Tags and Genres

An excerpt from a thread from Twitter user @bogboogie that's gotten a fair bit of exposure over the last couple of days:

I am, as I noted on Twitter, basically sympathetic with this. No, that's not strong enough. I'm highly sympathetic, especially since I have had all kinds of trouble trying to pick genre designations. This was a problem even before I got into self-publishing, which makes it even worse. Amazon lets you choose three genre designations from a hierarchy, and not only are the designations not especially useful, but Amazon does not tell you how the ones you pick from the hierarchy will translate to actual book listings.

HOW TO GO TO HELL IN 10,000 EASY STEPS is an urban fantasy. It is set in "the real world," in the recent past, with fantastic elements interceding to basically interfere with real life. It riffs on various mythologies, theology, and features as one of its central conceits the idea that Hell is an enormous refinery where your sins are processed out of you so you can go back and do it all over again. The one thing I was sure about when categorizing the book was that I couldn't call it SF and there was not enough horror in the book to call it horror. It ended up in Fantasy > Paranormal and Urban, a useless fucking category because any category which is broad enough to catch both Harry Potter and Twilight is too broad to be useful to anybody.

When it came time to classify GILLIAN'S EYE, I was relieved to be able to check the big happy SF box as the first category, but should I somehow take note of the fact that the book is, as I was known to note in less reverent moments, "chock full of lesbians"? Like @bogboogie, I felt that was Not My Focus--it just HAPPENS that there's only one significant male character in the book and yet there seem to be an awful lot of relationships between women in there, funny how that worked out--but on the other hand, I also felt it was relevant information, especially these days, and people would want to know. As my friend @jtkeys put it:

Maybe we can say "it shouldn't be that important," but the fact is, at least for the time being, it is.

Eventually I decided that it was probably a better priority to use my three categories for other things and put "LGBT" in the tags instead. You can have quite a few tags, and they're much more freeform. That's their blessing, and also their curse.

(In case you're curious, GILLIAN'S EYE ended up listing in Alternate History, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. I don't remember the setup on Kobo exactly but I think it was much the same.)

Tags seem like they're the answer to genre issues, at first glance. @norareed, for example:

The problem I have here is that I write applications for a living and I'm married to a user-experience consultant who spends her days trying to make software more usable by mere mortals, and we both have stubbed our toes on tags vs taxonomies so often that we know the lure of tags is an illusion.

The big problem with tags is the exact same thing that makes them, at least at first, seem so appealing: They're freeform. You can tag your book anything you want. Now, suppose you tagged your book 'lgbt.' If someone is looking for books tagged 'lesbian' or 'gay' or 'queer,' that is not a match. You are not going to show up on their lists.

Sure, you can try to cover all of them and hope you don't run out of tags. People have done that and had some success with it. But you're never going to be able to cover all the possibilities. And that's just for something which is as simple a designation as "does this book have queer characters/themes in it." Imagine trying to tag for something as complex as the multitudinous nature of gender. Or, god help us, kink. Many have died on the rocky shoals of taxonomy of kink.

But the complex taxonomies also don't taxonomize well; having a list of nested categories of kink to choose from wouldn't be much of an improvement over freeform tagging. One way or another, you're going to get it wrong. You'll either be forced to pick a category that doesn't fit, or you'll choose some tags that don't match the way others are searching.

Most UIs opt, at least in part, for a taxonomic approach (that is, picking from nested levels of preset choices) because at least that way they can have some reasonable hope of sorting and listing and classifying the data in a way that might be somewhat useful, bad as it is. Tags are lovely, but some people will omit them, some people will use peculiar ones, some people will make stupid mistakes (like misspelling a tag--as far as I know Amazon doesn't spell-check tags, so if you tag your book with "distopia" it's your own damned problem and all the people looking for dystopias are gonna miss you).

A few years ago at my day job we finally decided to throw out five gigabytes of image files of student work. They were almost completely untagged, and the taxonomic categories were fairly useless, and it became apparent that no one had the time or patience to sift through all those images and classify or tag them. But it was much less effort, back when the students were creating and uploading the images, for them to pick a category than type in a tag, so at least the taxonomy had data for all the images; if the taxonomy hadn't been badly designed in the first place, the images might have been salvaged.

I think throwing out the taxonomic approach to genre isn't the answer. I would rather work on improving the taxonomy. Hell, I'd rather work on improving the works. We could reach a point one day where LGBT became an unnecessary designation because there was an embarrassment of riches where queer content was concerned and even the old white guys are filling their books with well-rendered, non-caricature transfolk and boys kissin' and so on. It's possible. (I wouldn't hold my breath just yet, though.)

Fantasies aside, I would love to see clearer definitions of terms like "fantasy" (it should be applicable to any books which have fantastic elements, but it has almost entirely been claimed by the Spiritual Heirs Of Tolkien Or Those Who Think They Are, so we have to invent terms like "urban fantasy," and there's still no good term for, say, the kind of "my girlfriend turned out to be a lesser demon and it's really fucked up my existence" stuff that A. Lee Martinez and others specialize in and which my basic tendencies lean toward).

I'd also like to remove these weird notions of worth and purity that some people bring to genre. I have had more than one agent list that they refuse to consider SF which contains mystery elements or SF which contains horror elements. They may legitimately feel they don't know how to market those genres, or they may (less legitimately) feel those genres disgust them. I don't know. My take is, "It's SF! Market it as SF! It just happens to be SF that has mysteries! It's appealing to both the SF readers and the mystery readers." But, alas, in practice there are plenty of mystery readers who won't touch anything that smells of SF, and SF readers who won't go anything near anything that looks like a genre cross. Maybe we need to work on improving the readers too!

I don't realistically hope we will ever get there. People have been arguing about what qualifies as science fiction since Hugo Gernsback. But I feel like we could at least give it a try.

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