What is a genre?

And why do genres matter in fiction?

Hi everyone,

I hope you’ve all had lovely weekends. Today I want to talk about genre!

What does genre mean? It’s a question that came up a few times on a panel I recently did with the Blue Pencil Agency (I’m actually doing another one in person on Wednesday 25th March at Bard Books in London if anyone wants to come!) and I thought it was worth writing a post about. In commercial fiction, we talk a lot about genre, and if you are a writer, I do think it’s helpful to know what genre you are writing in. It can help when you are pitching to agents or editors, and it can help you think a bit more about the reader, too - readers have come to expect certain things from certain genres, and I believe knowing this can be helpful. I’m certainly not suggesting that all books need to adhere to tight genres - some of the best books don’t - but knowing and thinking about your genre can be a useful tool, and inside a publishing house, it’s a useful shorthand when we’re pitching to sales and marketing etc (and when they in turn are pitching to retailers).

Non-fiction also contains genres, of course, literary fiction less so, but this piece is going to focus on commercial fiction as that’s my area of expertise.

The main genres in commercial fiction are the ones that BookScan (our system that tracks book sales through the tills) uses - crime and thriller, general fiction and romance, science fiction and fantasy. However, within those there are a lot of sub-genres, the main ones being dark romance, rom-coms, ‘women’s fiction’ (though this term is falling out of use), book-club fiction, reading-group fiction, domestic suspense, gangland crime, police procedural, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, romantasy, saga, speculative fiction, horror, historical fiction, timeslip fiction - I could go on! As you can see, there are a lot, and publishing also loves to invent new genres every now and again: ‘grip-lit’ ‘sad girl lit’ ‘clogs-and-shawls fiction.’ I do realise some of these sound a bit reductive, and they are not meant to be offensive - they are, I suppose, a sort of shorthand for the industry (which tries to keep up with readers’ tastes and an ever-changing market).

If you are an author, I don’t think it’s your job to get overly bogged down in genre, and I can totally see how that list could seem a bit baffling! When I was first submitting to agents, with my debut novel The Doll House, I had no idea that I was writing a psychological thriller - at the time I didn’t call it that in my submission letter, and I worked with my agent to move it more firmly into that space, because she could see that the second half of the novel read much more like a thriller than the first half, and all the right ingredients were there to tap into that area of the market. A good agent will help you categorise your novel, and help you with comparison titles (or comps) too. So don’t worry, you don’t have to be certain about your genre on your own.

That said, I do think it can be helpful to ask yourself what genre appeals to you. A great way of knowing more and learning about genre is simply to read - read a lot of books in a similar space to what you think you’re writing, have a look at books in shops and online, and see if they feel similar to what you’re trying to do. Genres are not new - Daphne du Maurier was writing psychological thrillers before anybody talked about them on Substack, and Agatha Christie was writing what we’d now call cosy crime - but they are pretty prevalent in publishing. Online retailers such as Amazon also use genre to categorise the books, and as publishers we help with that by adding metadata behind the scenes, which affects which categories your book will show up in. Some of them can be very niche, but being in those can be a way of your book rising to the top of a specific Amazon chart and gaining a nice orange bestseller flag! Amazon is constantly changing and updating its algorithm, which hugely affects reader visibility too, and some publishers have more control over that than others (not least Amazon itself, which of course also operates as a publishing house).

So how else do we define genres? Well, sometimes its down to the tropes a book contains. Tropes are a huge thing in romance - you will doubtless have seen terms such as ‘enemies to lovers’ and ‘billionaire romance’ bandied about, which are really just more sub-categories of the genre. It can also be down to the time period, the setting, the writing style, the characters, the themes - all of these factors club together to form a genre. Often, books do straddle genres - we might call this cross-genre or genre-bending - but if you are a debut writer, I do think it is sensible when pitching your novel to stick to one genre, or if you really feel as though it is cross-genre, then to a maximum of two. For example, you could say the novel is a speculative crime novel - meaning it is a crime novel but that the reader should expect a speculative element. Or you could say that your novel is dystopian, with a hint of romance. You don’t really want to over-complicate it by throwing in more than two genres, as it can lead to the agent or editor feeling immediately a bit confused and unsure of what they are about to read.

If you are struggling to understand what genre you’re writing in, why not try asking yourself a series of questions about the novel? If you use beta-readers, you could also ask them for their views. For example: does your novel have a romantic relationship at the heart of it, and is that relationship the primary driving force of the book? And does it end happily? If the answer is yes, you are likely writing a romance. Does your novel feature twists and unreliable narrators? Does it contain darker themes? Perhaps it’s a psychological thriller. Does your book contain a lot of world-building and creatures that aren’t human? You’re probably writing science fiction and fantasy! You can build up more of these questions by reading and paying attention to reader responses when they read your work, too.

Of course, genres fall in and out of fashion. When I was first starting to work in publishing, all anyone wanted was psychological suspense. Now, it’s romantasy, horror, and romance! Perennial genres such as crime never go away, though, so take all of this with a pinch of salt. Most commercial fiction finds an audience, even if it’s smaller at times than others.

Try to think of genres as helping booksellers and readers out. Bookshops use genre labelling too. And I really do understand that there are some amazing works of fiction that don’t fall within a genre - sometimes these spark lots of similar books flooding the market - and I do also believe it’s important to write what you feel comfortable and excited about writing! But as ever with this Substack, it’s my belief that knowledge is power, so for those of you who have been wondering about genre, I hope this helps a little!

What does genre mean to you? Did you know what genre you were writing in when you started? Feel free to comment below and share your thoughts.

Happy writing.

Phoebe x

P.S. Reminder that I am running a competition on here to win the chance for me to read and critique your first 10,000 words and synopsis. If you want to enter, click here! You have until midnight today (GMT 22.3.26).