Really well thought out, ML, and as you suggest a bigger problem than most recognize. I think this is part of the reason why more readers and writers are turning to independent publishers as places that champion difficult-to-classify books. But not always. When my new novel was out on submission I heard from one prominent indie publisher of crime fiction who said that it's not the kind of crime fiction they publish anymore. What? So that nichefication exists, even when it's not explicit.
Maybe it's a topic for a different discussion but when I see the kind of thing that's being made into film and TV (especially on the streamers) this genre-straddling doesn't seem to be an obstacle. Bottom line, when publishers try to play it safe everyone loses.
Thanks for the shout out and hope we get to do another event together soon!
“When publishers try to play it safe everyone loses.” Louder for the people in the back!! Really, I think this sums is all up. The industry has become so precarious that everyone is becoming very risk-averse, which is not the best recipe for publishing anything groundbreaking.
I sympathize with publishers — trad, indie, or otherwise — who are just inundated and overwhelmed, but weaponizing a genre distinction the author has no say in just seems like a losing game for everyone.
However! It does make for great conversations and I hope we get to have another one soon, too.
This happened to me once on a project (not a novel, but a scripted podcast), and it took me so long to take a deep breath and understand that part of the reason it failed was because it was so terribly mislabeled. My mantra had to become "it's not a failure, it just didn't find its ideal audience." I wrote a dark and twisted comedy satirizing the rom-com and it was being peddled to listeners as, simply ----- a romance. I was asked to make an ongoing series, the people who consumed it thought it was supposed to be close-ended, like a book. I ended on a cliff-hanger and more than half of the one star reviews are people rioting against that, wanting more (which was by design!), but of course it performed so poorly I wasn't given that chance. It was so painful and maddening. Anyways, fast forward three years and I'm about a week away from being out on sub with my debut novel, which is also pretty genre agnostic and hard to niche-genre label, and God this article slapped for me. You have me PRAYING it's simply considered a work of fiction. I shudder to think where it might land if someone tries to pigeon hole it.
Honestly, my biggest advice here is GET OUT IN FRONT OF IT. Decide (with your editor) what you want to call it and call it that relentlessly in the lead-up to pub day so you can have your say before the market does. Will that fix the problem? Not completely, but it might help a little. And there will always be people who give you bad ratings based on their own misunderstanding of what it is. (If I had a nickel for every reader who docked a star from GRAVEYARD because they "don't like short books," I wouldn't even be worried about sales. If you don't like short books, don't buy novellas. That is a you problem.) Wishing you the best of luck out there, my friend.
this is such a great post—i’ve always been afraid of getting locked into one genre as a writer and i’m resisting that as much as possible. i think forcing writers to do more of the same thing endlessly is what breeds boring, tired work that nobody is excited to read or write. i loved “if we were villains” and i’m looking forward to reading hot wax! and your 1947 industry novel, when you publish it.
Your rant is justified. I think any writer would be angry and mystified if she and her publisher called out a retailer who insisted on purposely misplacing a book into the wrong category. So I agree completely. The part of the story that the retailer and publisher ought to care about a lot are the angry reviews--customers were upset at it. This is what happens when readers feel misled. No one should want that!
When "Hot Wax" was released I observed that this retailer's physical stores did not locate the book in the wrong place. In the stores where I saw it, which was only a handful to be sure, it was in general fiction even where new fiction is organized into genres. So the online discovery did not match the physical discovery from what I saw.
To buttress your point about general fiction, one of the pleasures of literary and general fiction is that the reader has no idea of what to expect, which makes for a much more immersive ride. I cannot do justice to describing "The Dutch House" or "Heart the Lover" but their ability to immerse the reader is what makes them work. As a reader, I find the sub-genreification of genre fiction to be annoying. If I would have known there was a genre called "cozy fantasy" I never would have read Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde trilogy--which I enjoyed (even though by the end I was pushing back against the genre's conventions.) And consider "Station Eleven," which was marketed as a literary novel but which could easily have been put into SFF. Broader was clearly better.
For the paperback you have a couple aces up your sleeve which should prevent mis-classification ever again: One the blurb from the San Francisco Chronicle and the other from the Irish Times: "The best book about rock'n'roll music since High Fidelity." That on the cover should make putting this in horror impossible.
Oh, you would think so and we certainly hope so! Still, unfortunate that almost all of our conversation about the paperback has been how to correct this misconception that was completely unnecessary to begin with. As for physical stores, it really depends on the location, but the digital footprint is the bigger problem. Metadata is easy to spread whether it's correct or not, and I've heard from probably a dozen people about this post alone saying they didn't buy the book *because* the internet told them it was horror. Honestly I'm learning in real time here that the damage may be even worse than we thought. And the saddest part is, it's generally that readers assume I'm the one who misled them. You truly can't win for losing in this business.
