Charlie Stross4d ago

#WritersCoffeeClub #WritingCommunity

20th May 2026. If not your current genre, what genre would you write?

This is your daily scheduled reminder that genres are just marketing labels.

I write SF/F, and I had a breakout success in 2007 with a novel about crime inside MMOs. In the UK, it hit its fourth hardcover reprint within 2 weeks of publication and my subsequent book advances quadrupled!

Turns out it went gold because Waterstones systematically misfiled it under "crime", not SF/F …

Show threadHollieK4d ago
@cstross SF/F Crime, just emphasising the last part of the label.
Show threadCharlie Stross4d ago
@HollieK72 Yes well, Crime outsells SF/F by about 3:1.
Show threadMark Whybird4d ago
@cstross @HollieK72 Your experience is a supporting data point for my theory that SF (and also F to a lesser degree) is not a genre by itself but a sort of meta-genre or theme category, in which you can place almost any other genre (eg crime, mystery, political thrilller, whatever).
Show threadRay McCarthy3d ago
@whybird @cstross @HollieK72
You can have multiple "genres" in any novel. It's artificial to help advertising and sometimes makes for shallower picks by the publishers because they want it to fit a box.
Riders of the Purple Sage has romance, adventure, Robinsonade etc.
Dune and early Pern novels are far more Fantasy than SF.
Forbidden Plant is based on "The Tempest".
Caves of Steel is more a detective story than SF.
Show threadHollieK3d ago
@raymaccarthy @whybird @cstross You need it to fit into a box so you can shelve it in the bookshop. Otherwise you've got hundreds of sub-genres or everything shelved A-Z under Fiction.
Show threadHollieK3d ago
@raymaccarthy @whybird @cstross I deal with this issue on a small scale in a charity bookshop that contains approximately 3,000 books in total, with various categories and sub-categories, and a limited amount of space. Under Fiction, General Fiction has 16 shelves, Crime has 7 shelves, SF/F has 2 shelves, and that's it. C J Sansom is sometimes in Crime, sometimes in General Fiction, and sometimes in both at the same time.
Show threadRay McCarthy3d ago

@HollieK72 @whybird @cstross
None of the charity shops here sort the books. Nor the few surviving shops selling S/H (They sort by price!). Only the shops selling new books do it

One new manager decided to sort alphabetically, with "men" and "women" separate. That caused some comment and didn't last. He obviously knew nothing about novels.

Show threadHollieK3d ago

@raymaccarthy @whybird @cstross

"Men" and "Women", oh my!

We do have a whole upstairs department dedicated to Books and Media, covering 20 bookcases, which is more than you get in your average charity shop. However, some of the other shops in our group have 12,000 or 15,000 books, and I'm dead jealous! We need to have some idea what sells, hence the categories and sub-categories.

Show threadRay McCarthy

@HollieK72 @whybird @cstross

Though there were no George Elliot titles.

Probably some of the Romance genre titles with female names were written by men…

May 20 at 7:02pmWeb