Thread by @LZats

I'm starting my morning with a gigantic pot of tea and my slush pile, so let's talk about queries for a few minutes!

Every query needs a metadata paragraph, where you tell an agent the data (material information) about your data (the book itself). Most of this metadata is super easy to provide...

Title--I bet your book has one, even if it's a working title!
Word count--just look at the bottom of your word doc!
But then you get to the tougher stuff that, frustratingly, feels like it should be simple: category and genre

At a first glance, it seems like these should be almost as simple as word count and title, but what happens when your book's trope parameters are a bit blurry?

Identifying your genre and category can be HARD, but it's so important you get it right--not only because it helps prep an agent for what to expect out of your MS, but it'll help you find the right people to query!

So let's talk about category first, because it's the simplest. It's basically age range. Is your book for adults? Teens? Middle schoolers? children who are learning to read? is your book a picture book?

Most people who have trouble with category are either
1) identifying actual readership instead of intended readership (most common)
2) have a book whose MC isn't the same age range as the intended readership (less common)

So in case 1, the issue I see is usually between YA and commercial/women's fiction--more adults read YA than teens do, but the book is still WRITTEN FOR TEENS. There is no such thing as a YA/Adult category

In publishing marketing, there is something called "crossover" which, well, describes a book that is marketed to different age categories. Crucially, YOU STILL NEED TO SELECT ONE CATEGORY because crossover is marketing & comes later; in the query process it just confuses

If you absolutely must put that your book can appeal to multiple categories of audiences, you may say that it's "YA with crossover potential" or some such thing. Please note that true crossover titles are quite rare! Your book probably isn't one!

(this is probably the time when readers are yelling at me through their phones about NA (new adult) where publishing tried to make college age/early 20s fic appeal broadly to adult and YA readers. It didn't work! There are a lot of reasons why, but that's another thread.

For #2, some books just...are definitely for adults but have kids as protagonists! Older kids books that you might remember reading often had adults as protags! This is relatively rare, but ask yourself WHO IS READING THE BOOK? And go with that, regardless of who the MC is

Now that you have category down, let's tackle the big one, genre. I fully acknowledge that sometimes pinning a genre down on a book is like trying to hold onto a handful of sand, but there are some general rules!

First, you need to know that some genres are defined by rules, and some are defined by vibe. Yes, I know that is frustrating. No, I can't do anything about it.

Rule genres: Romance, mystery, thriller (still rule-driven but more flexible is science fiction and fantasy/general spec fic)

Rules genres are driven by content and tropes (ex romance MUST have a happy ending). Often, they have many varied subgenres with their own specific rules (i.e. cozy mysteries being low-gore, and often have a non-professional investigator)

"But [insert famous author here] writes my tropey genre but doesn't follow all the rules, so why do I have to?" you might ask. Well, the more name recognition and success a writer has, the more leeway they have with their genre identification.

If you want to know the truth of a genre's parameters, look at the midlist authors--follow their cue, not the big names.

So, if you write romance, mystery, or thriller, congrats! You're done!

But what if you DON'T write those things? Well, then we enter the Vibe Zone.

Fantasy and Sci-Fi have content parameters they adhere to, and often will use tropes or their worldbuilding will play off of larger conceptions of the genre, but because this is such a huge and imaginative genre, there's a lot of room for vibes to shift the genre here

A good way to begin approaching this is to ask how speculative the book is--if you have a space western, well that's really tropey and you really gotta pitch SF agents. But if you have a book like Station Eleven, well, you get play with your identification a bit more

Every agent I know has tried to sell a book by tweaking the genre for different editors (literary speculative fiction versus literary fiction with speculative elements is an example--the first goes to SFF editors, the latter goes to litfic houses). You are allowed to do this too!

We must acknowledge that a lot of published litfic/gen fic/commercial fic/SFF/etc often crosses boundaries based on the current market, who is reading it, and author name recognition. It's hard to classify books into this marketing miasma, but still, we must try

If you write category/genre fiction, you will probably get a no from an agent if you misidentify your project (just this morning I turned down a thriller that was misidentified as horror, as I do not rep thrillers).

But if you write more in the ~vibe zone~ you can use feedback to pinpoint your genre better. If you get a no on a partial that says the book wasn't quite commercial enough, you might be writing litfic instead of women's fic!

If you're in that rule/vibe genre crossover, you can use feedback about pacing to better identify how closely you adhere to trope expectations, and adjust your pitch accordingly.

Anyway, this isn't a perfect science, but one thing you can always do to improve your understanding of publishing genre is to read broadly and deeply from current releases, ideally the ones that don't get huge marketing budgets or are from big-name authors

Oh, and please also insert horror wherever I talk about SFF, thank you

Finally, absolutely do not under any circumstances just throw genres together into a word-salad because your book has pieces of each. A book cannot be women's fic/romance/lit fic/thriller, even if it's a lushly written book about a women who falls in love and is running from cops