Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
I don't know. Of course it's the publishers who make the decision on what is counted as Religion as far as written works that are published. We the consumers can accept or reject a given book as being part of a genre but it's the publishers who print the genre on the covers.
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As an example I walked a local book store and Lord of the Rings was in the Christian Religious section, and in another local store it was in the Fantasy section (IMO where it belongs).
So I chatted with a rep at B&N about how this works and how they categorize their books in their store. They will only put books in the religion section that primary topic, and intention is to promote or inform about a religion. New age would likely count. They stated that most stores categorize books they way they feel they will be findable by the correct target audience, not by anything the publisher or author says.
Basically the understanding I got from that was that the STORES determine the genre, not publisher or author. At least as far as if you want to find the book to buy it.
I do not know how it impacts the numbers quoted above because we do not have any information about them, but genre, IMO, is about the worst thing to use to find/categorize a book anymore as it is too flexible and subjective.