Breaking the Rules: Can Genre Blending Educate as Well as Entertain?

Authors are generally told to pick a popular genre for their fiction book and stay with it. Why is the genre so important? First and foremost, it’s a marketing and positioning tag. Different genres have different features and characteristics. The genre tells the reader (and the bookstore or online marketplace) what kind of book it is. This simple classification helps the reader decide whether she might be interested. It also helps the bookstore decide where the book should be displayed or shelved for sale. Selling books is hard. Genre categories simplify the process for everyone involved, from the literary agent to the publisher to the book seller to, oh yes, the author—especially a new author. Knowing who’s going to read your book and where it fits in the marketplace is important to getting it sold to your publisher and purchased by your readers. If you want to sell your book to readers who like genre A, you’d best cater to these readers by following the “rules” for genre A.

But what if you don’t want to do that? What if you want to alter the rules or blend genres, even though it may make it harder to categorize your book and, accordingly, make it harder to market and sell?

A decade or so ago, blended genres became more popular as authors experimented with more creative approaches to the single genre rule. This led to a raft of mixed genres that has continued to proliferate, such as action comedies, sci-fi detective mysteries, techno-thrillers, paranormal romances, historical romances and dark fantasies, among many others. Critics and publishing industry players argue over whether to call these combinations subgenres, mixed genres, hybrid genres or whatever. Terminology aside, they all include at least some dominant features of two or more established genres. Some have become so prevalent that they are essentially recognized as “new” genres.

When I struck off to write Intentional Consequences, I wanted to use real-world politics and technology to fuel a classic thriller conspiracy story. I had two reasons for doing this.

First, to give depth to the plot and the action, I wanted to show how our current bitter partisan political environment and new technologies were combining to pose threats to American democracy that could be exploited by the conspirators looking to dominate the 2020 presidential election. To make the entertainment value vivid, I needed to educate the reader about the real-world context—to make it believable. To do that, I had to slow down the typical breakneck speed of the first part of the book to let the characters show the political disagreements and demonstrate, or at least foreshadow, the technologies that could be exploited.

To weave this background information into the story, I relied on my characters to explain key technical information or political disagreements—speaking not to the reader, but to each other. Valerie Williams, a respected political science professor, was invaluable in this regard, giving a keynote address and writing blog posts and Op/Eds that add real-world depth to the political commentary. Several of the other characters who were tech company execs played similar educational roles by conveying information in their conversations and actions.

To make the story relevant, I set the novel in the early days of the democratic primary battles during the spring and early summer of 2019. Rather than use the typical historical fiction approach of having real people play the key characters with my own interpretation of their actions and statements—something that seemed very risky from both legal and ethical standpoints—I included real world presidential candidates in the backdrop, but created my own fully-fictitious characters to play out the thriller story. The result is an interesting blend of fiction and nonfiction that echoes but doesn’t emulate classic historical fiction or the nonfiction novel genre.

My second reason for integrating the real-world politics and technology was to raise reader awareness about the threats to American democracy that are being posed by the political bitterness and the emerging technologies discussed in the book. As I said in my author’s notes, while the story is fiction, the issues are real. I wanted to encourage readers to join in the good faith debate we need to confront these issues and enhance democracy in America.

The depth of the background information was a risk, both in delaying some of the early classic thriller action and in asking the reader to remain interested in the amount of information presented. But the education provided the context needed to help the reader enjoy the accelerating action in the final two parts of the book. Hopefully, it also achieved my goal of interesting readers in the issues and in the importance of working together to resolve them. So far, I’m encouraged by the number of readers who have said that they both enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it. Check it out on Amazon or at www.charlesharrisbooks.com and let me know what you think.

So, what genre is Intentional Consequences? If you follow the suggestion that hybrid genres must still have a primary genre—a classic genre that can be modified by one or more adjectives (with perhaps a comma thrown in), then I’d say it’s still a thriller. If you start adding adjectives, it’s a political thriller. If you keep going, it’s a sophisticated fact-based political thriller. And if you allow a few more words, it’s a sophisticated political thriller for people who think (and enjoy nonfiction about politics and technology as well as fiction). Just don’t try explaining that to the publicists or the people mapping the keywords for online marketing.

Genres aside, the key point is to have a great story people want to read.

Which brings me to a final question. If the internet is reducing attention spans and making all of us expect quick, easy answers when we ask Siri or Alexa or whomever to help us find something, will readers gravitate to more granular sub- or hybrid genres, or will they stay with the traditional genre categories and keep scrolling through book after book presented to them by some AI-based marketing engine that thinks it knows what they want to read and buy? If AI holds the promise we expect, I believe granularity will carry the day. But we’re frankly not there yet. Too many of the AI-generated suggestions are still off-base or trite. Limitations on the number of categories authors can specify to Amazon/KDP and other online sellers, and AI algorithms that dislike marketing fiction books to readers of nonfiction (and vice versa), also have some way to go to provide the selection granularity and effective marketing readers and authors would like. Fortunately, that’s another topic.