Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "contests"

What do you do when you realize that your books don’t fit common genre expectations? What category should you suggest when your publisher applies for a fiction contest? What discussion groups would you join on LinkedIn or here on Goodreads?

Book stores, even Amazon, need to find a place—a shelf or category—that defines literature so readers can find the kind of books they love. Finding the right shelf for your books isn’t easy, because most readers eventually gravitate toward books of any genre that tell in beautiful language a powerful story. Those are the books that last on the best seller lists for years, not just weeks. Those are the books we keep, to read over and over again.

As writers who love words and the process of crafting story and characters, we are caught in the genre dilemma if our books don’t follow the currently defined formulas. My example are the books called The Archives of Varok. What shelf should I put them on?

The stories explore issues critical for teens to consider, but the protagonist is an adoptive mother, a professional microbiologist. (So Adult fiction?) Her child is two years old in the first book, grows up in the second (YA!), meets her first love and her greatest challenge in the third, and redefines her life in the fourth book in her twenties. (Is there a shelf called New Adult?)

On the YA shelf, the protagonist is supposed to be . . . how old? One teen reader said the Archives are appropriate down to seventh grade. An elder reader recently noted that The View Beyond Earth was definitely adult. It explores how we would “realistically” react if we discovered that friendly, savvy, attractive, very-subtly-but-profoundly-aliens lived near Earth?

Aliens? The trap springs shut, and the AOV books land on the scifi shelf. But the aliens are fun, not horrible and dangerous, not even drooling. The covers suggest they love children. Some are even cute, like the ahlork on The Webs of Varok cover. I feel that the books’ covers reflect the theme and tone of the series—an exploration of who we are, we human beings.

Current realism is not the worst feature that makes me want to take the AOV books out of the Scifi Shelf. I am also a realist when it comes to space travel. In my “scifi” books, traveling to Jupiter takes time, costs lots of energy, and damages living beings. Answers to our horrendous problems like overpopulation stress, fossil fuels, and cognitive dissonance are more easily portrayed in a realistic setting.

I decided my stories would be more palatable if they provided good entertainment, so I populated them with challenging aliens that were fun to meet. Fun? Humor? In Science Fiction? Or are they YA? Maybe New Adult from the beginning? Or should AOV be on the Sociology shelf? Maybe Political Science, since the books portray a formula for achieving an equitable, democratic long-term steady-state?

How about the Speculative Fiction shelf? Most contests don’t list that category. It’s a bit broad. After all, readers want to know what a book is about. So we have to rely on writing the one-liners and the marketing paragraphs agents love. No one shelf seems to fit; the second book in the AOV series, The Webs of Varok, won a silver Nautilus award for adult science fiction and was a YA ForeWord Book of the Year finalist.

I suspect I’m not alone in this dilemma. What do you think?