Once I finished Adrift and embarked on the journey to get it traditionally published, I quickly encountered the need to tell people what genre it was. To even query literary agents I needed to know.
This seems straightforward, but to this day it's still a puzzle to me.
Adrift is set in the near future, where memory wiping is a thing; is it science-fiction then? It opens with a women who doesn't know who she is, she just has an ominous note warning her not to dig into her past; is it a thriller? She does go digging into her past to find out what happened; is it a mystery? It was nominated for a Crime Writers of Canada Best First Novel award; so it's a crime book?
(Interestingly, in Canada Adrift is shelved in general fiction while in the US it is sometimes found in mystery/thriller. So even the booksellers have mixed opinions.)
Needless to say, I'm quite interested in the topic of genre. It's a fascinating step where a creative work has to go through the publishing & bookselling marketing sausage-making machine to turn into a product that lands on a shelf somewhere in the bookstore - which one? Which influencers do advance copies get sent to? Which awards does it get submitted for? You must pick a genre!
So when the fabulous local writer Frances Peck suggested a panel talk on the topic of genre and books that cross a few, I was all in.
And on July 3 we held a fantastic author event at a great local independent bookstore - Iron Dog Books. With a full house in attendance, Frances Peck and Robin Yeatman and I had a lively chat with some fun bits of audience participation (guess the book genre from the cover). My only regret is that we didn't have Hillary the bookseller sitting on the panel with us to give the bookseller perspective on all of it. A panel talk with authors and booksellers would be very very interesting, I think!
Big thanks to everyone who came - an engaged audience is a lovely thing! We've had amazing feedback from attendees, so we should do something like this again one day. :)
"Thank you for the reading and discussion at the Iron Dog last week. The most engaging and insightful of such things I have ever attended. And the most entertaining. You guys were the best."
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