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

[ambyr.livejournal.com]

Here's the story: I say to Waldenbooks, "This book doesn't have a genre." Walden says, "So what are we supposed to do with it?" I say, "I dunno." Walden says, "How about we just skip this title and buy twice as many of that romance novel?" I say, "All right." Then your book nets, oh, 6,000 mass market copies, and you don't ever sell another book again. The end..

Heh, if anyone's curious, this is equally true of academic books. . .if an author send me a prospectus listing the ten wildly different disciplines that he thinks will clamor to adopt his book in their classrooms, I will immediately (and generally correctly) interpret it as having no classroom potential at all.