Hello everyone! Welcome back to another series. This is the last series of the year! There will be a series of stand-alone posts after this series, a hiatus, a yearly reflection and then a new series starting in January. So, without further ado…
Genre: Introduction
Genre is a difficult concept to try to explain to someone who has never heard of them before. Genre is generally defined in dictionaries as “a class or category of artistic endeavor”. I think this is a perfectly fine definition for genre in general but when it comes to book genres there is a lot more that is encapsulated by that general term.
Book genres are also each defined by a list of tropes and characteristics that make them more than just a simple book category. These different tropes and characteristics are often expected of certain genres and stories and a book listed as a particular genre is expected to have at least some of these typical tropes and characteristics so as to not disappoint the reader.
As a reader there is nothing more disappointing (in my opinion) than reading a book that was listed as a dark romance fantasy only to find it was more of a redemption romance steampunk. Stories that have been misgenred (a word that I feel as though I might have made up) can be very frustrating for a reader who is rather familiar with a particular genre or who was looking for a specific type of genre or sub-genre.
In this series I want to go over several main genres and a few subgenres to discuss what kind of tropes and characteristics are typical or expected for those categories. I hope that this series will help writers to better categorize what kind of story they have. I hope this will help writers from listing the wrong genre on their story when marketing it and hopefully this can help writers to avoid disappointing readers in this area to help improve sales.
I won’t cover every single genre, and I won’t cover every single little characteristic of the genres I do cover but I still hope that this will give a basis for some writers to better understand and label their own story as the correct genre.
Next week I will be starting with the first genre I’m going to cover in this series. If there’s a specific genre you want to see, let me know! Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the links below. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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