Your genre isn't for you
No writer has to like being categorised, but genre labels aren't about authors...
Richard Osman irked me on The Rest Is Entertainment this morning.
He got sniffy about the term ‘Cosy Crime’, saying it’s a reductive label for the genre he works in, presumably as he feels that his books — which I’ve really enjoyed — are ‘more than that.’
I think he’s missing the point. Ignoring the fact that Cosy Crime, as a genre, existed for decades before he first put finger to keyboard, the classification isn’t for him. It’s for readers and booksellers.
By labelling it reductive, you’re in danger of reducing your fans, dismissing something they love and look for and, in many cases, make part of their identity. You're reducing the bookseller or the librarian who uses the term to say: ‘if you loved that, you’d like this’, which means, in many cases, the books of Richard Osman.
Send your books out into the world, and let the world decide what they are and how they connect with them. And if you’re seen as an exemplar of a genre millions of people love, then you’re in a pretty good place, aren’t you? There’s no need to suggest it’s beneath you.