Importance of Genre in Reader Expectations

Beaulieu, Cole, Pape, and Ahmed. Photo by Patrick Wolohan

At Epic Confusion last weekend, I sat in on a panel about genre-blending.  It was moderated by Myke Cole, but included authors Bradley Beaulieu, Scott Lynch, Saladin Ahmed, and Cindy Spencer Pape.  Cole, after a little talk about how each of the panelists' novels were genre blending in some way, posed the question -- what significance, if any, does genre have to a writer/publisher outside marketing?  The panel mostly agreed that it had none -- nor should it.  That got me thinking.  Value or not, genre and marketability have a tremendous amount to do with which novels editors buy, and even more with how they're presented to the marketplace.

On an earlier panel, author Kameron Hurley (God's War, Infidel, and the forthcoming Rapture) commented that several large publishing houses passed on her novel because they just didn't know how to market it.  Was it science fiction? Fantasy? Having read the novel, I can see where these houses were coming from.  What Hurley wrote is unique.  It's got flavors of gritty fantasy, but there's nothing remotely 'fantastic' about the world or plot.  Even the magic system seems more like biotech than wizardry.  Neither is it science fiction.  None of her 'speculations' have even the tiniest connection to actual science.  The fact is, God's War was lucky to see the light of day.  Night Shade Books took a chance on it.  Because it doesn't have a genre, it's a veritable boondoggle of marketing.

So how does that impact the reader?  That's a harder question to answer, and to do so I have to ask two more.

1. How are genres marketed to readers?  
2. And is the reader harmed by their own predisposition to spend money only on those things they know they'll enjoy?

To the first question, genres are marketed to readers primarily via cover design.  Perhaps, in the modern electronic world, genre has become a search term in and of itself, but even in cyber-shelf-space I find myself attracted to titles based on their covers.  Let's say I love literary fantasy.  Give me something with beautiful prose, some deep undercurrents, and I'm sold.  In that case, Glen Duncan's, The Last Werewolf, cover says all that right things, where Karen MacInerney's Leader of the Pack... doesn't.   Unfortunately, it seems the only time we get a cover like Duncan's is when a publisher is trying to target crossing over into the 'mainstream' (cue ominous music).

The fall-out of that is that covers will (most often) reflect those aspects of the novel that target a genre demographic.  Case in point, Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon and Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point, two novels due out in February.  Both covers are done in a cartoonish style that calls to mind kinetic action, promise of violence, and tangible magic.  They offer nothing to suggest that beneath the surface Ahmed and Cole actually pose weighty questions to their readers.  They're being marketed to the so-called 'fan boy'.

At the risk of being overly illustrative, I'd point out another interesting cover conundrum.  Bradley Beaulieu's debut novel, Winds of Khalakovo, was presented with a beautiful artistic rendition of an airship listing in a mountain pass.  The sequel, Straights of Galahesh, features a character driven illustration of the novel's protagonist leaping from an airship into the open air.  It suggests action and excitement, but does nothing to communicate true tone of the novel so well captured by the previous volume.  Will the new style sell more books?  I'm almost sure.  Does it send the right signals to the reader?  I'm not convinced, and therein lies the answer to my second questions.  Do genres harm readers?  The answer: you're damn right.

Genres create a false paradigm.  One that presumes that every book is like another, when in fact they are all unique.  Does Douglas Hulick's Among Thieves call to mind Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora?  Yes, but the truth is they bear little resemblance to one another.  Yet for the next twenty years they'll be spoken of in the same breath, bear covers that communicate their similarities, and few who don't like one will ever read the other.  And why?  Because marketing demands they be akin.  Forget the fact that they sound nothing alike and are built of entirely different foundations.  As far as an a publisher is concerned, a thief is a thief and that's the reader to target.

For Ahmed and Cole that means fan boy.  What I lament is that those same readers will never find Jo Walton's Among Others or Paula Brandon's The Traitor's Daughter, all because they are presented in such a way that make readers pause and say, 'that doesn't look like it's for me.'  Sound familiar?  That's the same thing every literary critic has said for the last fifty years when they walk by the Science Fiction & Fantasy section.  In allowing genres to persist, largely due to marketing concerns, I believe genre publishers are limiting themselves.  For every reader gained by producing something that fits a genre niche, another is lost who would never try such a thing.

What's worse, is that once an author finds a market it becomes almost impossible for them to do something else.  Their agents and editors want more of what sells, not necessarily more of what they want to write.  Writing is an artform as much as it's a business, and reading should be as much an appreciation of the art as it is an escape.  Genres retard that process.  It provides a path of least resistance to readers when it comes to choosing their next novel, allowing the publisher to continually target the same types of novel again and again.

Look, I get it.  It's a publisher's job to sell books.  They have to make a value judgement on each novel and find a box for it.  Meanwhile, readers will spend their hard earned money on titles they are sure to like.  It is a self fulfilling prophecy, but not one I have to like.

Do I?