Here I came upon an argument about whether a particular grouping is a genre, or a marketing term. Which made me wonder - what is genre? How strict is this taxonomy, and what purpose does it serve? I mean, is it for marketing (in which case the aforementioned argument has its answer in the market), or is there more to it?
To use a different example, The Master and Margarita has all the marks of an urban fantasy novel - a supernatural being (Satan) and his cohorts show up in then-modern-day Moscow, and make life interesting. Yet you wouldn't find this book on the "Fantasy" shelves. Is that a marketing decision, or does this work, for some reason, not belong to the fantasy genre after all? What is more salient - the shelf on which a book "should" belong by virtue of story elements, or the shelf on which it would sell best?
Does the genre designation serve any purpose other than finding books in a book shop? To what extent should we, as writers, care about genre, in regards to what we're writing?
Answer
Genre is a means of classification. To understand why a book is classified a certain way you need to understand the classifier and why they'd want to classify books. What is that person's intention?
The two primary intentions for classifying are:
To categorize a book to make it easier to find. Sellers do this so readers in their store can easily find a thing they are likely to buy. The Seller makes money. Libraries do this to make sure their information can be predictably found by both readers and researchers.
To categorize the book in order to understand or say something about it, either in the hope of spreading that understanding or forming a new understanding. The primary point here is to group types of knowledge together and label them. This may be a researcher who wants to find books on insects or a writer who wants to know about mysteries. Or it may be more politically minded: an activist trying to gather viewpoints they want others to read; a organization (church, government, business) trying to get their target audience indoctrinated by reading something that brings them closer to the organizations world view.
Professional writers are primarily concerned about the first because they need to eat and to eat they need to sell books. And I say primarily because there are writers in both groups. When you sit down to write you want to know who will read your book so that you don't write something they won't read. For the writer genre is more about readership identification. However, there are clearly writers who advocate or study; so it is not the only concern for a writer.
Sales-level-genre classifications are used to make short-hand promises to consumers about what they might experience when they consume the work. This means that if you say something is sci-fi, and there's a class of people who thinks that means "has spaceships", but they will buy anything with space-ships; then it would be correct to call the work sci-fi (even if you count up all of the fantasy/sci fi elements and there are more fantasy elements).
Writers may be more interested in using the lessons of genre that come from the second point at the point of designing a story. If a particular genre definition connotes elements common to a story, pacing, etc; it may be useful way of identifying tools the writer can used to create a better book.
Now sure, there's a whole layer of bashing that goes on about whether you are "genre fiction" or not. But, it's all relatively moot to the writer unless it directly impacts a work they are trying to sell. You use genre as a tool. Knowing what your readership is expecting can help you surprise readers or keep you from disappointing them. Having a knowledge of some of that classification for the purpose of mechanic may inspire you write in a specific way, or allow you to "hack" your way into a readership. As writers we should take what's useful and apply it to the problems we are facing.
The actual purposes of the classifier be damned. Write a compelling work. Use genre if it helps you do so. Don't worry too long in that field. This is a realm for business people, critics and politicians.
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