Defy Expectations

The new world of genre bending unleashed!

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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A few years ago (code for: pre-pandemic era) my friend and I went into Target. Neither of us are mothers but we love Halloween, so we were wandering the “seasonal” aisles looking at all the wonderful, tacky decorations and stumbled over the costume kits for kids. We were gobsmacked.

It was not the quality (poor) or the quantity (high), but the, for lack of a better term, genre bending nature of so many of them that was so delightfully astounding.

Mermaid witch? Devil fairy? Wizard astronaut? I’m sure I’m misremembering some (was there a rainbow unicorn firefighter????) but we had so much fun going through the racks and raging about “where were these costumes when we were kids?!?!?!?”

And that, friends, is my analogy to what is happening with genres in the indie publishing scene. You’re welcome.

Genre History b/c I love it, so deal

Genres started becoming calcified in the late 20th century, a consequence of publishing houses leaning into the great marketing boom that started in the 1950s (Mad Men era). Advertising and marketing are old professions with a variety of different schools of thought and practice to them, but by the 1950s, marketing theory had developed as a “science” to where every industry had to adapt or die.

In reaction to better marketing research and analysis of demographics, book publishers moved the needle from the “great writer” paradigm (“Read this novel because the author is erudite/creative/witty/insightful”) to the genre paradigm. There was a shift from noting genre as a description (“Read this science fiction novel because the author is erudite/creative/witty/insightful”) to marketing genres in and of themselves (“Read this novel because it is science fiction!”).

Before people start yelling at me: Yes, there is a lot more nuance to this historical overview than I’m covering here. Genres have existed for centuries and always been advertised as such, but usually that kind of marketing was devoted to what we now call the pulp fiction press: westerns, romance, tales of adventure, horror. I’m also not delving into the whole genre-magazine industry, which thrived on genre mining. I get it, there are complexities, yo’.

Back to the point: Over the past 50 years, and especially since the dawn of the ebook revolution, genre has been an important, if not the most important, marketing tool in a publisher’s arsenal. Which meant that it was also the most important aspect of an author’s approach to their career. By the late 1900s, authors were told to “pick a lane and stay there.” That advice only got magnified with the appearance of the Internet.

Before everyone blames this on the ebook and/or self-publishing revolution, let me assure you that this was an issue long before that happened. I remember being on USEnet in the 90s when mid-list authors would talk about juggling three, five, even ten (!!) pen-names over the course of their careers in order to land big sales numbers in specific genres. These were traditionally published authors who worked closely with their publisher’s editors and marketing teams to devise products (genre novels) to sell. (That said, even then people were watching the disappearance of the mid-list with trepidation.)

Bend, Blend, and Break Free

The advice for authors, especially indie authors, is still overwhelmingly “find a niche, write to market, mine it, don’t dilute it!” And it is still overwhelmingly excellent advice, if your goal is to make a lot of money. No shade on that, since we all live in late stage capitalism and making a lot of money does, in fact, improve life across multiple variables (health, happiness, personal freedom, owning a lot of dogs, etc.).

However, since the Internet has allowed authors to reach out directly to readers, it has opened the door for some of us who write outside of conventional genre expectations to find our very own audiences.

Maybe not big audiences, but audiences, nonetheless.

We’re seeing this in the rising popularity of the “cozy fantasy” category, which straddles cozy mystery, fantasy, and (often) romance genres. LitRPG is by its very nature genre bending, since it is based on video games incorporating elements of science fiction, fantasy, thriller, and horror genres.

Instead of readers being filtered through a marketing/advertising campaign founded exclusively on genre tropes and genre market expectations in order to get hard copy books on physical shelves in bookstores, these genre bending authors find a wide assortment of readers who want to read a wide assortment of things.

It’s not the best tactic for developing a big readership quickly, and it is definitely not the tactic I have tried to use for over a decade while struggling to find my footing in the “publishing industry.” What I failed to realize was that I was trying to hammer myself into a paradigm that did not fit me at all.

After trying to give up on writing completely for years, I found myself swimming through the fertile waters of fanfiction in 2007. There, experimentation was (is!) encouraged, and sometimes demanded. The best thing a fanfic writer can do is turn expectations upside down — invert a trope, subvert a cliché, wreck the canon timeline, put the characters in a different era or even completely different multiverse. “Dead dove” is a beloved tag for fanfic that is dark, unhappy, destructive, and all the things we’re told not to write about in popular genre fiction. “AU” means “alternative universe” where characters are lifted whole cloth into different settings (think: Les Miserables, but the characters are all doctors and nurses at a modern hospital in Chicago). It is not that fanfic is off the rails, it is that there are no rails there. Fanfiction is a free for all and proudly so.

This experience was fantastic for my writing skills, which I honed for years in the fanfiction trenches. It was not great for my writing career, as I inadvertently trained myself to entirely disregard things like “genre expectations.” My version of “write to market” was “as long as [beloved character and/or pairing] is present, it’s to market, now give us 100k words of that thnx pls.”

I’ve talked about how my difficult experience writing the story Wolves of Harmony Heights, which started as a NaNoWriMo dare in 2015, was due to the fact that I was unwittingly trying to cram a serial into a novel. But I was also trying to cram some low-level genre bending in there as well. The issue is that the original dare was “write whatever you want, without worrying about writing to market!” but when I did exactly that, I gnarled myself all up in worry about the fact that it wasn’t being written to market.

We are our worst enemies, are we not?

I continue to admire authors who are willing to jump the tracks and do all the genre bending/blending they want, without fear of marketing constrictions. It has taken me years and a sea change in the greater publishing world for me to realize I am not only allowed to do that, but that doing so might actually be good for my career!

Yet, the messages of old that I started absorbing in the 1980s when I was a young teen pouring over Writers Digest are difficult to put aside.

The short and long of it is that I want to attract readers who want to read what I write. I do not want to lure in readers based on their narrow genre preferences and then tie myself down trying to meet those expectations. I want to let my stories speak for themselves, and speak to the people who will enjoy them.

Maybe, finally, I can do that.

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