I have taken to describing Books of Loukas as “33% mermaids, 33% fantasy and 33% smut” over the last few months when asked to provide a summary of the position of the books in the weird classification zone that we call “genre”. I settled on that description after a while, since it seems to encapsulate the main positioning elements of the books in the whole sphere of fiction. I concluded a long time ago that the book series would not fit any neat current genre.
This, of course, creates its own issues. In preliminary conversations with one or two cover designers, they seemed to be fixated, within a short time, on making sure that the book fits into one of the existing genres. One designer explained to me that if it did not, positioning it on Amazon would be difficult, if not impossible.
I feel like (although I will never be compared with) musical artists like Miles Davis and the band Weather Report, who pioneered making music that included the jazz components of improvisation, but which used electronic rock music instrumentation. The music industry had no category for this type of music, and…categories were important in the era of physical record media sales, since you had to know which rack to put an LP in in record stores. (This sounds remarkably like the Amazon positioning issue raised by one cover designer).
Jazz? Nope. Rock instruments. Rock? Nope. Too much jazz. The term “jazz-rock” became an obvious answer, but one that did not satisfy the music industry, since it wanted a neat single box.
Eventually, a marketing guy in a record company somewhere decided to create a new category to get around the problem. Thus was born the name “Fusion”, a name that, to this day, causes musicians to explode in contempt. (Joe Zawinul of Weather Report pointed out in 1977 that Europeans already had an answer. “In Europe”, he said, in typical forthright and cocky Zawinul fashion, “they say that Weather Report is the leader in a field of one”. He then went on, like everybody else making music, to express total contempt for the word “fusion”. )
Later in the 1970s, writers and commentators ran into the same issue when attempting to define the music of Steely Dan. Pop? Nope. Way too many sophisticated jazz and classical changes. Jazz? Nope. Too much singing and pop choruses. Donald Fagen, one half of Steely Dan, noted that they themselves wrestled with how to define and position their music, before concluding that since they had hit singles, the best thing to do was to pass their songs off as pop songs, and hope that the upside outweighed the downside, while continuing to write what they wanted to write, not what the music industry would have them write.
Alas, my novel series is even more complicated than my 33/33/33 classification. I say “mermaids”, but my characters operate more as under-the-radar sirens, albeit (mostly) benign. One of the characters does go to the Dark Side, and splits off to form a school of Dark Sirens, who seek to destroy souls. But that comes later.
So, right now, I do have a positioning and marketing quandary. I don’t know how I am going to resolve it, but it certainly will not be by me removing material and twisting the books so that they do fit in an existing box. I did look at doing that, but I don’t have to. I am not trying to make a living from writing fiction at present, and the book series does, I think, stand on its own within its own space.
I will have to address these issues soon, since it will be cover design time before the end of November. I guess I need to find a cover designer who understands the underlying premise of the books and is not worried about fitting the cover to genre.