Penn Group

What’s your favorite kind of food? If your answer is Chinese, you probably wouldn’t go to a Tex-Mex restaurant and find chow mein and eggs rolls prominently displayed on its menu. Nor would you expect to find New York–style hot dogs if you went into an establishment whose specialty was advertised as English tea and scones.

            A correlation can be made to the ingredients found in different kinds of books, plays and movies. While there are plenty of stories that have “a little of this” and “a smidge of that,” most of them concentrate on one specific flavor that they prepare especially well. This is called “genre” and it refers to the style or type of story that is being served up to a target audience that’s hungry for good entertainment.

            Genre is also what makes it easy for you to find your favorite type of movie rental at the video store or a specific type of book at your neighborhood  Barnes and Noble. If the selections were all thrown together like goulash, it could take you forever to find the latest martial arts film or historical epic. Instead, these works are neatly categorized according to their primary content. Keep in mind that there are a number of basic genres (like beef, chicken and fish) and, within these divisions, subgenres (think of these as the compatible side dishes). This is important to remember as you start developing your project because, unlike an online store where items can be virtually located in multiple sections, a traditional bookstore or video/DVD outlet isn’t going to have the shelf-space to cross-file your title in every conceivable grouping.

This is also a good place to warn you not to make up genres that don’t exist, e.g., “a science fiction action-adventure romantic thriller mystery novel with comedic overtones.” Stick to the basics and you — and your readers/viewers — can’t go wrong.