Former bookseller here—the shelving and genre issue has always bothered me. I also suspect that the “general fiction” section suffers from a longstanding “literary fiction” snobbery problem, which only compounds with the BookTok-ification of other genres. I know I should be happy to see more people reading generally, but sometimes with these microtrends it has felt a bit “at what cost?”.
Been following you since the early Tumblr days; don’t let the pigeonhole get you down!
Yes! My local library is divided into genres, and it's always bothered me. I'm sure they'd say it helps people find the books they want, but my suspicion is that it much more stops people from finding books that they don't already know that they want.
I have this same problem because when I started out I had this ridiculous notion that every book I would write would be a slightly different genre. But the industry does not want that regardless of what my readers might like. I went out on sub with my third book, a crime novel that was literary leaning about a family drama-- and I got a lot of "we were disappointed bc we wanted something more like her first book." Which made me sad. I love my first book, but I love my second more as an evolution of who I am as a writer so it was doubly painful both from the "can you do more of the same?" and "we don't even care about your second book/evolution." So TBH, I pulled that novel and wrote something more like the first. (a girl has bills). I'll be honest- when I got my copy of Hot Wax I was like, "so ML Rio can switch it up but I cant... oh wait, she's more successful. Ok i have to be at that level of success for people to be okay with it...So in ten years I can write whatever I want...?" No, as it turns out, we are all getting shit on! I'm interested in writing a totally different vampire fantasy but hear hints of "~but that will confuse readers/ booksellers~" Um, no it won't..? And they can find me if they know the alphabet..? I think there is a very basic reader-- say the reader who just devours all thrillers--who might get confused by me writing a book that isn't a straight thriller, but maybe i lose that reader and gain the readers who might be more interested in tracking a particular writer's evolution over time.
All of this is absolutely why I’m a self-published writer. I went out on sub years ago with a book that featured powerful women, high tech, scheming, all the scheming (or as a friend and I say to each other in critiques, the SCHEEEEEMING), and skiing. In a Pacific Northwest setting.
Lots of positive rejects. But the reality is that I write SFF with western settings (and Pacific Northwest to boot) instead of the traditional urban or medieval European locations, and oh dear heavens my heavily Western stuff is NOT Southwestern or Old West tropy, so…yeah. And oh yeah, with the exception of the Martinieres, the anchor characters are all powerful women. Talk about cooties to tradpub!
oh this is outrageously infuriating and definitely something i've noticed as a reader on the outside. i agree that all three of your books have felt like YOU wrote them (which is why i read them!!) so your editor was on the nose there. it IS what readers want and unless it's a series all within the same world, i don't want the books to feel similar!! nobody wins if you misconstrue the product!!
I think most bookstores are already fighting for shelf space, and I think this would cause more confusion than it would correct, unfortunately. (It also doesn't solve the problem of selling the book to the wrong audience, i.e. horror readers.)
I tend to think of genre as a sort of artistic conversation: Northanger Abbey was talking back at Otranto and bantering with Udolpho; the authors of Narnia and Lord of the Rings did take long walks together and talk about their worldbuilding, while Game of Thrones notoriously wants to know the tax policy of the rightful King of Gondor... And so the commodification of art under capitalism is definitely very discouraging because that setup doesn't care about where the artistic conversation is at, but is only trying to sell to readers on the vibes.
I love to hop around genres in my reading, and I fully intend to do the same in my writing because I like to experiment and explore ideas that way. The idea that wouldn’t even be viable feels heartbreaking - and like another mark against traditional publishing (appreciating it’s retailer marketing you’re objecting to here, but given money speaks).
I also totally agree about it impacting education. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Worlds are big and messy and complicated, and if you don’t engage widely to taste all those different perspectives… well how narrow is your point of view going to become? How much wider the divisions between different groups who’ve never used a story to walk in others steps?
i relate to this so hard!! my first book was mis-marketed as a "romance" when it had some very gritty themes and was really more of an exploration of mental illness and self-compassion than anything else. the book really suffered for it.
Really well thought out, ML, and as you suggest a bigger problem than most recognize. I think this is part of the reason why more readers and writers are turning to independent publishers as places that champion difficult-to-classify books. But not always. When my new novel was out on submission I heard from one prominent indie publisher of crime fiction who said that it's not the kind of crime fiction they publish anymore. What? So that nichefication exists, even when it's not explicit.
