Children’s book genres: What’s a subgenre?

What’s a subgenre?

A subgenre (or sub-genre if you prefer) is just a more specific category within a wider genre, like ‘steampunk’ within science fiction or ‘cosy’ within mystery. It helps to narrow down types of stories even further so that readers know exactly what they’re getting and can make better choices.

Most genres are pretty huge. Fantasy, for example, can include stories about witches, dragons, zombies, fairytales, deep dark woods, flying kittens, magic sweets, bloody battles, unicorns, tin men, talking white rabbits and so much more. Not all fantasy stories will incorporate all of those elements (but can you imagine if it did! 😍) and not all fantasy fans will enjoy reading them all.

Crime stories vary, too. The excellent copyeditor Louise Harnby goes into detail about the different expectations and conventions associated with cosy crime, classic detective, hardboiled crime, spy thriller and police procedural.

Similarly, not all horror fans enjoy all horror subgenres. Somebody who loves supernatural horror might find more realistic stories like slashers or home invasions too scary. I’m a huge horror fan but I can’t stomach a lot of splatterpunk or body horror, for example. This is particularly relevant when it comes to kidlit because middle grade horror is almost always supernatural in some way while YA can feature lots of different subgenres so it’s good to understand the differences.

Sub-subgenre?

Often you can drill down even further within a subgenre. Under supernatural horror, for example, you’ll find ghost stories, vampires, haunted houses and possessions (among others). Under realistic horror, you could list found footage, slasher, psychological or home invasion.

Some people call those smaller categories subgenres in their own right while some think of them as categories or tropes within the supernatural horror genre – but the semantics don’t really matter. As long as you understand what sort of readers will enjoy your novel and what they’re expecting from the genre label you’ve chosen for your book, you’ll have a good chance of getting your book into the right audience’s hands.

Being able to zoom in and out like this, identifying your wider subgenre as well as the more niche tropes it features, will help you find suitable agents and comp titles, too. If you know your book is YA home invasion horror (hmm, does that exist?) but when you search online you can’t find any other books listed under that category in the YA space right now, you can zoom out a little and look at the wider subgenre of realistic horror.

That might bring up stories about serial killers and babysitter stalkers which will probably be similar to your manuscript in tone. If you’re looking for an agent who might be interested in representing your climate fiction (cli-fi) book but nobody’s specifically asking for that sort of fiction at the moment, you can zoom out and look for agents seeking apocalyptic stories or science fiction as these might cover your cli-fi manuscript depending on the plot.