Narrowing Your Book’s Genre Description: An Exercise

So you wrote a novel. Congratulations! Now you have to describe it to agents, editors, and readers. This can be difficult to do when you have a multi-genre book. How do you prioritize and order the genre elements of your book when describing it?

For a multi-genre book, try typing out the various important genre elements of your narrative and whittle down your description from there.

An Exercise

Let’s do an exercise using a famous Victorian novella that, while problematic due to its antisemitism and misogyny, most readers will know. We’ll pretend the author is not long-dead (thank goodness he’s no longer collecting royalties) but is alive today, writing about the past instead of his contemporary time period, and trying to figure out how to market his latest work.

The book takes place approximately in 1840’s London, so it’s clearly historical fiction set in the Victorian era. There are ghosts and magic, so it’s also a paranormal fantasy. There are also strong horror elements, but due to the ecstatically happy ending, it wouldn’t be fair to call it horror. It would be more fitting to describe the novella as dark. Adaptations often sanitize the horror elements and play up the cozy resolution, but the novella contains solidly dark material. So now we have a dark Victorian paranormal fantasy.

The novella also takes place during Christmas. In fact, Christmas is central to the narrative. This famous and beloved story is, at its core, about a senior citizen being paranormally manipulated and threatened into celebrating Christmas. Many Jewish content creators, such as TikToker Danielle Silverstone (@daniellesilverstone), have noted that this senior citizen is strongly coded as Jewish, playing into harmful and antisemitic Jewish stereotypes. I encourage checking out Silverstone’s video from December 31, 2022 and other content from Jewish creators and literary analysts for more information. When the story’s main character, who has the Hebrew name of Ebenezer, caves to the abuse of several ghosts and seemingly converts to Christianity, the reader is supposed to rejoice. So when describing this problematic favorite of Western culture, it is essential to add that it is a Christmas Story. It’s actually the book’s main genre. The dark elements are not overpowering and the reader is left with cozy feelings about Christmas, making it a seasonal book. An employee at a bookstore would firmly place the novella in the Christmas section.

So now we have a dark historical paranormal fantasy Christmas story. …but that’s quite the mouthful to say, isn’t it? During an elevator pitch, that long description wouldn’t “land,” as they say. It would be too much to process. It’s convoluted and wouldn’t resonate with the listener. The description, while accurate, needs editing.

Let’s look at what elements are most important to preserve in the description and what words can be used to allude to the others. A lot of Victorian books are dark, as are the majority of paranormal books. So let’s cut the word “dark.” Most paranormal books have fantastical elements while most fantasy books don’t contain the paranormal. So we can cut the word “fantasy” and retain “paranormal.” We could get more specific by reducing “paranormal” to its subcategory of “ghost.” Part of pitching is “what sounds good,” and “Victorian ghost Christmas story” doesn’t look great in print or roll off the tongue very easily. So instead, for print, we could write “ghostly” and put that word before “Victorian” for “a ghostly Victorian Christmas story.”

Looks good, right? But verbalized, it requires a lot of enunciation. So if you walk into an elevator with someone and need to pitch the story fast before they get off on their floor, I’d recommend describing the book as “a Victorian Christmas story” and adding “with ghosts” at the end. Sure, it doesn’t sound as formal, but it is simple and easy to remember. And if the person you pitched to sees you later on as you’re both in line to get coffee, they may be more likely to remember you and what you said.

So, after much thought, we finally have the answer to the question “What kind of book is it?” The novella by Charles Dickens, called A Christmas Carol, is a ghostly Victorian Christmas story. Or, when speaking out loud, “a Victorian Christmas story with ghosts.”

Questions to Ask Yourself

Here are some questions to help you whittle down your genre description:

• Where and when does your story take place?

• If someone were trying to find my book in a bookstore, where would they think to look first?

• Are most of the story’s genre elements similar to each other? What are the ones most dissimilar?

• What are the book’s most polarizing genre elements? How do I warn or signal potential readers to the book’s contents?

• How can you best describe your book in the fewest words possible?

Practicing Writing Genre Descriptions

Try practicing writing genre descriptions with existing media you know well. Show your descriptions to friends to see if they agree or disagree with your descriptions. Also, assess how engaging or disengaging your descriptions sound to them. Does each description grab their interest? Which ones don’t and why?

Practicing genre descriptions will prepare you for describing your own book. Story pitching, like anything, is an art and a skill that takes practice. And if you’ve read this far, you’re well under way!

If you have any requests for blog topics or writing questions you want answered, email JacksonDHollingsworth@gmail.com .