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Originally Posted by sun surfer
I like the poll options. Will the poll be hidden or open?
Also, what constitutes a repeat category? It would be good to have that clarified beforehand.
We discussed categories such as two non-fiction where one is biography and one is something else, and also how Mystery/Crime and Thriller/Suspense are essentially the same...will "repeats" include either of those?
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I don't think we need to establish what counts as a separate category in order to decide whether or not we allow duplicate categories. We can, later, decide whether two suggested categories have so much overlap that they are effectively duplicates, or whether one is a subcategory of another, and so on.
I've been told the difference between Mystery and Thriller is that Mystery is a hunt (protagonist/s must find the bad guy) and Thriller is a chase (the bad guy is after the protagonist/s). Whether those are different enough themes, given the similarity of settings, character types, and literary tropes, is potentially worth discussion; it doesn't matter for the purpose of sorting out "will every month have a different category?"
"Biography" and "other nonfiction" (whatever label we manage to find for it) are obviously two separate categories; the issue becomes "is there enough interest for two different nonfic categories?"
I don't have a neat, concise description of the difference between Fantasy and SF. I could probably go hunting for one--and still come up with several dozen books that fit into both. The "urban fantasy" genre is fast eroding any useful boundary-lines between them; however, there is definitely both a tone-and-style difference and a themes-and-tropes difference between "The Hobbit" and "Beggars in Spain."