Your Story Is More Important Than Your Category

Why aspiring authors should focus less on how to classify their books and instead tend to what matters

I have a theory that categories have been given more power than they deserve. It’s not that they don’t matter so much as writers can bestow on them a particular kind of importance that doesn’t always align with what categories exist to do.

I blame the marketing side of the industry—which I write with the loving rivalry and reverence editorial people like me have for our marketing counterparts who have a tendency to focus on buzz over content. If you’ve worked in publishing, you know that editorial and marketing teams think differently. They have a fundamentally different orientation to the industry. You might think of them as a relay team—with the first two legs (editorial) out for substance and last two legs (marketing) out for show.

Ultimately, this relay team mentality is essential for a book’s success, but it creates scenarios where the thing editorial people care about—story—ends up getting buried in marketing priorities (ie, categories, classification, and positioning).

Editorial people care about categories as a thought exercise in which an author’s book will eventually land on a book shelf, in a brick-and-mortar store. Shelf placement for editors is a state of mind because you can visualize the reader who might end up staring at those stacks. Editorial people, in keeping with substance, spend a lot more time thinking about what the book is about and less time on how the book will sell.

Marketing people care about categories as a selling tool. Marketing minds are ones at work slicing and dicing categories for the good effort of appealing to the right readership. But here’s where writers can get ahead of themselves. For instance, it’s less important that your novel is commercial, upmarket, or literary if it’s not a great or saleable story. In keeping with show, marketing people also liberally encourage authors to compare books to movies and shows (something editorial purists don’t love).

Both sides are doing their jobs, of course. In-house editors are tasked with 1) buying your book (for the publishing house) and 2) developing your book for its readership, whereas the marketing team is tasked with 1) thinking about how to sell your book and 2) thinking about how to reach readers.

The piece you’re reading is biased, I admit, because I’m writing this from my editorial orientation. But I do this in the service of authors because I’ve listened to too many pitches that feel more designed to sell books to readers than to editors. I am tired of authors hand-wringing about their categories and how to classify their books when really all I care about is their story. Recently, I sat down with an aspiring author who wanted to give me her pitch. After she finished telling me about her compelling life story, she asked me if I thought her memoir should be categorized as a late-in-life coming-of-age story, a survivor memoir, an LGBTQ memoir, or an adoption memoir. I told her, “You have a memoir. Just leave it at memoir.” This doesn’t mean that I don’t care about all her themes—survival, LGBTQ, adoption. These things are essential to the story, but they’re not categories, they’re themes. And these are not “types” of memoirs, either.

It would behoove writers to consider those legs of the relay race, and to understand during that the first part of the journey, the editorial part, the terrain is particularly about the reading experience (ie, substance). The second part, the marketing part, is about appealing to a readership by finding ways to convince them that the reading experience of your book is one they want to have (ie, show).

Thus, a pitch is different from your eventual marketing copy. Selling your book to an editor is different than selling your book to a reader. It seems to me that out in the world of writers’ conferences and Pitch-o-Ramas, it all gets conflated.

If you’re a writer, aspiring author, or an author, I encourage to you think of classification as a hierarchy:

1. Genre

Genre rests at the top of the category kingdom, gathering everything else in the folds of its robe. Genre matters to editors because it helps us understand what your book is. In book publishing, you have giant umbrella genres: fiction and nonfiction. And from there the drill down begins. Genre is most helpful in fiction because there’s a huge difference between science fiction and commercial fiction, and between historical fiction and fantasy. But for many genres, just sticking with your high-level genre—poetry, memoir, self-help, etc.—is the best way to get an agent or editor to know quickly and succinctly what you’re doing. Let the story do the rest of the telling.

2. Category

Categories’ original function in book publishing was for book buyers to know what shelf to put the book on, the end. It wasn’t even until the 1990s that the Book Industry Study Group (an organization whose Board I’ve sat on) started to maintain BISAC codes. BISAC stands for the Book Industry Study Standards and Communications, which is a terrible acronym for what BISAC codes actually are. The organization that creates and maintains BISACs calls its own codes “subject descriptors.” The rest of us call them categories. They look like this:

The advent of Amazon’s category system has created all kinds of confusion for authors, and frustration for publishers. This is because publishers are bound by the confines of BISAC, whereas self-published authors can access Amazon’s categories directly. Sometimes publishers can puzzle their way into the desired Amazon category using the right combo of BISAC codes and keywords, but not always.

I think it’s a useful exercise for authors to take a look at BISAC codes because they offer a window into how the industry thinks about categories and “subjects” as a way to classify books. This can support authors who are talking to agents and editors and booksellers, too. Speaking the language of the industry gains you access to the people you really want to know (agents, editors, book buyers, librarians, reviewers, etc.).

3. Keywords

Finally, keywords. These are searchable terms, and probably more important than genre from a search engine perspective. The reason they’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, however, is because they don’t matter all that much until you’re about to become a published author.  Keywords are essential points of data that do a lot of heavy lifting on the back end. Keywords are those words that a person might type into Amazon or Google if they were in the market for a book like yours but they don’t know your book exists. Kind of a heady exercise, but a good one. Keywords are connected to category for traditionally published (or distributed) authors because they do a dance with BISAC codes to land books into Amazon’s category system. If Amazon weren’t such an important vendor, this wouldn’t matter so much. But publishers spend a lot of time thinking about keywords because they play a major role in discoverability—ie, readers finding your book.  

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At the end of the day, classification is about trying to define what our books are, and that’s a meaningful exercise. But consider where you are in the journey, and remember that simple is good. I am so much more interested in having a conversation about what your book is about than I am in having a conversation about your categories. It all matters, it’s true, but stay focused on what moves you about your story, and you’ll move the both the people tasked with taking your pitch and your eventual readers alike.