Genre- How do You Decide?



I’ve got a book almost ready to publish. I’m almost ready to send it to my proof reader and get a cover.

I started to think about marketing. What genre do I put the book in?

I write romantic suspense. Some are western and other’s PI and detective. This one is a medical about cloning. It’s setting is a hospital. The cloning is designer children, and cloning for body part’s. There’s suspense, but I’m wondering if this fits into a sci-fi category. I don’t write sci-fi but this seems a little in that direction.

So when I market it – what do I say? I checked out Wikipedia and here’s some of the genres they define.

          Classic – fiction that has become part of an accepted literary canon, widely taught in schools

• Crime/detective – fiction about a crime, how the criminal gets caught, and the repercussions of the crime
• Fantasy – fiction with strange or otherworldly settings or characters; fiction which invites suspension of reality
• Historical fiction – story with fictional characters and events in a historical setting
• Horror – fiction in which events evoke a feeling of dread and sometimes fear in both the characters and the reader
• Mystery – this is fiction dealing with the solution of a crime or the unraveling of secrets
• Science fiction – story based on impact of actual, imagined, or potential science, usually set in the future or on other planets
• Short story – fiction of such brevity that it supports no subplots
• Suspense/thriller – fiction about harm about to befall a person or group and the attempts made to evade the harm
• Western  – set in the American Old West frontier and typically set in the late eighteenth to late nineteenth century

If you write a straight romance, or western it’s easy, but what if you cross genres, how do you decide where your book works?