Charlie Stross5d 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 threadHollieK5d ago
@cstross SF/F Crime, just emphasising the last part of the label.
Show threadCharlie Stross5d ago
@HollieK72 Yes well, Crime outsells SF/F by about 3:1.
Show threadMark Whybird5d 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 McCarthy5d 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 threadHollieK5d 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 threadHollieK5d 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 threadMark Whybird4d ago

@HollieK72 @raymaccarthy @cstross Revised theory: in computing terms, the genres should be treated a “tags” rather than categories.

This doesn’t help much in organising a bookshop, unless you wanted to just go A-Z and physically put colour-coded tags on all the books.

Show threadCharlie Stross4d ago

@whybird @HollieK72 @raymaccarthy

Shockingly, the publisher/distributor databases shifted to tagging years ago (for ebooks)—you can see the effects on Amazon, Kobo, et al. Problem 1: inaccurate tagging. Problem 2: only three sub-categories per book. Problem 3: search is badly supported and fixing it requires coordination across platforms.

I mean, it's a thing: it's just a thing that's been done badly.

Show threadMark Whybird4d ago
@cstross @HollieK72 @raymaccarthy Ha! And *of course* they did it badly!
Show threadRay McCarthy
@whybird @cstross @HollieK72
Deliberately, and poisoned with sponsored results that are completely irrelevant.
May 20 at 10:29pmWeb