Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s been an awful lot of chat­ter around the web lately about sub­gen­res and steam­punk in par­tic­u­lar.  We’ve seen attacks on steam­punk, defenses of steam­punk, and a thou­sand shades of opin­ion in-​​between.  As some­one who likes steam/​clockpunk enough to name his busi­ness after it, I have a dog in the fight.

But I’m not drawn to these discussions.

Genre in gen­eral, as far as I am con­cerned, is mostly a con­struct of mar­ket­ing. Booksellers care about them, and the read­ers do too, but I ques­tion how much it helps an author to con­sciously choose a genre or sub­genre.  Right now, I feel bad for any­one writ­ing a steam­punk novel, because steam­punk is clearly, at least to my eyes, reach­ing a sat­u­ra­tion point rivaled only by zom­bies.  To be on that bus, you needed to write and sell your steam­punk novel 2–3 years ago.  I’m sure we’re going to con­tinue to see nov­els from estab­lished authors in this vein, but it wouldn’t sur­prise me if edi­tors and agents are already mov­ing on in their search for the next big thing.

My advice to you, and to myself, is to ignore the sub­genre when you write.  You can ignore that advice and still be suc­cess­ful (of course). I know, for exam­ple, that John Scalzi set out delib­er­ately to write mil­i­tary SF because it seemed to be sell­ing well, but I won­der what we would have got­ten from him if he had set out to write his own sub­genre.  Scalzian fic­tion, we would call it, prob­a­bly.  What would it look like? Who knows.  It’d prob­a­bly have fart jokes though! (and I mean that in a pos­i­tive way)

That’s not to say that if your pas­sion is steam­punk, I think you shouldn’t write a steam­punk novel. By all means, punk away.  This post once again boils down to “don’t lis­ten to oth­ers and write what you love.”

But I think this advice espe­cially holds true when it comes to labels.  Labels are for mar­ket­ing and that comes later.  Right now, when you’re still string­ing words together and shap­ing a book just seems like the wrong time to get caught up in such thoughts.  It’s not the sub­gen­res that exist today that get me excited.  I’m exited to won­der just what weird, wild, and expres­sive forms and gen­res writ­ers are work­ing on right now, as we speak, that we’ve never seen before.  I can’t wait to see what they turn out to be.  Regardless of where they are shelved in the bookstore.

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Tags: books, genre, marketing, My Writing, subgenre