Recently I was beta-reading a book for a friend. He had told me before I began reading that it was a “new-age thriller.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded intriguing, so I was all in. As I read, though, and the story unfolded, I kept looking for those thriller sequences but they were nowhere to be found. I found myself getting frustrated, wanting to get into the meat of the genre, but the narrative was taking its sweet time. Finally it became clear to me that this book was not a thriller. It had a very few thriller elements, but they actually only occurred in the last 10% of the book and they were not anywhere near the fast-paced, clock-ticking, heart-pounding sequences I was used to (and expected). While the book was good as far as it went, and well-written, it was decidedly miscategorized, and I told him so. Continue reading “Book Descriptions and Broken Promises”
Tag: genre labels
How Genre Labeling Keeps Some Books from Being Discovered
Guest post
by Sylvia Engdahl
Fans of my past novels are sometimes surprised to learn that I have become an indie author. I’m known to librarians as the author of six successful Young Adult science fiction novels, including an award-winner, that were first published by Atheneum in the 1970s and have all been reissued in hardcover as well as paperback by different publishers in the 21st century. They are enjoyed by adults as well as teens, and three of them were reprinted by a small press as adult science fiction. So why did I publish my recent adult science fiction trilogy, now concluded with Defender of the Flame, myself? Continue reading “How Genre Labeling Keeps Some Books from Being Discovered”