Genres and Subgenres

If you are serious about being published, it makes sense to understand where your writing sits relative to readers and the marketplace. Comparison titles usually help to frame how your book might appeal. It’s also important to grasp your book’s genre or category; not only will this help to identify a possible readership, but it can also clarify and focus the writing itself during drafting.

Some definitions

First, some broader definitions and distinctions:

  • Genre is a particular way of thinking about the content and shape of a story. It functions internally, defining common conventions, characteristics and styles of stories for writers to work with, and it functions works externally, offering markers that appeal to readers with particular tastes. 
  • Subgenre describes even more specific groupings within a genre. Science fiction, for example, includes the very different realities of space opera, dystopia, time travel and alternative history among many other subgenres. Genre can be so broad it’s perhaps more useful to be thinking towards subgenre when you get down to the writing of a story.
  • Category describes not so much the content of a story as the way in which it’s classified for the outside world of readers or markets. It is particularly a commercial description, defining how a book is sold. Children’s and Young Adult fiction are categories that each contain works in most of the genres, for example, and literary fiction is more of a category as it can include stories in any genre. 
  • Story type is a classification that reaches across all genres, but it can be a helpful additional lens for combining with genre conventions and specific narrative ingredients. Brokeback Mountain can be read as a Forbidden Love story type that puts a spin on the genre tropes of the western, for example. In my experience the most useful story types are those of 20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias. 

Norms and variations and genre-blending

In the comments for the New York Times Best Books of 2024 someone remarked, ‘I keep seeing a genre I think of as bourgeois navelgazing, and in these interesting times I need something more engaged.’ Maybe that comment belongs to yet another genre: that of snark!

Genres create norms, but also the possibilities for variation and invention with new forms too.

Some of the more original stories arise when writers pursue what Donald Maass in Writing 21st-Century Fiction calls ‘genre-blending’. You can bring ingredients from one story into another, e.g., making your romance into a spy story as well might lift your material and give it more of an edge. Romantasy is a currently successful example of the mixing of genres.

I love a good pun, so I am tickled by the idea of sporror, fungus-fascinated writing that The Bookseller identifies as one of several niche subgenres in the recent revival of horror. Many new writers are embracing horror for ways to explore gender, queer identity, and environmentalism.

Cosy is still popping up everywhere. Cosy crime is now met with cosy fantasy and cosy self-help and cosy nature writing and cosy Japanese coffeeshop whimsy, and I detect hints of cosy in plenty of other places even if the genre definition isn’t so sharp, e.g., cosy Olive Kitteridge-ish retirement fantasies with a hint of seaside grandmother cottagecore. 

I guess cosy is a VIBE, and vibes can be an important aspect of genre. In the English department this is called MOOD, if we want to get technical, and mood can be as important a driver in the crafting of some genres as plot or character.

Now of course I’m wanting some cosy horror.

Consider how you might combine or establish conventions for a new genre or subgenre of your own. 

Making genres work for your own writing

None of these genre descriptions are hard and fast divisions, and there are plenty of overlaps and blurrings that raise questions about what they really mean. Commercial fiction is a broad category that includes popular works in all the genres, for example, though literary fiction can be very commercial too, especially when it wins prizes. Orbital by Samantha Harvey is a good example. 

Sometimes a genre is obvious from the start of a new project, but sometimes it’s not so clear. I often suggest that writers take whatever material they have and then start writing the story they want to write with whatever magic is summoned up by these ingredients. We can pay greater attention to the needs of genre or subgenre further down the line when the story feels as if it needs some focus or reining in, and when we have to think more earnestly about pitching and selling a manuscript. Thinking about genre becomes an important consideration during developmental editing and revising.

But don’t get too bent out of shape about this during your early drafts. This is creative writing, not an English exam. Find descriptions that speak to you, and then make them work for you in original ways. 

Links for different subgenres and categories

As a taster of forthcoming masterclass on Genres and Readers I’m sharing useful links on specific genres and subgenres of writing that are included in the workbook. 

These lists come from a variety of sources: publishers, journalism, genre bodies, individual writers and readers, the crowd-sourcing of wikis. I’ll update when something suitable arises – feel free to make suggestions in comments below. 

Literary fiction, upmarket fiction

Literary fiction is perhaps the hardest to pin down, as so much is subjective. I often go back to a simple description offered by a former colleague who’s a senior editor: he said literary fiction is writing that is nuanced.

Fantasy, science fiction, horror
Crime, mysteries, thrillers
Historical fiction
Romance, women’s fiction

The term ‘women’s fiction’ seems so gendered, and I know some writers prefer not to use that term. But then other writers use this description over romance, because the stories they are writing are not primarily romantic fiction. 

Action, adventure, westerns, war

Currently action-adventure stories seem more popular as a specific sales category in children’s literature, but there is a certain style of old-fashioned adventure-based storytelling that reaches into various genres: westerns, spy stories, military stories, sea stories, and also fantasy and science fiction. 

Nonfiction

Plenty more can be said about nonfiction, but I’m just adding this for now:

Further resources

Practical matters

Plenty to consider! Lists – and links to more lists – can become a distraction.

A simple exercise I often recommend is for writers to keep a running list of their own of, say, half a dozen or a dozen conventions their story might adopt – or adapt.

And to help in thinking through the relevance of genre and category to your own writing, my next masterclass is devoted to Genres and Readers on 17 November 2025 at 7-8.30pm, live on Zoom. We’ll also discuss related topics, such as finding readers and submitting writing to those professional readers who’re agents and publishers.

An earlier version of this post originally appeared on my Substack in December 2024.

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