Why Are Publishers So Obsessed With Genre?
Week 12 – in which I question publishing commercial wisdom and wonder why we can't all just write and publish whatever the hell we like
I did not found WoodPig Press in order to make money.
Judging by their reactions, announcing this in front of certain people – authors and publishers, financial dependants, anyone on LinkedIn – is a bit like farting in church during the Sunday sermon. (Not something I’ve ever done, by the way – mainly because I don’t go to church). In fact, my primary reason for starting the press was to create something that was not about money – or at least, where money was not the chief objective.
So much of publishing now seems formulaic, risk averse and obsessed with chasing trends. The success of Madeline Miller’s 2011 book, The Song of Achilles, triggered a deluge of copycat retellings of Greek mythology that we’re still in the wake of. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo spawned a thousand “girl” books (The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl), though there is some evidence that this trend has shifted, and the girl has now grown up (The Woman in the Window, The Woman Downstairs, The Woman in Cabin 10). Somehow this doesn’t feel like progress.
AI will only exacerbate all of this; it will help publishers identify and chase trends more effectively, allowing them to sift the slush pile at lightning speed, to identify those manuscripts already in possession of the requisite market-ready tropes. But even before AI, “algorithmic thinking” was already firmly in place, and had been for years. As publishing academic Fiona O’Connor put it, writing almost ten years ago, when these practices had already become well established:
Within literary fiction, commercialism demands the bestseller. It’s a formulaic approach leading to Fast Fiction, a version of Fast-Fashion, Primark style, where the constant push is towards updating trends – presenting the same thing but a little bit different: just-in-time supply chain systems finely tuned as adrenaline drips to the pulse of consumer interest.1
If you need further evidence of this, do a search for “Greek myth retellings” and see just how recent many of them are:
You would hope that the very nice, cultured and highly-educated people who work in publishing would at least be a bit abashed about all of this: the naked commercialism, the lookalike covers, the cynical attempt to cash in on superficial passing fads. Boy wizards! Vampires! Zombies! And the endless variations and mashups. Vegan vampires! Fast moving zombies! Vampire boy-wizard werewolf zombies! Actually, I don’t think that last one’s been done yet…
But before you reach for your laptop (or pen and paper, if you’re old school, bless you), rest assured that someone has probably beaten you to it. That’s why “write to market” is such bad advice for most of us, because unless you just happen to have a little vampire-boy-wizard-werewolf thing on the simmer, you’re likely to be too late: either the market will have moved on, or you’ll be trampled in the stampede. Self-publishing has condensed the publishing schedule considerably, and indie authors can be more “agile” in capitalising on new trends. But why bother? If “what’s hot right now” is determining your creative output, then I think you should ask yourself why you’re writing in the first place. I mean, if it’s just about the money, and you value speed over quality and originality, then you may as well be using AI. Perhaps you already are.
I was once asked by a commissioning editor if I could write like Alain de Botton. But isn’t that a role already filled by, you know, Alain de Botton? I thought (but resisted voicing, as I needed the work). But that’s how publishers think, in terms of “write-alikes” (if I may coin a phrase). Modern publishing is less and less about merit, and more about fitting the mould. In truth, mainstream publishers will have a vampire-boy-wizard-werewolf-zombie-sized hole in their autumn publishing schedule that they’re looking to fill, and will simply choose from among the best candidates (or those they can whip into shape). Well, until some fresh trend makes BookTok lose its collective mind.
You may think I’m being harsh here, and perhaps I am. There are lots of great books that are published every year that don’t fit neatly into this or that commercial template, lots of great genre books (e.g. the wonderful Dungeon Crawler Carl), and there are also many publishers who are genuinely more concerned with quality and originality than money. But think how many more of these there might be if publishers were less obsessed with shareholder dividends and “the bottom line”. And when did genres become the defining feature of a book’s potential appeal, anyway?
Author Anne R. Allen traces the turning point back to the 1980s.2 Prior to that, she argues, the general reading public might be exposed to serious, commercial literature as part of “mainstream fiction”, wherein it might find authors as diverse as Jane Austen, The Brontës, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood. The term “genre fiction” was reserved for dime store novels and pulp fiction. However, once the ’80s came along, mainstream fiction was balkanised into genres (romance, historical fiction, sci-fi, woman’s fiction, etc), forcing literary and pulp writers alike to share the same ill-fitting pigeon holes, while truly “serious” writing got its own genre of “literary fiction”, which was reserved for work that was clever enough to be studied on university English courses (e.g. anything by Thomas Pynchon).
Before anyone is tempted to school me on the hard reality of publishing finances, I am aware that we need money to publish books, and that means giving the public what it wants. But that in turn raises the question: does the public really want what is being sold to them? Mightn’t they be as happy with books that were different or unusual? True, any outlier which becomes successful will thereby generate copycats, but it does seem now that we are becoming an industry of copycats rather than outlier hunters. Must we be?
I’m also not so naive as to argue that there was a golden age where genres didn’t exist – going back to the comedies and tragedies of Ancient Greek theatre, people have always liked certain sorts of story – but it does feel like things have reached a ridiculous extreme. Rather than handy bookseller short-hand for the appeal of a book, genres now supply a prescriptive template for aspiring writers, who are commonly advised that they must choose a popular genre in order to be published, and match the tropes and “story beats” expected of those types of story. Which, followed too closely and adopted too widely, all becomes a bit limiting, to say the least. And as for crossing genres, well that’s a no-no too – unless of course that particular mashup happens to be “hot right now” (see, e.g., romantasy), or the writer is celebrated and “serious” enough for their experimentalism to be considered “literary” (see, e.g., David Mitchell). In short, the tail is now wagging the dog.
So what do we do about it? Well, from my own perspective, the only thing I could think of was to start my own press. As I say on the website, we’re a “loose collective of creative freelancers” who share the same response to AI and to the restraints placed upon publishing by the money-driven obsession with genre and commerciality. We’re also very niche, focusing only on “speculative” fiction and non-fiction, albeit broadly (and not genre) defined. As a result, our books will likely be few, our marketing budgets tiny, and our authors modestly recompensed. But what we will hopefully have is original, quality fiction and non-fiction that’s been rigorously edited, stylishly typeset, and beautifully illustrated and designed. I am also hoping that, when we open to submissions in early 2026, we will receive a glorious array of unfettered weirdness and quirkiness. Marketing gurus advise that, “When the world zigs, zag”. Well, since zigging currently seems to involve squishing creativity into a cookie-cutter template shaped by money and sales algorithms, I think it’s time for a bit of zagging, don’t you?
Irish Times, Sept. 12th, 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/can-small-presses-save-us-from-formulaic-fast-fiction-1.2788127
“The Decline of Mainstream Fiction: Why Authors Need a Genre in Today’s Fragmented Publishing World”, Aug. 4th, 2019, https://annerallen.com/2019/08/decline-mainstream-fiction/
Oh I hear you on the chasing genres treadmill. Books have to sell, and bravery doesn't seem to happen in the weekly marketing meetings in the Big Publisher Brands, who have all eaten each others' tails anyway.