Musing on Hybrids

Hybrid cars are hot right now.  I’ve been thinking that car manufacturers have had no problem with marketing them, either, despite their hybrid status.  But then, they have a compelling primary consumer benefit: save money on gas and get incredible mileage while helping the environment.  As a result, the market has embraced hybrid cars with, if not passion, then enthusiasm.

As I prepare to research more literary agents to send out more queries, I am revisiting the question of what kind of novel I’ve written.  The Perceval novels blend genres: with their strength in character development, they are literary but I am more concerned about story than language; the future setting and focus on social issues place them in the social science fiction category; and they have other genre elements such as thriller (the secret of Perceval), crime (murders are committed), psychological suspense (who is Evan and what will he do?), international espionage (a rogue CIA agent and other “spies”), a dash of political intrigue (how Perceval will change the geopolitical situation), laced with mystery much as real life is.

During previous research into agents and publishers, reading Publishers Weekly religiously, attending workshops led by agents and/or writers, and digging through other market reference books, I learned that to categorize a novel as a “blend of genres” is the kiss of death.  Why? 

Marketing.  Publishers and booksellers want to be able to categorize books so that customers can find them easily and buy them, hence, the sections in bookstores.  It makes sense.  Customers who prefer literary fiction to popular have their own section, and the genres under popular fiction have theirs, nonfiction has its own section with subsections.  I’ve wondered on occasion, when I’ve been in a bookstore, what would happen if only two categories existed: fiction and nonfiction.  In each section, booksellers would shelve books alphabetically by author last name.  Then genre novels would mix in with literary novels and maybe people would read more of both.

I’ve also wondered, as I’ve browsed in bookstores, if it would really be such a hardship to create another category called “hybrid fiction.”  (Or even “hybrid nonfiction” — an article in the Foreword section of the March 24, 2008 Publishers Weekly  discussed the blending of fiction and nonfiction as a new phenomenon in writing.)  A hybrid fiction section might be small at the beginning, but once writers understood that this category existed, more would produce hybrids, expanding the consumers’ reading choices.  Is the reading public ready for a “new” genre?  Why not?  As long as the story is strong, the characters fascinating and real, and the subject interesting, does it really matter what category the novel is in?  Really, only for sales and marketing purposes….

If life were a novel, in what category would a bookseller shelve it?