Is It Done Yet? Part 2 – Know Your Genre

Part 2 – Know Your Genre

This is the second installment aimed at helping writers know when their novel is ready to query. It's based on the presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in April of this year, "Is It Done Yet? How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Query"

In the previous post, I said I would talk about identifying the stages of revision, but I realized I need to back up a bit and talk about one of the most basic steps for knowing when your manuscript is ready to query.

Do you know your novel’s genre?

Surprisingly, there are a lot of writers out there querying who don’t, and this is such an important question because if you don’t know your genre, you won’t know which agents are more likely to represent your work and you may not understand the conventions of the genre. Every genre, from literary (and, yes, literary is a fiction genre) to historical fiction to thrillers has conventions that the readers of the genre are not only familiar with, they expect. Those conventions cover everything from use of language to pacing to what drives the action of your novel forward. A mystery without a crime to solve, isn’t a mystery. A romance without a relationship at its core isn’t a romance. And a literary novel that doesn’t turn on deeper aspects of human consciousness and the writer’s use of language isn’t a literary novel.

Understanding and reading in your chosen genre not only helps you find comp titles when it’s time to query, but it also helps you avoid overworked tropes and genre clichés (or use them to your advantage by subverting those tropes), and recognize other conventions that vary from genre to genre, such as the average number of pages and word count.

In addition, most agents only represent a select number of genres. Besides personal preference, agents specialize because it allows them to get to know the imprints and the editors who acquire books in those genres. They understand the current marketplace demands for those books and are familiar with the genre’s conventions. So, if you query, say, a serial killer thriller with only one murder that takes place over halfway through the book and no plot line about someone trying to stop the murder from occurring, you’re likely to receive a slue of rejections because the readers of the genre expect a fast pace, a string of murders that happen during the course of the book, and tension derived from the attempts to save the next victim, and the agent knows they’ll be hard pressed to find a publisher.

The Large Buckets for Fiction – Commercial, Upmarket, and Literary

Though some people call these terms “genre” as well, I prefer to call them “categories” so there’s less confusion.

The first question you want to answer about your novel is where it falls on the market spectrum. These are the big bucket categories of commercial, upmarket, and literary. Like genre, each of these categories has conventions, but they’re pretty straight forward. And, please remember, these are generalizations, and these terms have nothing to do with the quality of the writing.

In general:

·       Commercial is driven by the plot

·       Upmarket is driven by the characters

·       Literary is driven by the language

Commercial fiction – like Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Suzanne Collins, Stephen King – is driven by the plot. It’s fast paced, oriented more toward what happens than character development (note: sometimes commercial fiction is also labeled "genre" fiction, which means that it conforms to the tropes of the genre rather than subverting them or commenting on them, as a reader would expect for an upmarket or literary mystery or YA or fantasy, etc).

Upmarket fiction – like Sara Gruen, Jennifer Egan, Nick Hornby, Gillian Flynn, Emma Donoghue, Khaled Hosseini – is focused on the character. There’s more emphasis on how the character reacts and changes over the course of the novel as well as an increased need for the character to be well-rounded and compelling.

Literary fiction – like Donna Tartt, Margaret Atwood, Anthony Doerr, Ian McEwen, Cormac McCarthy, Celeste Ng, George Saunders – turns on the writer’s use of language and deeper explorations of psychological and experiential meaning. (I’ll have to do a future blog post about meeting Margaret Atwood a few years ago and our conversation during which she admonished me several times that writing was “all about the language.”) Literary novels can be slower paced (though not always) because readers read for the nuances of the language and expect stories that aren’t as straight-forward as books in the other categories.

The major difference between books in these categories (and there is some overlap depending on the personal tastes of whoever is creating the list) is what drives the novel forward. Going back to the previous post, it’s the question of your novel’s central focus or question. If your novel is focused on the question of what happened, it’s likely you’re writing commercial fiction. If your novel is exploring what happened and the effect it has on the characters involved, you’re probably writing upmarket fiction. And if you’re exploring a philosophical construct or ideas about consciousness and memory, the odds are good you’re writing literary.

Genre – History, Mystery, and Romance, Oh My!

Now that you’ve figured out your category, it’s time to look at the question of genre. As I said above, identifying genre is important because it helps you narrow down your agent search and understand the marketplace.

A good place to start (though a tad overwhelming) is the BookIndustry Study Group’s listing of fiction genres. It’s a comprehensive (and exhaustive) list of genres and subgenres that’s used by the publishing industry (including Amazon) to group like books together. It’s also a good resource for writers who want to identify their genre and, in the case of large genres like SF/F, mystery, romance, and historical, their book’s subgenre as well. For example, there are sixteen subgenres for mystery including cozy, hard-boiled detective, police procedural, and historical. For romance, there are forty-seven including Regency, contemporary, Christian, military, and historical.

You’ll notice “historical” shows up as a subgenre for both mystery and romance, while there are also historical romances, historical mysteries, and historical thrillers under the historical fiction heading. The question of how you label your book goes back to the idea of what drives the forward movement of the story. If the central focus of the novel is the coming together of a couple set in Jane Austen’s time, it’s likely a Regency romance, but if the relationship is a subplot and the main focus is the protagonist’s attempt to stop a bomb exploding, it’s a thriller (think the Keanu Reeves/ Sandra Bullock movie, Speed – the main focus is the bomb on the bus, a subplot is the relationship that develops between Jack and Annie as they attempt to thwart the bomber). Always look to what the novel’s main focus is when attempting to label its genre.

So What Does All This Mean??????

What all this really boils down to is being able to identify the agents who represent the type of novel you’re writing AND giving the agents the kind of novel they want to read.

This is important because an agent won’t represent a book, no matter how well written or marketable, in a genre with which they are not familiar. When I was reading submissions for the literary agent, we received a spectacular query that identified the book as a mystery, which the agent represented. I recommended she ask for the full manuscript, which she did, but about 100 pages into the novel, I realized the novel wasn’t a mystery at all. It was a thriller, which this agent didn’t represent, and so the manuscript was rejected. Similarly, the agent represented historical fiction and was quite specific about the time period in which she was particularly interested: the American industrial revolution. We received a very good query for a novel set in the Roman era but the agent declined because it wasn’t a time period with which she was familiar enough to know if the author was getting the details right and she didn’t want to risk looking foolish to an editor by sending something that got major historical facts wrong.

What this also comes down to is sounding professional from the first line of your query letter: I am seeking representation for my upmarket contemporary women’s novel OR my commercial legal thriller OR my genre millionaire/billionaire romance OR literary amateur sleuth mystery…

In addition, knowing your specific genre is also important because it helps you find comp titles. Remember I said Amazon uses the genre/subgenre list? If you do a search for, say, bestselling dystopian fiction or bestselling cozy mysteries, you'll find comp titles to use in your query letter. 

Now that the ground work has been laid, let's take a look at the stages of revision starting with What the Writer Needs in the next post.  

If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me at: diane.glaz@gmail.com

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email, Facebook, Twitter, or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base whose work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs