -- for example, in some places, Laurell Hamilton is stocked in romance, because the bookstore manager knows that the majority of people buying LKH's books are romance readers, and that makes it easier for the romance readers to find the books.

Does that make more sense?

Re: Urban Fantasy//Dark Fantasy/Paranormal

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, that does make more sense. Thank you!

One more question. Say you write a fantasy with vampires, werewolves, faires etc., and want to eventually write more novels set in that world. Then for a different book, you want to write a paranormal romance. Does it become a problem to use the same world - same rules etc for your supernatural creatures - in a different genre?

Re: Urban Fantasy//Dark Fantasy/Paranormal

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Heh, oi, the fantasy subsections! When I finished my first novel, it was time to do the query, and so many examples have qualified genres: "multicultural romance," "urban fantasy," "bio-thriller mystery", and so on. That may be some part of where authors get confused (especially when new to it all), because we think, oh, we should clarify as much as possible. I had the full list: multicultural, queer, urban, fantasy, thriller.

There were two things I learned: one, if your summary/teaser can identify sub-genres--gay Japanese DEA agent, multicultural, queer, urban, check, check, check; has car chases, thriller, check--there's no need to identify any but the biggest: fantasy. Just slap the biggest on there and let the agent and/or editor whittle it down to proper categories. Identifying the rest is just treating the agent/editor like s/he's stupid: in case you MISSED the __ __ __ points in the teaser, I'm going to remind you: western urban SF thriller chick lit, damn it!

And the second thing I learned was that first novels pretty much, for the most part, suck. All the fancy adjectives and qualifiers don't mean jack if the story don't sing.