Is self-publishing redefining the rules of book genre?

Like many début authors, I didn’t really think too hard about the genre of my first book until I’d finished writing it. And looking back, with large parts of the story seemingly writing themselves, I’m not sure I could have moulded it to fit a predefined literary pigeon-hole even if I’d wanted to. So it was only when I started the laborious and disheartening process of seeking representation that I began to realise the importance, at least to the traditional publishing world, of fitting neatly within a recognised genre. Of course, you only need to consider browsing the aisles of a traditional bricks-and-mortar book store to understand why this is – they need to know in which aisle and on which shelf to put your book. Publishing genre fiction also removes some of the risk since publishers already understand how the overall market is subdivided into groups loyal to each of the categories such as crime, murder-mystery, science-fiction, fantasy etc. and roughly how many they can sell into each. Consequently, agents and publishers tend to shy away from novels which fall between genres. Of course, there are the so-called cross-over novels, but the very small number of these which actually get published rarely come from new authors. This is when I realised that my novel, CONNECTED, didn’t fit so neatly into any existing recognised genre. In fact, I’d had some early warnings of this when, in the very early days, having accidentally let slip to friends that I’d just written a book, I struggled to answer the simple yet inevitable next...