The Grip of Genre

A professional misstep reveals the horrible momentum of the present moment. A look at publishing, short-form content, nature preserves and generational bad dreams

Not everyone goes to a book looking for surprise. This was a surprise that was waiting for me.

A few years ago, I was out in the world, trying to sell a book I’d written. In it, two childhood friends reconnect with a woman from high school, a femme fatale who seduces them both to varying degrees in the course of one boozy night. Weeks later, she’s accused of murdering her husband and son.

Now, being an artiste, I considered the book to fall squarely within in the Literary Fiction category. And at the time, I’d had some luck with something called Bookbub - a huge email list that would publicize a giveaway of your ebook. For a few hundred bucks, you could get something like 20,000 new readers, and another 1,500 proper sales of your book, if you did it right. It was a good deal at the time, and all the big publishers soon piled in. They don’t work with self-published types anymore.

But at the time, they were game. They read the book description and came back with an idea: Instead of the 20,000 readers I could get for a book in the Literary Fiction category, how about the 50,000 I could get for a book in the Mystery category. I said sure.

The Bookbub email went out and around 50,000 people downloaded the ebook. Within the week, their reviews started bubbling up on Amazon. They trashed it, kicked in its face, slashed its tires, put out cigarette butts in its rosy-red cheeks and left it for dead.

Why I’ve gathered you in the parlor

The experience taught me about genre. My book was a lot of the good things I thought it was. But it wasn’t a Mystery. There was a murder - two, actually - and no one knew who had done it. And maybe if you read between the lines with some care, you could put it together. But the main characters never cracked it.

And there was certainly no scene in a parlor where the sleuth gets everyone together to spell it all out and the murderer is taken away in handcuffs. And that really pissed people off. On Amazon, I think it got down to two stars at one point - the status of a recalled dietary supplement. That more or less killed the book for future readers. Bummer. Life goes on.

It’s not just me

Genre is a funny thing. Every other new novel is either busting, bending or defying genre. The marketers try to say it like a boast, but it’s really an excuse. It’s like saying all due respect before you tell a bully they didn’t pay their tab.

The marketers are apologizing for the writers. And the writers deserve a pass - they’re rightfully looking for the thing that isn’t being said.

Writers who say their work twists or sprains or cracks genre are just doing the work of the marketers, whose bullying smiles convey pain. And the marketers bear the marks of a deeper bullying still.

But rigorously genre-obedient novels are the ones making the real money. The guys who write the supersoldier-just-wanted-a-quiet-life-until… books are drinking smoothies in the Hollywood Hills. The ripped-bodice romance cliche merchants are shopping for second and third beach residences.

Immunology

There’s a kind of ceremony when a book comes out - some publicity, reviews, awards. It’s like a fishing derby, they plop it on the docks, weigh it, appraise it and sell it. This is how a book finds its way into the world. And the genre allows it to be absorbed more quickly and fully by a hungry readership. Genre readers consume more of this stuff than you might think. Hence the beach houses.

But this ceremony is also an immune system. It rejects the outliers with startling efficiency. This isn’t just books in the Romance or Thriller categories, but also the hallowed Literary Fiction field, whose rules as a genre shift on a quarterly basis, as the smart set plays its games of hide-and-seek with taste and conspicuous morality on a quarterly basis. for status, and occasionally even profit.

The market isn’t a mind so much as a gland. It gets excited and makes the whole system sick. Then there’s an overcorrection. Medicine gets regurgitated. Kit Kats put people in motorized wheelchairs. No hard feelings.

Fiscal quartering

Quarterly is how the publishers of a solid majority of the publishers with books on your local bookstore’s shelves judge success. These few outfits may be responsible for 50%, or more, depending on the store. For reference, in an airport bookstore, it’s 100%.

After ninety days, bookstores can return the books to the publisher for a full cash refund, and get it. I’ll repeat that. They can just send the unsold books back and get a new set of books that may do better. It sounds crazy. But that’s how the market for deathless moments of literary truth and beauty operates in our fair Republic. It’s another lesson I learned at great personal expense. But that’s another story.

Genre readers

The lesson for the billion-dollar publishers with their highly precarious business model and me is the same: Don’t mess with genre readers.

Who reads a hundred versions of the misunderstood heiress who meets a soulful but defiant horse trainer? Who reads a hundred books about a haunted CIA-trained killer, who wanders from town to town, just wanting a peaceful life, until he’s pushed too far?

It ain’t me. But they pay for a big chunk of what there is of a literary world in America. And their financial mass warps the outlines of everything that goes into a book, and from there into TV and movies.

Their sheer gravitational force demanded the creation of Literary Fiction as a kind of nature preserve for readers who don’t seek the reassuring and increasingly predictable contours of genre.

