[caption id="attachment_609" align="alignleft" width="179"] Not an image to suggest the author has just violently murdered one of their characters...[/caption]

Genres can seem like solid facts in the book world, but of course they aren’t. Meanings change over time. Subgenres grow up, and melt away. Go back to Shakespeare and a comedy simply meant there was more chance any given character would be married, rather than dead by the end. ‘Romance’ used to mean ‘fanciful’ rather than any certainty of amorous involvement. For a long time after that, romance meant a wedding at the end, but these days characters can hop into bed with each other, or even with someone who is not the focus of the romance, right at the start of the book. The rules change, and keep changing.

Genres exist because readers find them useful, and marketing departments doubly so. It really helps a book get out into the world if you know from the start where to find the people who probably want to read it.

Some authors write in a given genre because it’s simply what they love most. Some authors get into a genre because they think it will sell well for them. If you do that by studying the genre and delivering what it’s readers like, that can work out well all round. If you say ‘oh, I see vampire erotica is big this year, I’ll write one of those’ but you don’t read erotica, and you don’t read vampires, the odds of pulling this off well, are slim.

Not all authors naturally default to a genre, or genres. Some like to wander about, some have to push the edges, some want to write the books that will define the genres of the future. There should be room for all of this.

The difference between a great author and a lousy one often isn’t to do with how well they can conform to genre expectations. It’s about the kinds of readers they are. Someone who has read a lot of books, who is passionate about books, and writing, and language is likely to write a good book no matter where they go, or why. Authors who are not themselves readers, tend to re-invent the wheel because they don’t know they’ve just written something obvious and clichéd. They tend to know less about how to structure and pace a book, how to create character, or mood. As in all things, you learn by doing, but there’s a lot to be learned by reading other people.

If an author is passionate about other people’s books, I tend to assume they’re going to be worth a look.

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