@Encorm took the words right out of my mouth on the question of defining genres (which just goes to show how persuasive I am when soapboxing on this topic in-person, right? ) but on a side note, I went through and added genres to a bunch of 2022 games when the IFDB Awards opened and I noticed we really don’t have an official genre equivalent to “Drama” (in the film sense, as @Angstsmurf defines it above). I can see why this wasn’t on the radar when the Baf’s Guide genre list was created, but it’s become a pretty substantial IF category over the past decade or two, and I wonder if there might be some value in adding such a category to the genre drop-down on IFDB even if it means breaking from the list.
Because I have feelings about the artificiality of genre as a construct and also you can put whatever you want in the IFDB genre box regardless of what’s in the drop-down menu, I’ve never really considered this a problem, but now that we have the IFDB Awards with categories for the most popular “official” genres, it does seem like it might be worth thinking about—of course, there may not be enough games under this umbrella per year to be worth having an award for them, but right now there’s not even an easy way to tell how many there are (as most of them just don’t list a genre at all).
Another little secret - the publishers know that readers of genre fiction are mainly just into the text and they don’t need to make a beautiful artisan keepsake book for them. MM paperbacks are often traded or collected and the easily shelvable format (same size, nothing but pages) supports that at the price point since genre readers tend to buy books frequently and store more of them.
New “Literary Fiction” tended to be hotness of the moment books suggested by word of mouth through book clubs (you can bet all the Oprah selections were usually published or reprinted when she mentioned them - in an exquisite and pricer QP format for display on the feature tables and end-caps.) These titles usually would pick up extra sales on publication from people who aren’t consistent readers and publishers make sure that these books are beautiful and eye catching since they are most commonly left out on a coffee table instead of shelved and get more “cover play” turned out instead of spines-aligned on a bookshelf.
So basically for “non constant readers” they wanted to offer a more beautiful book at a higher price point since these were people coming to the bookstore often for that book specifically instead of a casual browse. And QPs usually sold more consistently when displayed prominently on feature tables instead of shelved spines-out with the genre selections.
This has shifted quite a bit over the past decade. People who just want the text buy ebooks. If you’re buying a physical book at all, nice hardbacks and trade paperbacks make up a larger percentage of the market.
Paying money for fiction is an artificial construct, but I do a lot of it. :)
It’s unfair to say that genre is only a marketing system. It’s also a communication directly from the author to the audience: “This is the kind of thing you like! Take a look!” You don’t need to invent capitalism for that to have value.
Genre is also a communication within an audience. I can talk about science fiction because I’ve read a lot of it. I know the conventions and tropes. I know when an author is attacking the conventions and tropes, or playing off them to do something clever that expands the boundaries of science fiction. All of that is genre.
(All of that happens within the “literary” or “non-genre” genre as well. But I’m not part of that conversation, because I don’t read that stuff.)
I mean, I’m obviously not saying genre as a construct has no value at all, or I would object to the IFDB Awards having genre categories in the first place. I was being a bit flippant, but I just meant that genre is an imperfect way of describing a work of fiction, especially when it comes to self-published stuff that isn’t required to fit into a category to be marketable; it is helpful for communicating to an audience that this is the sort of thing they might be interested in, but there are other options for that (such as the additional tags on IFDB) that some people find more useful, or at least equally so. This being the case, I didn’t previously think it was much of a problem that a lot of works on IFDB had nothing in the genre field or that the IFDB “canonical” genres had at least one significant gap. But being nominated for awards is a positive experience for many authors, so now that the genre categories have that additional utility I do think it might be worth addressing that gap.
) but on a side note, I went through and added genres to a bunch of 2022 games when the IFDB Awards opened and I noticed we really don’t have an official genre equivalent to “Drama” (in the film sense, as @Angstsmurf defines it above). I can see why this wasn’t on the radar when the Baf’s Guide genre list was created, but it’s become a pretty substantial IF category over the past decade or two, and I wonder if there might be some value in adding such a category to the genre drop-down on IFDB even if it means breaking from the list.