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IN THIS CHAPTER

Taking readers into the fantastic and the historic

Telling stories about people

Conveying a message (subtly)

Making them laugh

Solving a mystery

Genres are the general nature of major children’s book categories. They’re like big buckets into which publishers throw a bunch of books that the authors wrote by using certain similar conventions. For example, mystery is a genre of fiction, as is action/adventure.

When you hear about conventions of a genre, think customs or rules widely accepted because authors have used them that way for a long time. Basically, conventions are expectations that a reader has for a genre because that’s what they’re used to reading; for example, if a book falls into the mystery genre, the convention says that it has a problem that an intrepid protagonist has to solve and a solution that the protagonist struggles to figure out, finally making that crucial discovery. Sometimes you want to stick to those conventions, and sometimes you want to veer away from them to make your story more interesting. Either way, it helps to know a bit about the genres out there.

In this chapter, we explore many of the various genres in which you can find children’s books. If a distinctive style, form, or content composes the very nature of certain genres, we talk about those, too. We also dip into the series pool, where single characters can take off into multi-book adventures.

If you aren’t writing plays, poetry, or nonfiction, you’re probably writing fiction. And you can cross, mash, or mix up fiction genres if you’re confident in each of the genres you’re subverting. Just make sure you research the genre (or genres) you’re writing in so that you subvert in the right way.