It’s the one thing that goes at the top of your query letter, it’s the first thing you say to describe your book to your friends, and it’s one of the main categories that distinguishes one writing workshop from another: genre.

Genre is also something that causes querying authors to gnash their teeth in frustration. It can make potential readers turn up their noses, and it’s often used more as a nebulous marketing term than an actual story descriptor.

How can something that’s meant to be straightforward be so complicated? If your book is Star Wars-esque, is it sci-fi or fantasy? And what exactly is book club fiction, anyway?

Identifying your book as part of a genre is meant to help you find readers and agents who will love your book. It shouldn’t be confusing.

So put aside any questions about what on earth “upmarket” is supposed to mean, and instead look for your intended audience.

The Shelf Rule

When your book is being sold in stores and held in libraries, where will it be shelved?

This is a pretty common method of finding your genre, so if you’re used to thinking about your book in terms of shelves and you’re still getting stuck, take things a bit further and actually walk into your local bookstore.

Consider the genres you think your book falls into. Maybe your story has elements of mystery, fantasy, and literary fiction. If you can’t choose which shelf it would sit on, look through those shelves and check out the actual books.

As you browse, read the marketing material on the covers, look at new releases, and search for established authors whose backlist takes up a lot of space. There are so many books that might qualify as one genre or another, but they still sit on one shelf. Studying how other writers and publishers make those choices will help you understand how to position your own book.

Look to Your Comp Titles

As you’re checking out your local bookstore, don’t forget to take note of those genre-bending books to use as your comp titles.

Comp titles, short for comparison titles, are usually listed in query letters to give prospective agents an idea of what recent books are similar to your manuscript. If you’ve ever seen “for fans of X” splashed on a book cover, that’s another example of a comp title.

If you already have your comp titles, have you looked at where they get shelved at the bookstore? You may want to flip to the acknowledgments at the back to look for the agent who represents that author. Do a quick Google search and find out what genres that agent says they represent.

To use the earlier example of Star Wars, look for books that use elements of both fantasy and science fiction. Bookstores often group both science fiction and fantasy together in one section, while some agents—and many readers—prefer just one or the other, so the bookshelf method may not be specific enough here.

That’s where you can look up those specific agents and see how they describe their lists. When agents write their wish lists and areas of genre expertise, they’re usually very good at being extremely clear and descriptive about what they want and what kinds of books fall into their wheelhouse.

Even if you’re constantly working to read as much as possible and stay up on the world of publishing, you’re simply not going to be able to manage the depth of expertise that an agent has in this area. So if an agent’s taste fits your book to a tee but you thought your story was a little too weird to be realistic fiction, maybe reconsider your genre descriptors.

Categories Are a Tool

Sometimes when authors get hung up on genre labels, it’s not a matter of confusion or even genre-bending in the story; it’s a matter of ego. Some writers, for example, really want “literary” as a descriptor. Unfortunately there are still many readers and writers who haven’t considered their biases around romance as a genre. And still more writers get fussy over pinning themselves down. After all, you want your book to appeal to a lot of people, so why would you put yourself in a situation where your potential fans won’t find your book because they won’t approach the right shelf?

If you’re getting defensive about genre, you’re thinking about it all wrong.

Of course genre boundaries are malleable, and many books could easily go on more than one shelf. But readers are inundated with infinite books, and there simply has to be some way to sort them into categories. Choosing a genre for your book isn’t about sticking it in a closed box; it’s about helping you find your readers.

If you’re still bitter about genre categories, consider your own book-shopping habits. Walking up to one section of the bookstore is only the first part of your browsing journey. After you find the memoir section, you might filter down to looking for memoirs by people who quit their high-flying city jobs and moved to a farm. Readers who aren’t normally big science fiction buffs might look past space operas and find near-future stories about a world much like our own but with slightly more advanced tech.

The reason your genre goes at the top of that query letter and at the beginning of every conversation about your book isn’t because it’s the only thing that matters. It’s because it’s only the beginning of a conversation about all the many wonderful things in your story.