Skip to main content

Death of the Genre

I'm sitting in an educator's technology conference in Niagara Falls and the keynote speaker is addressing how teaching will change  in the next ten years. "Change" seems to be the topic of every educational professional learning workshop I attend, and the "change" is attributed to our ever-evolving technology.


We know education isn't the only industry affected by our advances in tech, so my question is, "what is changing in the writer's world?"

As a reader, researcher, author, you know many answers to this question. You will have read or personally experienced self-publishing, engaged in discussions about Kindle ethics, looked longingly at the spot where your local bookstore used to be, and then hammered out your thoughts on a personal blog.



For this blog, I would like to look at an impending possibility brought on by the progressive use of technology to market reading materials to the reader--death of the genre.
    As technology and eBooks evolve, eReader competitors like Kindle (Amazon), Nooks (Barnes and Noble) and Apple iBooks continue to out do each other in functionality. As these three platforms compete and evolve, traditional book categorization is diminished in importance.
In the past, putting books on static, tangible shelves for purchasing involved a logical train of thought:
  1. Readers will come through the door and want to peruse the books
  2. Therefore, books will need to be categorized in a way to allow readers to move quickly to the shelf that interests them most.
  3. Therefore, books should be separated into some form of logical organization.
  4. And, so  books were broken down into literary categories:
    • Fiction / Non-Fiction
    • Genres
The above logic doesn't hold as eBook platforms provide new ways of "shelving" and "sorting" books for the reading market. You can access Best Seller or trending lists, or suggestions provided by the eReader based on your reading patterns and preferences taken from the device itself. This gathering and analysis of your data is called "Data Driven Marketing" and it is intelligently personalizing your reading experience.

Now that doesn't mean anyone is taking away control of choice. You can go to your eBook store and do a search, and perhaps you will use genre as one of the features for searching. The categories for books still exist, and  may always exist and are helpful. But as the main "shelving" strategy, genre is fading into the background as a spirit of bookselling past.

Following this trend, publishers and literary agents are asking for cross-genre pieces like "Sweet Silver Blues" by Glen Cook and "Outlander" by Gabaldon. The pressure is on for writers to focus more on "story" and less on the genre conventions. As a high fantasy writer, I must cry "genre conventions are the story" but Joseph Campbell may be the only yay-sayer who agrees with me.

When we, as readers, love a book, what do we want? More of the same book. Through data driven marketing tools, we'll get more books of the same. More books of the same, way beyond just genre. And this will help us dig down through the multitude of eBooks coming available as more people access online publishing.

So, this is my funeral announcement for genre. It will never truly die, but it will certainly fade into obscurity as a categorization method as dated as the Dewey Decimal System. May genre rest in peace, while we march on to the beat of change and the personalization of the reading experience.










Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First Steps in the Scrivener Waltz

1-2-3, 1-2-OMG! I finally did it. I purchased Scrivener. Now I have to hold onto my self-worth as I try to wrap my brain around the interface. I keep telling myself, so many experts can't be wrong , right? Surely, when I've mastered this program, I'll come out on top. On top meaning I will have a tool that will give me more functionality, save me more time, and overall, make me a more organized and efficient writer. Currently, I'm doing pretty good with a combination of MS Word and Excel, so this baby better be awesome to convince me to convert for long term.  So I start to learn it like I learn all things - jumping in with both feet. Click, click, click, click.... cli... That didn't work. So basically, I've purchased the Scrivener software that experts are saying is functionally amazing, but its user interface is so non-intuitive, I can't figure it out, and I used be an Internet Business Consultant. Surely my skills aren't that rusty...
18 comments
Read more

How to Use MS OneNote to Organize Writing Research and Novel Outlines for Writers

Let’s Get Organized  Writers take a gazillion notes.   I don’t have to tell you this, because you know all about it. You also know how difficult it is to organize notes, search through paper notes, and sometimes even find all the notes you've written.  In this day and age, going digital is the best way to keep track of your notes. If organized properly, digital notes are sortable, searchable, editable, accessible from anywhere, and light as a feather to carry around. In this blog, I'm going to show you how to be note-efficient. ____________________________________________________ The following is an excerpt from "Technology #WritingTips for Writers". First 100 subscribers at http://www.cherylcowtan.com get a free copy at book launch. _____________________________________________________ The first step in getting note-efficient is finding the right software. For writers, finding a software that will meet all of our needs is like trying to pic...
1 comment
Read more

How to Edit Overused Words in Your Novel Manuscript

Wordle for Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Wordle is probably the easiest tool for finding overused words in your novel, because you just paste your entire manuscript into Wordle and wait for the results. Wordle creates an image of the most often used words in the text, increasing the font size of a word based on how many times it was used. The Pride and Prejudice Wordle is interesting as a comment on societal manners at the time it was written by Jane Austen (Mr, Miss, Mrs). Wordle will increase the font of words used more often in your Manuscript. The Wordle above is from my current manuscript The Fergus She . If you notice, the word "Angus" is in the largest font. Angus is hotter than this! The visual  is telling me I used "Angus" more than any other word, which is good beca use he's the hot highlander my protagonist, Rachel, is lusting for. W here is Rachel's name? you might ask. The Fergus She is written in first ...
1 comment
Read more