Niche Genres

 

Most lists of book genres don't even include mine, so I must really be a niche. I suppose one could classify women's fiction as "drama", but drama is a pretty broad category. Isn't everything fictional basically drama? 

The strange thing from my perspective is that when I was an avid reader (more than a few years ago), every book I read was simply "fiction". Nowadays something like The Thorn Birds could easily be categorized as women's fiction, and thus sell about as many copies as my books, instead of millions. Women's fiction is a bad rap.

I'm toying with the idea of NOT categorizing my books as women's fiction. "Drama" has a nice ring to it, or maybe just "commercial fiction" or "contemporary fiction". Besides, women's fiction is too often confused for romance, which it definitely is not.

Promo sites are constantly hounding me to advertise with them, yet none (or almost none) of them even offer my genre. How hard would it be to expand a bit? But of course they know what sells and what doesn't. I did a search for the least popular book categories and couldn't find anything, at least no lists recent enough to be considered reliable. Is it a secret? I mean, they could just ask me. 

Shoot, even poetry is apparently more popular, and I can't even imagine reading a book of poems. Any half-wit can write a poem (sorry poets ~ I didn't say they could write a good one). I could take some of my song lyrics and call them poems. Maybe that'll be my next book project (kidding?)

I can commiserate with other niche writers. No matter what we do to promote ourselves, we'll never sell more than a couple of copies of our books. KDP is great, but it's too reliant on genre. Sure, I could go back into my published books and remove their women's fiction classification, but that seems like a lot of effort that wouldn't have much effect.

Happily, I'm not writing anymore with the purpose of selling. I have enough trouble just creating a story that pleases me. If I can manage that, I'm okay.