The artillery becomes audible again

That nature preserve was fine for a few decades. The Literary Fiction folks had tenured positions, preparing future authors. They could survive, raise their families, have their crises and affairs and carry on in America’s colleges.

But nothing lasts. It’s hard to say if it was an accident. Maybe all those difficult books were just onerous homework that stood between a lifetime of profitable labor and big-screen television watching. Or maybe after the Cold War ended, the so-called human beings who really run the world decided that the United States of America no longer needed to pretend that it had a high culture in order to compete on the world stage.

Whatever the reason, the Arts, Humanities and Liberal Arts were defunded and defamed with ease. Their liquidation is now underway with a seemingly irrevocable momentum.

College is one thing. But it feels like part of a broader liquidation. I feel it when I read the news or watch a recent film, or sometimes even when I try to have a conversation. Maybe you do too.

Aesthetics of retreat

He not busy being born is busy dying, sang Bob Dylan. It an impression on me when I was 16 as an easy choice to make. Now what sticks out to me is the fact that no matter which way you’re headed, you’re pretty busy.

One thing I’ve noticed is that dying places more demands on you than being born, because it’s counterintuitive. It makes you more tired. And tiredness feeds on itself. Suddenly you can’t take a big enough break. You retreat, which affects everything, not least of which is your aesthetics. As a younger man, I thought genre was a retreat from reality and from the real challenge of the unknown.

But retreat doesn’t necessarily mean just genre, which can conceal innumerable kinks and charms within its predictable unfolding. Retreat is nostalgia, recent period pieces, fan service, reboots and second-screen TV where they explain everything at least twice because they know you’re also looking at your phone.

Human nature’s event horizon

Most of the money these days is betting - doubling down, even - on retreat. You can call it escape. But it’s really the death drive.

Some people I respect, like Ted Gioia, say that this cultural retreat is more profound. He makes the case that the vast majority of cultural production and consumption is collapsing to 5-second videos. He says basically that just as entertainment has largely devoured art, now distraction is devouring entertainment. To the continued detriment of most of us, this trend is accelerating, like light being sucked into a black hole. And like a black hole, it warps time, swallows light, tests our basic assumptions about reality and seems utterly inescapable, once you’re in its grip.

But we’re not really dealing with a black hole. We’re dealing with human beings. And unlike galactic singularities, human beings have a gag reflex.

The end of the alimentary canal

Some of the current moment may be coming from the collective death drive of the Baby Boomers. They’ve chosen the gods, demigods, goods, evils and general cosmology of America for fifty-plus years. And they’re losing their grip fast.

As a cohort, they’ve been selling out everything they once claimed to believe in for the last thirty years, and now the reaper is coming. Their bad dreams, and the desperate fantasies with which they distract themselves, weigh heavily on the media. And the media - literally the thing between you and I - is swollen to where we live with these dreams more than we do with each other.

The peculiarity of now

All of this is a long way around to arrive at where I started: Genre is all-powerful, and its consumers are bloodthirsty for their conventions. And the broader cultural winds seem to be blowing against curiosity and experimentation on the part of audiences. This makes the general desire for genre more powerful and less forgiving.

I just wanted to point out how perverse, how regressive and nearly suicidal the current moment is. I wanted to draw out its peculiarity, or else it might seem as though things need to be this way. They don’t. And they won’t stay like this.

Outside of genre

I’ve been working on something - Forget This Good Thing. It’s an oracle in the form of a website, an app, a series of books. Trying to define it briefly pushes the “elevator pitch” to its limit. Being so far outside of genre, it’s at least free from the opinion-thresher of the aficionados of genre.

The downside is that it may not have a way into the world. “If you build it they will come,” is only in the movies. But there’s also not much of an immune system waiting to neutralize it. It may also make a bigger mark on users who are exploring it and using it to explore reality in a slightly new way, rather than just consuming media. There’s a chance. And that’s something.

I should note that Forget This Good Thing is also very short-form, like the avalanche of content that threatens to destroy all we hold dear of culture. One way to think of it, and perhaps even use it, is like the feather in the throat. If reasoning don’t work, maybe reflex will.

Selected Bibliography

Forget This Good Thing – Try it now

Ted Gioia’s scary The State of the Culture, 2024

Forget This Good Thing – The app for iPhone and iPad

The book that was savaged as a result of my misunderstanding the seriousness of genre

Forget This Good Thing – Paper book 1 - Paper book 2

A good, sturdy version of the I-Ching

Forget This Good Thing – All About It

Forget This Good Thing - Its creation - What it can do for you - Why it matters - Thirteen descriptions - Case Study