“Genres and Quality, Is There a Correlation?” by Jack Powers

Genres & Quality: Is There A Correlation?

Jack Powers

magine going to your local bookstore, the scent of pages fresh off the press in the air, where do you look to find a good read? The easiest way to organize books is by genre, which is primarily how books are organized in bookstores. Book genres are the go-to way for readers to determine if a book is right for them. If a reader is interested in mystery, they’ll gravitate towards books labeled as such, and if they dislike sci-fi, they’ll avoid reading books that fall under the genre. So, largely, the quality of a genre is dependent on your perspective. But, can a good book come from any genre? Or is the quality of the book limited by its subject matter? Concerning this topic, Madison Johnson explained: “There are a lot of books that I think are going to be real duds because they are not the kind of thing that I like… but anything can be great… [and] I think if something has a lot of heart in it, it can turn out to be a really beautiful book, regardless of what kind of genre it is.” Johnson, the head of submissions at Greenleaf Publishing, an Austin-

An opened book shown amongst other books in a library.

based company, strongly believes that the genre of a book is no more than a label, and doesn’t define the quality of the book itself. William England, CEO of Sentia Publishing chimed in on this topic as well: “I think people need to read outside of what makes them comfortable… you need to read a few things that you didn’t think you’d like or you know and think outside of your comfort zone,” he concurred. Genres are an excellent way to classify the idea or tone of a book, but they don’t classify the quality of the story or the skill of the writer. What does classify quality, then? Perhaps, the explosive popularity of a book determines that said book is high above the rest. More specifically, perhaps bestsellers are the books that are of the best quality you can find. After all, why else would they sell so well? However, Johnson stepped in to debunk this as well, “It really just depends. One thing to consider is that a book being a ‘bestseller’ doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a book that sells really well, because… hitting the bestseller chart means selling a certain amount

within a short amount of time… and just because they don’t sell well doesn’t mean they’re not amazing books to the people who want to read them.”And, even books that seem to underperform can be great, but just haven’t been discovered by many more than a “niche audience,” as she puts it. So, maybe there’s no real metric to determine the quality of a book. I was satisfied with that conclusion, but it wasn’t the end of my research. While you can’t decide if a book is good before you read it, how do you know it’s a good book while you’re reading it? That is to say, what

“But anything can be great… [and] I think if something has a lot of heart in it, it can turn out to be a really beautiful book, regardless of what kind of genre it is.”

makes a good book? To answer this question, I spoke to Owen Egerton, an award-winning author in Austin, Texas. To get into the headspace of writing a good book, I asked him why he decided to begin writing. “I don’t know if I could have avoided it,” he explained.

Egerton is passionate about his career and has always been an avid writer, so it was less of a choice for him and more of a necessity.

“Not necessarily the profession on the level we get paid… but for me, writing has been a bit of a compulsion. Since my early teen years… the way I work to understand and wrestle with the world is by writing stories.” Egerton is passionate about his career and has always been an avid writer, so it was less of a choice for him and more of a necessity. Going back to the topic of bestselling books, I asked Egerton why he thought his bestselling books did better commercially than his other books. “I wouldn’t really actually be able to say why one works and why another doesn’t,” he confessed. “I do find for me that perhaps the ones that hit the most with people are the ones that were the hardest for me to write. I don’t mean

just on a craft level, but I think on an emotional level.” To write a quality book it seems, the words on the page must come from a place of passion and emotion to be able to strike a chord with readers. All in all, tastes in reading are subjective. To end this story, I think Egerton put it best. “It’s amazing how vast [of a] reading selection [there] can be. Because it can be the story of some small family in the deep south in the early 1900s, or it can be an abandoned space cruiser, the depths of space being explored by space cookers, you know, it can be anything. There’s so much wildness out there, in all these different books. And so I think this is not one flavor for anybody,

which is why we are able to have so many… books.”

“I do find for me that perhaps the ones that hit the most with people are the ones that were the hardest for me to write. I don’t mean just on a craft level, but I think on an emotional level.”

An opened book on the ground (center) next to a water bottle and a copy of The Hunger Games (top right).

Photo by Jack Powers.