WTF Write to Market?
Where are genres going, and are they still useful for authors? Do we care? DO WE?????
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!
Welcome back to text technology history deep dives with KimBoo! I’m sure you’ve been breathlessly anticipating the second of this two-part series, which is all about our present understanding of genres, and where genres are going in the future, and what that means for authors.
In part one, I talked about the history of genres and what that means for modern readers, which mostly boils down to “genres are made-up categories that publishers use to help readers find books to buy.” The only category where the quality of writing sometimes comes into play is the non-genre genre of literary fiction, but for all the others, expectations readers have for those genres trump almost every other element (quality, style, length, or format).
This twist in the publishing industry happened over the course of more than a century, as publishers and booksellers realized that shoving hundreds (thousands!) of books at people in random piles was not an efficient sales strategy. Marketing as a profession/industry took off in the same time period for the same reasons. Together, these forces caused genres to calcify to the point where they became defined by reader expectations of the subject matter by the early/mid 20th century.
I flog that point a lot in part one, but it is important to stress it again here because I am shifting the discussion from the abstract level to how this has, does, and will impact genre writers like me.
Since ‘zon and digital sales in general came on scene, the once obscure information science of taxonomy became incredibly important. “What category does this [product] belong to?” is a crucial step in organizing a database of things, and to be perfectly honest, the early years of ebooks found retailers to be pretty lazy about it, basically replicating the floor plan of your local big-box bookstore: Romance? Here’s all of our romance books! Good luck finding what you want!
But as the number of published books soared into the millions, describing something as “a romance novel” or “a horror story” or “science fiction” became almost meaningless. When self-publishing gained traction between 2008-2010, writers had to figure out for themselves how to make their books stand out in a large bucket of a genre, and learned quickly to play fast and loose with keywords, those extra bits of metadata ‘zon allowed you to tag onto your book description. Tag stuffing became an art form, because the actual genre categories were so broad.
To tag your stuff effectively, you had to have a really good grasp of your genre, your sub-genre, and your tropes. Your books had to deliver on all those points in order to resonate with readers a.k.a. sell like gangbusters.
The call went out: “Write to market!”
What does it mean to write to market? You probably already know, but for the sake of clarity: writing to market means writing a story to conform very exactly to reader expectations for the genre/micro-genre/tropes.
For example, you can’t claim to be writing epic fantasy if you don’t have a very long story (usually a trilogy) with some wizards, elves, and dragons somewhere in the mix (thank you, Tolkien). A genre romance novel must have a happy ending, no exceptions.
That’s because messing around with the reader’s expectation for the subject matter will make readers very angry. So angry. Really, really angry, like, please believe me, they will be furious.
This is especially true for the romance genre, because inevitably there will be a new writer (or an old writer trying to make new inroads) who will have a story that ends unhappily yet try to sell it as a romance novel. (Pro tip: Nothing will piss #Romancelandia off faster than trying to pawn a tragedy off as a romance. Just don’t do it. Accept that your book is romantic literary fiction and move on. I beg of you. Yes, this is the PTSD talking.)
Thrillers where the bad guy gets away in the end better be Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris, or GTFO.
Novels, movies, and shows can incorporate thematic elements of classic westerns no matter the setting or era, but they are not genre westerns. They can’t be. That’s not how genres work anymore.
For the next decade+, it was really the only solid advice for authors who wanted to make money writing stories: Write to a very exact market, and tag that fuq’r to oblivion. Even the moribund “trad pub” (traditional publishing) industry, for which “write to market” had been a longstanding but not compulsory guide, began focusing on that tactic almost exclusively.
As a result, it’s come down to slicing and dicing genres into finer and finer thicknesses in order to provide readers with what they want to read. A billionaire mafia het enemies-to-lovers dark BDSM romance has to hit every single one of those promises.
We entered era not just of sub-genres but micro-genres. So micro, in fact, that the concept of genre has become damn near meaningless.
Is “billionaire mafia het enemies-to-lovers dark BDSM romance” a genre or just a list of tropes? The answer is “yes.” Writing to market has gone from meeting broad market expectations to finding the tiny slice of the market that fits the exact micro/niche/sub genre tropes your story incorporates. Tagging itself started to shape reader expectations. People learned to search for exactly what they wanted, and writers learned to write to exactly what readers were searching for.
This is why I believe that genres as a useful tool for authors have peaked. They will become less important and turn into legacy categories that people use for shorthand, but are not actually relevant to readers or booksellers in any useful way.
This is due in large part to the advances in information technology, specifically, that oft-maligned tool of artificial intelligence, The Algorithm (capitalized for laughs, tbh).
There is no one almighty algorithm, just as there is no single large language model, much less one artificial intelligence. But algorithms are not just for ruining the user experience on social media platforms! They fuel search engine results in granular ways. Do you want a billionaire mafia het enemies-to-lovers dark BDSM romance that features a mixed race couple, or is set in Tokyo, or is about the street racing scene in Chicago? That’s what a good search algo can get you, and we are nearly at the point where you can do a search for stories with incredibly specific settings/genres/tropes and find exactly what you want.
Which is why I believe that “genre as marketing tool” will become less important over time. It will be important to write to your market, but not The Genre because as the saying goes, there is no there, there.
Genres will not become obsolete, but will fade in importance as a tool for marketing. The marketing will be the content itself. In other words, very sophisticated search engine algos will scan the book to figure out what’s in it and then deliver it up to the people who are looking for just that specific thing.
As I was writing this essay, an article was published on LinkedIn by Jesse Damiani, “More Liquid, More Solid: Generative AI and the Future of Genre Under Postreality.” It is short but as dense a read as the title makes it out to be, and Damiani’s focus is more on exploring how AI tools will alter our understanding of both creativity and reality, but it’s worthwhile to review for how he defines genre as a meditation on cultural history:
The metamodern shifts underway in creativity point to deep underlying changes in how humans express reality and establish consensus with each other, with implications that extend beyond art and culture…Our imaginations of the past, present, and future—and the ways we’ll be in dialogue with them—expand and complexify. At the center will be genre—even as genres continue to adapt, morph, and evolve—becoming our shorthand for navigation, discovery, and our relationship to history.
As authors, we see this expanding and complexifying represented in the proliferation of micro-genres and tropes, where “genre” is the legacy shorthand we will use to sweep the broad brush of appeal over our work, while the content itself creates the future markets we will be writing to.
This is why I think stories based on genre fusions are becoming more common and more popular (“cozy mystery fantasy romance” is a great example), but maybe that should be a another essay for a different time. 😁