Genre for eBook uploads.

[DaleDe]

I see that most, by a wide margin, fiction books are identified as "other fiction". I wonder if some are just too lazy to mark a genre, unable to decide, or whether there is a real demand of more genre choices. I did notice one upload from a while back that was a comedy but I guess humor was not close enough. Perhaps we can reach a consensus on some new choices. The tags don't seem to help much in narrowing them down. What do you guys think?

[Jellby]

Personally, I try to set the appropriate genre and tags for my books, although I have sometimes chosen "other fiction" where I should have chosen "romance" (I seem to remember there was a description somewhere of what the different genres were supposed to mean, which said that "romance" was for anything focusing on personal relationships, and this makes it appropriate for a lot of books, but I'm afraid it's easy to misunderstand).

However, I mostly ignore the genre and tags of the existing threads, just like the thread icons.

[Dngrsone]

Genre in ebooks is just as iffy as it is in music: give a book (or song) to ten different people and you are likely to get ten different genre recommendations.

[Jellby]

And most books here have never been read by the uploader, so the genre is chosen quite blindly.

[AlexBell]

In a day or so I will upload The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederick Manning, and would appreciate some advice as to what genre I should choose for it. The novel is set during World War 1 (the subtitle is Somme and Ancre 1916) and was published in the late 1920s.

It most certainly is not humorous, and there is only a trace of romance. Since it was published ten years or so after the event I don't think it is historical fiction. The author specifically stated that the events were real but the characters were fiction, so I don't think it's an autobiography or biography. Any advances on 'Other Fiction'?

[GrannyGrump]

@Alex -- Oh, I don't know, I think Historical Fiction fits it fairly well. It is a "fictionalized history". I don't think there is any law that says "Historical" must apply only to someting that occurred 'xxx" (insert your quantity of choice here) years in the past, why not something that happened ten years prior? After all, Hollywood now refers to movies about things that happened a decade ago as a "period piece."

But maybe we do need a few more categories of fiction.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

The author specifically stated that the events were real but the characters were fiction

That matches my definition of "historical fiction" pretty well.

[AlexBell]

Thanks to you both. I'll think about it until I put it up tomorrow.

I accept the point that there is nothing written in stone defining what 'historical' means. But it just doesn't feel right to describe an author's writing about events in his own lifetime as historical - today anyway.

[Jellby]

There's a famous series of 19th-century Spanish novels, Episodios Nacionales, which are also a prime example of historical fiction. The series is abouth 19th-century Spanish history too. It was started in 1872 (with 1805 events), and the final finished novel relates events in 1874-1880 (published in 1912). The author's lifetime was 1843-1920. Perhaps the "historical" tag is more obvious due to the series' character, but you see the dates overlap.

Anyway, whatever genre tag you apply here, I don't think it matters too much.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Jellby

There's a famous series of 19th-century Spanish novels, Episodios Nacionales, which are also a prime example of historical fiction. The series is abouth 19th-century Spanish history too. It was started in 1872 (with 1805 events), and the final finished novel relates events in 1874-1880 (published in 1912). The author's lifetime was 1843-1920. Perhaps the "historical" tag is more obvious due to the series' character, but you see the dates overlap.

Anyway, whatever genre tag you apply here, I don't think it matters too much.

It really only matters to the readers, not the submitters. You can use it as a search argument to find eBooks you are interested in reading and while scanning eBooks it can guide your selection. The perspective should always be for the readers. It matters not when the author wrote it. It matters a great deal when the reader fails to find it because it wasn't a genre they are particularly interested in. It is for this reason that historical should be from the perspective of us today, as apposed to modern.

Dale

[AlexBell]

Thanks for both your responses. It's quite obvious that I'm outnumbered, so in a few minutes when I upload The Middle Paths of Fortune I'll call it historical fiction.