| Hey, This Decoders newsletter is a few days late – apologies – because we have been Spring Cleaning. Our yard had become completely full of all sorts of flotsam and jetsam since moving in and refurbishing towards the end of last year. With the weather finally improving it was time to divest ourselves of a rather impressive amount of detritus. Turns out that throwing stuff out is almost as much fun as acquiring it in the first place! Of course, as every writer knows, such moments are fertile breeding grounds. "Where do you get your ideas from?" is a question we're often asked but rarely answer honestly because readers (probably) don't want to know the glamorous truth: taking out the garbage, unblocking the drain, carting an embarrassing amount of wine bottles to the recycling, waiting for a bus that never arrives. This time, however, my brain decided not to volunteer a solution to either of the WIPs I am stuck in right now. Instead, I began pondering an email I received last month. It was in response to my "3 Ps of Marketing" email series in February – Part 3 is here, if you missed it, and contains links to the first two – specifically asking what you do with cross-genre work. If you remember, I was advising throughout this series that you should look to the charts. This is a handy list of what readers are already responding to, as you might have gathered, so you should package your book at least somewhat like that. (Because our innate creativity and frequent desire to color outside the lines can lead us to sometimes put our books in packages which are unfamiliar to readers or inadvertently mislead them as to the contents, and the wrong readers might buy our books while our target readers select something else. Something a little more familiar that has clearer signals as to the true contents.) But what do you do when your book crosses genres? It's a question that a few of you emailed in response. Probably because there is no easy answer here. Making it a topic worthy of a separate newsletter today! This is the double-edged sword of being able to place our ebooks on multiple digital shelves. Something that straddles science fiction and fantasy, for example, can be placed in both categories on Amazon. But will it appeal to both sets of readers? How do we package such books? Which genre do we focus on with our cover, our blurb, our series name? And how does all this affect the algorithms? A double double-edged sword; we're juggling ninja stars over here. These questions can drive you a little mad. And if you go too far down these rabbit holes, you don't just begin questioning what genre your book is… but what genre even is anyway. Which I'd respectfully submit is a better question for a conference panel, or perhaps the spicier discussion in the bar afterwards. And who gets to decide such things anyway? Authors? Publishers? Critics? Librarians? Academics? Readers? They all can, and do, have their say but for our current purposes I'd suggest viewing genre as a marketing label. Or if that gets your back up, think of it as a quick way for readers to know if a book is for them. I'm not suggesting this is the only way of looking at genre, at all, but that it might be the best way of resolving genre to-ing and fro-ing when it comes to marketing and packaging your own work. I saw a fellow writer post on Facebook recently along the lines of, "Knowledge is understanding that Star Wars is fantasy. Wisdom is marketing it as science fiction." We could get into a long discussion about the first part of that sentence. Sure, Star Wars begins with a farm boy going on a quest and heavily features space wizards and so on. That's telekinesis, Kyle. But does that mean Dune is fantasy too? All the Pern books? And, like, half of what readers consider science fiction? Do we really mean mythology over fantasy? Can't you do this with almost any book or movie? Is Firefly truly a Western? Is Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said really a detective novel? Is Artemis fundamentally a heist story? Besides, doesn't all sufficiently advanced technology seem like magic? Can't things just resemble each other in some aspects and not others and still be under the same tent? Is it not just the case that Star Wars and, I dunno, The Expanse are at different points of the spectrum within the same genre, just different levels of SF "hardness." Don't make me whip out Mohs scale! Chewing through all this got me through two return trips to the skip and I could probably argue all sides at length if you are insomniac enough. But it's all rather moot for our more commercial considerations here; the second part of that quote above is most relevant. "Wisdom is marketing it as science fiction." Focusing on readers seems to be the way out of this morass. You might personally be of the view that faster-than-light travel is theoretically impossible so any novel containing that is, at best, space fantasy. But do you really think that taking a novel set in the distant future with interplanetary travel and galactic space wars and marketing it as fantasy or science fiction is going to deliver better results? To take a less obvious case, you might be of the opinion that time travel isn't possible – or we surely would have experienced time travelers already – but does that mean that all time travel novels are automatically fantasy? I'd respectfully suggest that if this time travel is achieved by using a contraption of some kind, you will get better results marketing it as science fiction. But if it involves libations and incantations then you're more likely to reach the correct readers by pitching it instead as fantasy. Not all stories fit so easily into one neat genre-shaped box. And sometimes it can be surprisingly tricky to figure out what kind of story you have written. The stakes are high in one sense in that putting your story in the wrong sleeve can be detrimental in several different ways. It can impact your sales, obviously, and even those you do get could end up hurting you by sending the wrong signals to the algorithms and messing with your Also Boughts and all that jazz. On the other hand, we aren't born with wisdom and sometimes that needs to be earned the hard way, by making mistakes, through trial and error. You can only launch a book once, perhaps, but you can always relaunch it if you need to. But when it comes to marketing your book – choosing the title, writing the blurb, designing the cover, coining the tagline – you might be best of setting the genre bunfights to one side, avoiding the temptation to disappear down academic rabbit-holes, and putting yourself in the shoes of your Ideal Reader. What packaging will help you reach her? Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Neutral Milk Hotel with The King of Carrot Flowers. | 
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