Looking for likely publishers for my pile of finished mss I came across one that looked promising, asking for ‘adult literary fiction’. As per the submissions guidelines, that precluded only children’s, YA, and poetry. That’s okay, I thought. I have adult work to submit, I write pretty decent sentences, grammatically correct with the odd lyrical flourish. I had always assumed that literary denoted a quality not a genre. Sadly, I was very wrong. ‘Literary fiction’ means something that could never be accused of being ‘genre fiction’.

Since authors are obliged to fit their work into a genre when pitching it to publishers and agents, or just to sell it on Amazon, many hopeful authors were asking questions on this author’s submissions page about which ‘genres’ would be accepted. Reading through the answers, it turns out that books with protagonists under age 25, romance, or paranormal elements, if the book could…