Finding a great book is hard. Finding your favorite book genre is harder. One problem is that books don’t have content ratings like movies. You want to avoid a bad reading experience, but you don’t want spoilers about the plot. Not only do you want one great book but a favorite book genre full of them.
This is my struggle. This is the problem that drives so many of my blog posts. We don’t like to waste our time, don’t want a bad reading experience and we’d like to have every book be a five star winner.
That’s not realistic. But, we can improve our odds by identifying exactly what we’re looking for and naming it.
How do you create your favorite book subgenre?
- Identify your favorite genres
- Pinpoint the top characteristics you want
- Find the descriptive words to name your subgenre
- Set up a group or list for your subgenre
- Let people know about it
What good does it do to create a subgenre? You can build community around it. You can connect to other people. There’s probably other people out there looking for your subgenre. You can categorize books without giving spoilers. That’s a plus.
I created my own favorite subgenre.
Introducing for the first time (drum roll please)
Commendable Lit!
I’ll show you step by step how to do it yourself and tell you about mine.
Identify your favorite genres
Stop and think about your best reading experiences. Which books made you want to start over again at the beginning? Which books stay with you as move through your week? Which books transported you from your daily life to another reality?
Which reading experiences do you want to repeat or recreate?
Of those books, which genre do they fall into?
If you’re having trouble read How to Find Your Favorite Book Genre.
Pinpoint the top characteristics you want
Here’s the problem: You don’t like all the books in your favorite genre. So, what is it that makes them winners or losers?
What part of the genre would you want to throw away? Which would you like to keep?
Which authors do you love? Why?
An ongoing problem that has driven a lot of my blog posts is the problem of finding well-written books that don’t glorify, celebrate or normalize immorality.
I wrote Why Don’t Books Have Ratings Like Movies? to explore this topic. In doing research for that question, I learned some interesting things.
One thing is the small probability that books will ever have a universal content rating system.
Next I wrote How to Find Good Clean Books
Then I wrote a series of lists of clean books:
24 Exceptional Clean Fiction Books for Adults
Clean Romance Novels for Adults
and Clean Beach Reads.
Identifying those characteristics is critical.
Find the descriptive words to name your subgenre
Finding accurate words to describe your new subgenre is key to communicating the distinctives of your subgenre.
I love word hippo as a resource for finding just the right word.
I spent some time there trying to pin down words that really describe the books I love.
When I stumbled across commendable I knew I hit the jack pot, because two uses of the word fit perfectly.
“Having or showing high moral standards” and “worthy of being recommended”.
Those are the kind of books I love to read.
I chose Lit because it doesn’t sound as high brow as literature, but still conveys the idea of works of fiction.
Voilà!
A new subgenre is born: Commendable Lit
Set up a group or list for your subgenre
Next I created a list on Goodreads and added forty some titles that I feel epitomizes this subgenre.
There are multiple ways to do this, such as a facebook group. Even a paid membership could be an option if you gain a following.
Let people know about it
The final step is to get the word out.
The internet and social media has many avenues to make this easy. Like minded readers will be on some platform that you can find and connect with them.
You know your favorite places to connect on the web. Take advantage of those or explore new platforms.
