Literary Agent Hunting Makes You Suddenly Hyper-Aware of Genre
I wrote an upmarket, literary, speculative, magical-realistic, comedic-fantasy, hopepunk novel without thinking about genre at all.
When I set out to write a novel, the last concern I had was selecting a genre. I simply wanted to tell a story I’d thought up. Having been an English major in college, an MFA student after that, and a general reader of what I deemed “quality” fiction for so long, the only descriptor I might have used (if asked or required to list) was that the tale was literary in nature.
Did that inform my work as I was writing? Well, sure. I aimed high when it came to the craft side of things, trying to compose prose of a certain quality, and including various conventions and best practices when it came to phrasings, tone, word choice, structure, etc.
So, yeah, it was a literary novel, I told myself.
Then I began building out a list of agents to query. Hmm … so many specialties exist — many I’d never heard of. You may well be an avid reader and never cross paths with some of their terms and categorizations.
Upmarket was the first I encountered (prior to looking at AgentQuery.com, btw, which doesn’t list upmarket as an agent specialty). It seemed to me to mean “literary, yet with a strong plot,” more or less — a way of…