Maybe it's a topic for a different discussion but when I see the kind of thing that's being made into film and TV (especially on the streamers) this genre-straddling doesn't seem to be an obstacle. Bottom line, when publishers try to play it safe everyone loses.
Thanks for the shout out and hope we get to do another event together soon!
“When publishers try to play it safe everyone loses.” Louder for the people in the back!! Really, I think this sums is all up. The industry has become so precarious that everyone is becoming very risk-averse, which is not the best recipe for publishing anything groundbreaking.
I sympathize with publishers — trad, indie, or otherwise — who are just inundated and overwhelmed, but weaponizing a genre distinction the author has no say in just seems like a losing game for everyone.
However! It does make for great conversations and I hope we get to have another one soon, too.
This happened to me once on a project (not a novel, but a scripted podcast), and it took me so long to take a deep breath and understand that part of the reason it failed was because it was so terribly mislabeled. My mantra had to become "it's not a failure, it just didn't find its ideal audience." I wrote a dark and twisted comedy satirizing the rom-com and it was being peddled to listeners as, simply ----- a romance. I was asked to make an ongoing series, the people who consumed it thought it was supposed to be close-ended, like a book. I ended on a cliff-hanger and more than half of the one star reviews are people rioting against that, wanting more (which was by design!), but of course it performed so poorly I wasn't given that chance. It was so painful and maddening. Anyways, fast forward three years and I'm about a week away from being out on sub with my debut novel, which is also pretty genre agnostic and hard to niche-genre label, and God this article slapped for me. You have me PRAYING it's simply considered a work of fiction. I shudder to think where it might land if someone tries to pigeon hole it.
Honestly, my biggest advice here is GET OUT IN FRONT OF IT. Decide (with your editor) what you want to call it and call it that relentlessly in the lead-up to pub day so you can have your say before the market does. Will that fix the problem? Not completely, but it might help a little. And there will always be people who give you bad ratings based on their own misunderstanding of what it is. (If I had a nickel for every reader who docked a star from GRAVEYARD because they "don't like short books," I wouldn't even be worried about sales. If you don't like short books, don't buy novellas. That is a you problem.) Wishing you the best of luck out there, my friend.
Thank you for this :’)
Big oof!!
The biggest oof
This is so well done and I’m really grateful for you!
Oh, thank you so much! Thank you for reading x
Holy shit actual nightmare
And a recurring one apparently!
Relatable! Glad to read this before the marketing meeting for my second book.
Definitely get out it front it if you can! The best defense is a good offense.
this is such a great post—i’ve always been afraid of getting locked into one genre as a writer and i’m resisting that as much as possible. i think forcing writers to do more of the same thing endlessly is what breeds boring, tired work that nobody is excited to read or write. i loved “if we were villains” and i’m looking forward to reading hot wax! and your 1947 industry novel, when you publish it.
Thank you! Unfortunately I'm proof positive that a lot of this will be beyond your control but I hope you get luckier than I did b
Your rant is justified. I think any writer would be angry and mystified if she and her publisher called out a retailer who insisted on purposely misplacing a book into the wrong category. So I agree completely. The part of the story that the retailer and publisher ought to care about a lot are the angry reviews--customers were upset at it. This is what happens when readers feel misled. No one should want that!
When "Hot Wax" was released I observed that this retailer's physical stores did not locate the book in the wrong place. In the stores where I saw it, which was only a handful to be sure, it was in general fiction even where new fiction is organized into genres. So the online discovery did not match the physical discovery from what I saw.
To buttress your point about general fiction, one of the pleasures of literary and general fiction is that the reader has no idea of what to expect, which makes for a much more immersive ride. I cannot do justice to describing "The Dutch House" or "Heart the Lover" but their ability to immerse the reader is what makes them work. As a reader, I find the sub-genreification of genre fiction to be annoying. If I would have known there was a genre called "cozy fantasy" I never would have read Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde trilogy--which I enjoyed (even though by the end I was pushing back against the genre's conventions.) And consider "Station Eleven," which was marketed as a literary novel but which could easily have been put into SFF. Broader was clearly better.
For the paperback you have a couple aces up your sleeve which should prevent mis-classification ever again: One the blurb from the San Francisco Chronicle and the other from the Irish Times: "The best book about rock'n'roll music since High Fidelity." That on the cover should make putting this in horror impossible.
