What’s My Line — er, Genre? — win a prize!

[mmegaera]

 

I have a question for those of you who’ve read any or all of my Time in Yellowstone series, and there’s something in it for you if you win.

It seems like a simple, stupid question.

What genre are these books in?

Yes, time travel is obvious.  Go beyond that, if you can.  Go bigger, go broader.   Are they science fiction, even without a time machine?  Are they fantasy, even though they’re not epic or urban?  What else might they be?  And what do you think they are?

Name that genre!  And please, only a genre you’d find on Amazon, the genre you’d type in to find stories like mine, not a made-up genre or a description.

Whoever comes up with the best answer, including why, will win a $25 Amazon gift certificate.

Oh, and if you haven’t read any of my books, go here for a free Kindle copy, or here for a free anything else digital copy of my Time in Yellowstone short story Homesick.

 

Mirrored from Repeating History.

Comments

[hedda62]

I'd say Western time travel fantasy, though I'm not happy with that: the regional setting is very important, but one doesn't want to confuse them with "Westerns" in the genre sense; the time element is obvious enough. "Fantasy" is a way of saying they are not science fiction, but the time shift isn't exactly magical either, and there are certainly no elves. :) "Western time travel adventure" would also be possible.

*stabs genre* *waits for you to define mine*

[mmegaera]

Okay, I obviously did not phrase this well, and I will fix the original post, too.

What I'm asking is where you would expect to find my books on a bookstore shelf, and why. I don't think most bookstores have a Western time travel fantasy category [g].

[hedda62]

Ah, I see - well, that's easier, because most bookstores shelve all SFF together, and I think they would have to go there. Or, you know, "fiction."

[mmegaera]

Oh, dear.

Well, no, that's not easier, because if you look at SFF on Amazon, there are literally *dozens* of subgenres within that overarching genre[g].

At which point you'll say, yes, then it's time travel, which is an Amazon category (albeit under science fiction, which really isn't where my books belong).

At which point I say I want a genre that has review blogs I can actually give the book to which might actually review them, which time travel of the non-machine, non-romance kind does not, at least not so far as I can find (and no, I've had no luck with time travel review blogs of either the time machine or romance type).

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. I have committed myself, so I will be giving the gift card to the winner, but I have to say I was hoping for a different kind of response than what I'm getting [wry g].

[hedda62]

Well then, bookstore shelving and Amazon searching are totally different things. But I agree that negatives don't make a category. If I knew that "time travel adventures of the Old West" existed as a thing, and that appealed to me, then I'd be searching under the "time travel" banner for a setting in the West, but I wouldn't know that if I didn't know you. *grin*

It's tough!

[mmegaera]

Yeah. This makes writing the actual books seem easy -- and that's saying something.

[mmegaera]

Or rather, what you'd type into Amazon if you were looking for stories like mine.

[annathepiper]

From what I've read of you so far, if I were a bookstore employee tasked with where to shelve you, I'd be very hard pressed to choose whether to put you in Romance, SF, or the general Fiction section. I'd be leaning between SF and general Fiction, just because while time travel IS SFnal, it doesn't automatically make your book an SF novel.

The Time Traveler's Wife for example gets filed in general Fiction, at least at Third Place Books. And that's the first thing I think of when I try to think of another example that handles time travel in a way that reminds me of your work.

And yeah, how your metadata gets set on the online sites is an entirely different question. But for what it's worth, I just checked The Time Traveler's Wife on Amazon and saw that it got slotted under Fiction > Romance.

Repeating History didn't feel like an SF novel to me though. And it also didn't feel like a romance novel. So I'd go ahead and stand by filing you under general Fiction. The overall feel you're going for with your covers says 'general Fiction' to me, too.

[mmegaera]

Of course, as I said above, general fiction (or historical fiction, or speculative fiction, without narrowing them down more considerably) is *way* too broad a category to be useful for marketing as an indie.

What I was trying (and am now failing) to accomplish was to find out what sort of things I could search under to find where the people who might like my books hang out.

Someone said elsewhere that what I need to do is figure out what makes my books special, and search on that. The problem there is that most people tell me what makes my books special is their sense of time and place (not the specific times and places, mind), and how the ^&%^&% am I supposed to search on *that*???

Sigh.

[archangelbeth]

For Amazon, Historical Fantasy? They've got historicalness, and the time-travel is less device (SF) than Just Happens (thus, Paranormal or Fantasy).

(Look, I found The Princess Bride filed under Historical Fantasy. So I figure it can take a lot.)

Historical Paranormal/Paranormal for Sojourn, but I don't know if that's a category for Amazon.

Historical Plus Time-travel might be another description, but again, dunno if you can wedge that into Amazon search easily. O:/

[mmegaera]

The last two are not Amazon categories, alas. Time travel is a subset of romance or science fiction, neither one of which fit [wry g].

The other reason I'm trying to find a niche, though, isn't just Amazon. It's so that I can find out where the people who like these kinds of books hang out. Casting my net wide *doesn't* work, alas.

[archangelbeth]

I'm poking at the top-100 in the Romance->Time Travel segment, and I'm not sure you couldn't put at least some of the books there.

That said, "Western Time Travel" or "Historical Time Travel" might be the the rest of the niche. O:/

[mmegaera]

They've been in Romance>Time Travel pretty much since the beginning, mostly for lack of anywhere else to put them.

Someone suggested I put Sojourn under steampunk, except, of course, that there aren't any fancy gadgets [wry g].

[archangelbeth]

Well, if you want some fancy gadgets... ... ... ... ............... *beth frowns* Yeah, no, doesn't really work so well, does it...

[mmegaera]

Nope.

[nishatalitha]

If it helps, for my genre-tagging in Calibre/on my Kindle, I file them broadly in Historical.

Definitley not SF. I think if I was deciding where to shelve them back when I worked in a library, they would end up in historical or romance or general. I think they'd all work in Historical Romance (and I have read loads of time-travel romances), even if they're not in the bodice ripper section of romances.

[mmegaera]

Library categories are too broad for my uses, alas. I'm trying to find a *niche* for them, where I don't have to compete so hard against all the historical romances out there.

That and I really don't want to put them into a category where they don't *fit,* and they *don't* fit in romance for a lot of reasons, even though there's a love story.

Thanks! I'll be deciding who wins the gift certificate after I get over whatever this is that's laying me low right now.