Defining your book in independent publishing

Genre is one of things that help us define what we write. One of the most common question authors get asked is: “what kind of books do you write?” Falling neatly into a particular genre gives us a useful, brief way to answer this question.

In independent publishing, it also gives us useful ways to promote our work. Knowing what genre our books fall into means that we can research markets more effectively, work out how to target readers and come up with marketing strategies that are simple, cohesive and effective. Hopefully.

Having a clearly defined genre can also be beneficial in terms of sales; we know that self-published romance authors, for instance, often sell more copies than authors of other genres. However, perhaps there is also something to be said for not worrying too much about the genre your book falls into when you’re planning to self-publish it.

One of the big reasons for this is that self-publishing is not traditional publishing. In traditional publishing, you sometimes hear stories of writers being rejected because their work didn’t fit neatly into any particular category; the fact that their work was ‘cross-genre’ counted as a mark against them, no matter how good it might have been.

This isn’t something we have to worry about as much in independent publishing. We can take a chance on doing something different if we want to – we only answer to ourselves and so we control what we write, and how we define it. There are also plenty of categorisation options when publishing through platforms such as Amazon.

For example, you can choose to classify your book as both a romance and a thriller. You can choose subcategories that fit your work so that readers searching in one genre can just as easily find your book as readers searching in another. It makes it easier to create and publish cross-genre novels.

Plus really, the clue is in the name: independent publishing. Genre is a useful definition of fiction, but it isn’t the only definition, and not all books fit neatly into one genre or another. Embracing the independent side of our work could well give us a unique, interesting marketing angle that no other author has to work with.

What do you think? How important is it for books to fit into genre-based categories?