Quote:
Originally Posted by crane3
Another idle question: when reporting genre sales, is there double-dipping or triple-dipping? Romantic Mystery counted twice, romance & mystery or SF&F romance.
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No.
Typically book classification is a branching system and sales get assigned to the root category. That is why such a big chunk of SF&F sales (and an unknown amount of mystery) shows up under Children's books. Often the publisher gets the assignments wrong (accidentally or "accidentally on purpose") so, as pointed out above, romantic Erotica gets lumped in with steamy Romance or Fantasies with young protagonists get lumped in with nursery tales.
It is far from an accurate system made less accurate by publishers looking to steer existing titles into newly "hot" categories. That's why the Data Guy quote on mystery sales has the qualifier phrase "most reliable industry data". It is more than a bit ironic that ebook sales data, which is not publicly reported, is more *statistically* accurate than the publicly reported pbook sales data.
Publishing is a very weird business. Bookselling even more so; In many cases it isn't even a real business but rather a hobby or community service.
Anyway, as to familiarizing yourself with the romance genre, odds are you've already been exposed to its most popular variant: the romantic comedy. It's become somewhat rare in theaters in recent times but a while back they were all over the place: SPLASH, YOU'VE GOT MAIL, SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE... Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan made their careers off romantic comedies. They tend to be very accessible and amusing when done right. And any single day there are bound to be a couple dozen freebies at most ebook stores.