Oh, you would think so and we certainly hope so! Still, unfortunate that almost all of our conversation about the paperback has been how to correct this misconception that was completely unnecessary to begin with. As for physical stores, it really depends on the location, but the digital footprint is the bigger problem. Metadata is easy to spread whether it's correct or not, and I've heard from probably a dozen people about this post alone saying they didn't buy the book *because* the internet told them it was horror. Honestly I'm learning in real time here that the damage may be even worse than we thought. And the saddest part is, it's generally that readers assume I'm the one who misled them. You truly can't win for losing in this business.
Former bookseller here—the shelving and genre issue has always bothered me. I also suspect that the “general fiction” section suffers from a longstanding “literary fiction” snobbery problem, which only compounds with the BookTok-ification of other genres. I know I should be happy to see more people reading generally, but sometimes with these microtrends it has felt a bit “at what cost?”.
Been following you since the early Tumblr days; don’t let the pigeonhole get you down!
Yes! My local library is divided into genres, and it's always bothered me. I'm sure they'd say it helps people find the books they want, but my suspicion is that it much more stops people from finding books that they don't already know that they want.
I have this same problem because when I started out I had this ridiculous notion that every book I would write would be a slightly different genre. But the industry does not want that regardless of what my readers might like. I went out on sub with my third book, a crime novel that was literary leaning about a family drama-- and I got a lot of "we were disappointed bc we wanted something more like her first book." Which made me sad. I love my first book, but I love my second more as an evolution of who I am as a writer so it was doubly painful both from the "can you do more of the same?" and "we don't even care about your second book/evolution." So TBH, I pulled that novel and wrote something more like the first. (a girl has bills). I'll be honest- when I got my copy of Hot Wax I was like, "so ML Rio can switch it up but I cant... oh wait, she's more successful. Ok i have to be at that level of success for people to be okay with it...So in ten years I can write whatever I want...?" No, as it turns out, we are all getting shit on! I'm interested in writing a totally different vampire fantasy but hear hints of "~but that will confuse readers/ booksellers~" Um, no it won't..? And they can find me if they know the alphabet..? I think there is a very basic reader-- say the reader who just devours all thrillers--who might get confused by me writing a book that isn't a straight thriller, but maybe i lose that reader and gain the readers who might be more interested in tracking a particular writer's evolution over time.
All of this is absolutely why I’m a self-published writer. I went out on sub years ago with a book that featured powerful women, high tech, scheming, all the scheming (or as a friend and I say to each other in critiques, the SCHEEEEEMING), and skiing. In a Pacific Northwest setting.
Lots of positive rejects. But the reality is that I write SFF with western settings (and Pacific Northwest to boot) instead of the traditional urban or medieval European locations, and oh dear heavens my heavily Western stuff is NOT Southwestern or Old West tropy, so…yeah. And oh yeah, with the exception of the Martinieres, the anchor characters are all powerful women. Talk about cooties to tradpub!
oh this is outrageously infuriating and definitely something i've noticed as a reader on the outside. i agree that all three of your books have felt like YOU wrote them (which is why i read them!!) so your editor was on the nose there. it IS what readers want and unless it's a series all within the same world, i don't want the books to feel similar!! nobody wins if you misconstrue the product!!
valid points--couldn't bookstores solve the showcasing problem by putting copies of the book in two places in the store (general and genre)?
I think most bookstores are already fighting for shelf space, and I think this would cause more confusion than it would correct, unfortunately. (It also doesn't solve the problem of selling the book to the wrong audience, i.e. horror readers.)
I tend to think of genre as a sort of artistic conversation: Northanger Abbey was talking back at Otranto and bantering with Udolpho; the authors of Narnia and Lord of the Rings did take long walks together and talk about their worldbuilding, while Game of Thrones notoriously wants to know the tax policy of the rightful King of Gondor... And so the commodification of art under capitalism is definitely very discouraging because that setup doesn't care about where the artistic conversation is at, but is only trying to sell to readers on the vibes.
Love this and appreciate you posting it so much.
I love to hop around genres in my reading, and I fully intend to do the same in my writing because I like to experiment and explore ideas that way. The idea that wouldn’t even be viable feels heartbreaking - and like another mark against traditional publishing (appreciating it’s retailer marketing you’re objecting to here, but given money speaks).
I also totally agree about it impacting education. Things don’t happen in a vacuum. Worlds are big and messy and complicated, and if you don’t engage widely to taste all those different perspectives… well how narrow is your point of view going to become? How much wider the divisions between different groups who’ve never used a story to walk in others steps?
Thank you again for sparking the discussion.
i relate to this so hard!! my first book was mis-marketed as a "romance" when it had some very gritty themes and was really more of an exploration of mental illness and self-compassion than anything else. the book really suffered for it.
thank you for this piece <3