Genre and all that…

As a reader, do you pay attention to genre? Same question to you if you’re an author. “Genre fiction” is often a snooty put-down, but bookstores invented genres long ago as a means to order their bookshelves, and they’ve hung on, even though cross-genre books abound and one can now argue against the need for them. As a reader, I don’t pay much attention to genre—maybe more so than Amazon’s star ranking, though—I’ll read almost anything if it piques my interest. I determine that from the book...