{"id":52,"date":"2008-08-12T14:25:49","date_gmt":"2008-08-12T14:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mitziszereto.wordpress.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2012-04-02T03:11:33","modified_gmt":"2012-04-02T02:11:33","slug":"book-labels-good-bad-or-ugly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/book-labels-good-bad-or-ugly\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Labels: Good, Bad or Ugly?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mitzi<\/a>
Mitzi Szereto: Dying For It: Tales of Sex and Death<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What do you do when your book is mislabelled? No, I’m not talking about some spotty teenaged\u00a0kid at\u00a0Walmart<\/a> putting the wrong price sticker on it. I’m talking about something a lot more annoying and something which can potentially affect your\u00a0book sales –\u00a0sometimes to the negative.<\/p>\n

When readers\u00a0head over to a bookshop or\u00a0to an online bookseller\u00a0to find a book to purchase, they\u00a0might go to a specific category, be it crime, romance, science-fiction, chick-lit, self-help, whatever. They then have certain expectations of what these books will be about. But what happens when a book isn’t quite what it says on the tin? Well, readers\u00a0may get more than they bargained for and have their reading experience\u00a0elevated to a higher level.\u00a0At least this is what we as writers hope will\u00a0happen!\u00a0But what about those readers who miss out entirely on a book because of the way in which it’s labelled?<\/p>\n

Labelling isn’t necessarily done as a sinister plot\u00a0to mislead a book buyer into purchasing something he or she doesn’t want to buy (though\u00a0if a recent article about publishers suddenly\u00a0labelling everything chick-lit\u00a0is anything to go by…), but rather a matter of expediency. If it says sci-fi on the cover, booksellers know to stock\u00a0it on the\u00a0sci-fi shelves, and readers know to find it there. Simple, right? In the majority of cases, this works just fine for most categories of\u00a0fiction and non-fiction. But what about those times when it does not work just fine?<\/p>\n

I’ll draw upon my own experiences in this area to demonstrate my point. Although much of my work has been in the area of\u00a0erotic fiction, or “erotica” as it is more commonly referred to, the label has on occasion been misapplied. Case in point: my anthology Dying For It: Tales of Sex and Death<\/em><\/a>. This is a multi-genre collection of short stories ranging from crime, romance and horror, to\u00a0literary fiction and erotic fiction. Before it went\u00a0to press, I spoke on the phone to my publisher in New York discussing this very\u00a0issue: how to label the book. We both agreed that classifying the work as “erotica” was not really accurate, therefore it was agreed that the anthology would not be labelled as such. But when the book came out, there it was on the back cover:\u00a0“erotica.” Clearly the\u00a0opinions of the creator and editor\u00a0of the book (me)\u00a0and the gentleman who’d so\u00a0enthusiastically agreed to publish it were overridden by someone with no concept of what the anthology was about (they probably just\u00a0saw the word “sex” in the title)\u00a0and had probably not even read one story contained within it.<\/p>\n

The problem is, there are many readers out there who are not interested in reading erotica – or what they either rightly or wrongly perceive\u00a0to be\u00a0“erotica.”\u00a0However, they might not be averse to reading\u00a0material that\u00a0contains sexual themes or content, providing\u00a0this is\u00a0placed within a wider context. These readers\u00a0probably don’t bat a proverbial eyelash at the\u00a0sexually explicit and\u00a0often even purple prose to be found in a John Updike<\/a> or Philip Roth<\/a> novel, but will they buy a book that proclaims itself\u00a0to be\u00a0erotica? Unlikely.\u00a0Which means, you’ve lost a reader, and you’ve lost a sale.<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong – labelling a book\u00a0in a specific genre\u00a0can have its advantages, providing said book is labelled properly.\u00a0But this requires a bit more than a one-size-fits-all mentality by publishers.\u00a0It requires some\u00a0thoughtful analysis of what a book is actually\u00a0about and\u00a0who\u00a0might be interested in\u00a0reading it.\u00a0It should be the goal of a\u00a0publisher to\u00a0attract the widest possible audience\u00a0to a book, which will result in\u00a0higher sales figures – and a label\u00a0can either help or hinder this process.\u00a0Placing a\u00a0book such as my Dying For It<\/em> into a specific classification can undermine what the author (or editor) is trying to accomplish. Likewise, it can keep readers away from books they might have considered, were it not for the label. A book is not\u00a0a garment\u00a0with a tag sewn into the collar\u00a0listing its size and washing instructions. By treating it as such, we not only shortchange writers, but readers as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do you do when your book is mislabelled? No, I’m not talking about some spotty teenaged\u00a0kid at\u00a0Walmart putting the wrong price sticker on it. I’m talking about something a lot more annoying and something which can potentially affect your\u00a0book sales –\u00a0sometimes to the negative. When readers\u00a0head over to a bookshop or\u00a0to an online bookseller\u00a0to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1782,1781],"tags":[26,33,834,67,68,1719,69,70,71,138,738,161,189,190,1342,238,1722,292,579,298,327,1721,345,346,367,1720,386,1723,1724,833,474],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artsandentertainment-2","category-writingandpublishing","tag-anthology","tag-authors","tag-bloggers","tag-book-labelling","tag-book-labels","tag-booklabels","tag-books","tag-booksellers","tag-bookshops","tag-dying-for-it-tales-of-sex-and-death","tag-dyingforittalesofsexanddeath","tag-erotica","tag-genre","tag-genre-fiction","tag-genrefiction","tag-john-updike","tag-johnupdike","tag-mitzi-szereto","tag-mitzi-tv","tag-multi-genre-fiction","tag-philip-roth","tag-philiproth","tag-publishers","tag-publishing","tag-sales-figures","tag-salesfigures","tag-sex","tag-sex-writers","tag-sexwriters","tag-vloggers","tag-wal-mart"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6934,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/6934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mitziszereto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}