by Tosh McIntosh

The cover sheet for NIP submissions has an entry for members to indicate the genre of the work being submitted for roundtable. That’s been true since I joined the group in the Spring of 2003. But in the 14 years since, the topic of genre has become a totally different animal, a change that began immediately following release of the first Kindle on November 19, 2007. It bears noting that the foreshadowing of this eReader’s impact on the publishing industry arrived even quicker: the device sold out in five and a half hours and remained out of stock for five months until April, 2008.

Those of us actively seeking publication from 2003 until the Fall of 2007 had only three options: 1) convince the traditional industry’s gatekeeper literary agents and acquisitions editors of the big-six publishers to offer representation and a book contract; 2) negotiate a deal with one of the few smaller publishers that accepted un-agented submissions; or 3) vanity-publish our books, haul a box of them around in the trunks of our cars, and try to sell them to anyone we could. And I do mean anyone. One brand-new NIP member showed up at his first meeting with copies of his novel for sale. He never returned, thankfully.

The task of finding an agent dominated the lives of NIP members with completed novels. We had to wade through the vast amount of information available on a list that included about 300 agents, if memory serves, and rank order them according to our assessment of the probability that each one might be interested in our novels.

This research typically produced a list with three tiers: dream agents, those that might be interested, and long shots. We talked incessantly about how best to send out queries, and the most common tactic was to begin in the second tier. While that might appear to be wasting time, our reasoning acknowledged one of the harsh truths about the trad-publishing route.

At the time, agents had to deal with hundreds of query letters each day. Many of them hired an intern, typically an undergraduate creative writing student, whose primary job was to say “No.” This filtering step ensured that agents only saw queries that met specific criteria as applied by the interns, and it also meant that writers typically never had a clue about whether the agent ever read the sample or the synopsis. On very rare occasions, an agent might send a personal note to the writer with an explanation, but for the most part, we never knew where the query package failed.

To game the system, most of us tested the effectiveness of our queries by trying them out on lower-tier agents first. The objective was to make it past the auto-reject barrier for the first time, most often indicated by receipt of a request for a partial or full manuscript. Once that occurred, we had cleared the most formidable hurdle, which gave us a chance to showcase our novels. If the agent subsequently declined representation, most would provide a reason, and this invaluable intelligence could be used to modify subsequent queries sent to agents occupying higher positions on our lists.

Initial contact with an agent was then, and still is, governed by two sets of rules: those that applied to all agents as a group, and those that reflected the individual quirks of each agent. The most common query requirement contained three key elements: a one-page letter, a writing sample, and a synopsis.

Formatting guidelines for the package had to be followed exactly. For the query letter, that meant ensuring three key pieces of information were conveyed early (often in the first paragraph): title, word count, and genre, followed by a mini-synopsis (jacket blurb), and some combination of citing market potential, why you chose this agent, how your novel fit into the agent’s current stable of clients, any connection to current events, and specific qualifications showing why you are the only writer who can write this book.

Length of the sample and synopsis varied somewhat by agent. As best described by Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages, you had little more time than that to grab an agent’s attention and hold it until the end of the sample. Only if still interested would the agent read the synopsis, which served the purpose of proving that the promise of the query letter and writing sample could be carried through to the end of the novel. The specific task for each of these query elements never wavered, which meant that if the letter didn’t do its job, the agent (or agency minion) immediately tapped what we called the “auto-reject key” to generate the dreaded “not for me” letter.

Early in the agent-search wars, I wondered why agents wanted writers to declare the genre of their novels up front. I figured agents were the market experts, and they should be the ones to figure out where a novel needed to be positioned within the genre landscape. It didn’t take long for me to shake hands with two realities. Agents typically received far too many query letters for novels in genres they didn’t represent, so they wanted to determine if that was the case before wasting any time on considering them, and more importantly, to ascertain immediately that the writer had specifically pinpoint-targeted a genre with a large audience.

In the time before Kindle, one of the primary source reference books for writers seeking to be trad published included an article titled, “The Fiction Dictionary” by Jamie Forbes. In it, the author identified specific story elements for each of the established genres, and emphasized that these elements were defined by reader expectation, the only basis for using genre designations in the first place. If you were going to label a book a thriller, for example, it better have the following three essential story elements: 1) something very bad is about to happen to a large number of people; 2) only one person stands in the way of that disaster; and 3) a clock is ticking.

Fast forward to May of 2017, and it should go without saying that among the changes triggered by release of the Kindle and the resulting seismic shift in the bedrock of the publishing industry, the influence of genre designations has undergone a transformation. That said, this remodeling only applies to indie-published novels, and more specifically, to those sold primarily as eBooks on Amazon, where the algorithms used to determine the ranking of a novel in the popularity lists are routinely manipulated by authors jockeying for position, increased visibility, reviews, and sales.

And that finally brings me to the core issue of this post, which relates to how we NIPers define the genre for our submissions, particularly because this topic has been recently discussed on more than one roundtable free-for-all session.

The question for each of us is whether it’s better to write the stories we want and do our best to choose a genre to categorize them within the marketplace, or pick a genre in advance and write to it. The issue assumes even greater significance for those NIPers who haven’t yet decided if their ultimate goal is to trad- or indie-publish their current work in progress.

I could search forever within my own database of knowledge and the words I might use to convey an opinion and still not provide the following succinct takeaway on this topic as offered by a fellow NIPer who shall remain nameless. Here it is, paraphrased to protect the innocent as well as the guilty:

Here’s the thing about trad publishing. It’s all about nailing a genre for a low-risk publication. If we write genre-indeterminate or perhaps genre-free novels, we’re just not going to find a home for them in an industry that needs to build a business case of triple digits in sales to sign a contract. If you write what you want without regard to market or genre, it’s a fool’s errand to then ask the market to approve of your market-dismissive manuscript.

Amen, brother.