Having trouble finding the perfect book? – Press Enterprise
Authors and publishers have to give their books genre labels so that booksellers know where to put them. But defining genres is becoming increasingly difficult. I know an author who is working on a romance novel with a crime story at its center, and so many young adult books are being read by adults that the publishing industry has tried labels like “New Adult.”
If you ask an author at this point, “Where does your book belong on the shelf?” you’ll get several answers. An agent or a publisher might be desperate, but honestly, the genres mix. Many books are labradoodles, and besides, the author might hate being pigeonholed into a lousy label.
Women’s fiction is a lousy label, and a large number of books by women are shoved into that label. I’ve already written a piece for this column about how much I hate that label for novels with female protagonists. When men write novels with male characters, what do we call them? Fiction. I’m querying my current novel as book club/high fiction because that’s not as gender-specific and eliminates the expectation of a romantic subplot.
Book publishers are unlikely to take advice from mere writers like me, but if they’re open to suggestions, here’s mine: Think like librarians.
As a reader, librarian, and writer, I always ask myself: What’s missing from the collection? The reader in me asks for recommendations of new books and stories that deserve attention. The librarian in me purchases materials that complete the collection and makes sure the needs of the quirky, unconventional reader are taken into account. The writer in me does what Toni Morrison said: “If you find a book you really want to read that hasn’t been written yet, then you need to write it.”
I’ve realized that sometimes we find ourselves in a “tricky” situation when we try to fill in these quirky, unusual areas. It’s a little uncomfortable. I noticed this especially when I was interviewing agents for my upcoming young adult novel about a girl trying to escape a polygamous cult. They liked the writing style. But was it too adult? Very hard things happen to young people in this cult. Why not give the protagonist a boyfriend to pique the interest of teenage readers?
And you know what? Terrible things happen to teenagers, and seeing a character in a novel deal with those things can help real adolescents in their own lives. I also reject the idea that every book written by a woman has to have a romantic subplot. The protagonist of my young adult novel lives in a cult where teenage girls are forced to marry older men. They are not allowed to have boyfriends—and they are tightly controlled, making it almost impossible to sneak in. If they had a boyfriend and were caught, they would immediately be married to some old goat and treated as a concubine. Yes, my protagonist has a crush on a guy, but he was kicked out of the cult as a lost boy because this is not a book about romance. The queer characters hide like it’s 1692. It’s a novel about patriarchy and religion gone feral.
This might be just the book someone needs to complete their collection.
Victoria Waddle is a former librarian and the author of Acts of Contrition (Los Nietos Press) and The Mortality of Dogs and Humans (Bamboo Dart Press). Her next young adult novel is due out from Inlandia in 2025. Meet her on Substack at Be a Cactus for conversations about libraries, book bans, and the art of writing.
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