It Seems I Can't Go With "Commercial Fiction"

Intellectually, I know that commercial fiction isn't a genre, but it's been my fallback when I've thought about how to categorize my novel. Maybe contemporary fiction instead? I think KDP actually lists that as a choice when uploading a work.

You know how I feel about labeling my books as women's fiction. I'm now firmly against doing it. I guess it's fine for my novellas that are already out there; I'm not going to go back and change their categories. It's not that I find women's fiction to be necessarily bad. I'm sure there are tons of good women's fiction novels, but it's rather the inherent expectations of the genre that chafe. I don't write about social issues and I'm not a feminist; I'm a person. I also don't write romance, which gets lumped in with women's fiction. In fact, even though all my books have an element of romance in them, I suck at it. Take my current novel. The main character is so in love with a man she can't have that it ultimately leads her to drink away her sorrows. Yet when he was in the picture, I can't really see what the big deal was. He's barely a blip in the story; his most obvious characteristic being that the MC found him annoying when she met him. He's hardly a well-rounded character. It's as if I just needed to write him in so that my protagonist would have someone to pine for.

So, women's fiction is out.

In reading about literary fiction and book club (or upmarket) fiction, nope, my novel is neither of those. I couldn't write in a literary style if my life was threatened. Most of the time I'm searching for a common word my brain can't seem to recall. Thus, my sentences aren't "lovely"; they're plain. I'm also lousy at symbolism. If any of my published books contain symbolism, it's news to me. It certainly wasn't intentional. I can barely scrounge up a metaphor, must less some kind of "the empty glass on the table represents man's helplessness" or something.

Book club fiction apparently is also literary, but more accessible. It has depth and carries a powerful theme. Again, nope ~ no depth; no theme. It's a story. It starts in a place and ends in a place, and things happen in between.

My novel is uncategorizable.   

That's not a good thing.

I think they need to invent more genres, something like "a story" or "something else" or "undefined".

Why I'm focused on that now is silly. I'm nowhere near having to make a genre choice, but I've got nothing else going on at the moment, so my brain ponders these things. I apathetically took a stab at my manuscript yesterday, about a five-minute stab, and I found an inconsistency in the second paragraph. The second! How can so few words even have inconsistencies? Well, I managed it. And I've listened to that passage being read back to me at least five times without noticing it. This is not an auspicious start to my editing.

Incidentally, I tried out Natural Readers as an alternative to the AI voice that's been reading my novel back to me, and I'm here to say, don't bother. Certainly don't pay for a subscription. My narrator stumbled over the most basic words. "$459.00" was pronounced as "four hundred fifty-nine dollars dot zero zero". Cool. Plus, I found that Word's female voice is more pleasing. Just for kicks, I should have tried out a male narrator or a child narrator, though that would have made the story rather creepy.

Enough about genres and general creepiness. I'm putting the novel away for its long nap. I think I'll do the same.