What are we writing?
When you are writing a book and want to publish it, in print, digital or both, you have to be aware of your product. First, you have to decide whether your text falls into the literary genre of poetry or prose. In the latter case, the choice can fall on chronicles (journalistic or historical), memoirs (personal or judicial), anecdotes, accounts (e.g. of travel), myths and legends, in the form we prefer.
Novel, novella or short story?
When a novel is written, even in graphic form, in the modern conception it means a text (with or without images) that tells a progressively evolving story, in which the characters, immersed in a historical or fictional context, interweave relationships and relations in a complex and articulate manner.
The novella, on the other hand, contains a more concise description of the entire story and focuses more on the essential aspects of the narrative. For this reason, the novella more frequently has blank spaces to break up the text in place of chapters, the use of which, in any case, is not forbidden (and we at La Novella Orchidea know this!).
The short story, which is usually (but not necessarily) shorter in length and characterisation of events and characters than the novel, may however coincide with both genres: the short story is usually associated with the novella, the long story with the novel. There are those who differentiate them by number of lines, but one often runs the risk of running into different definitions depending on the publishing houses. The advice, especially if one chooses the path of self-publication, is to personally evaluate one’s work not only on the basis of length, but on the way in which the descriptive and narrative part is developed.
Cataloguing systems
Once we know which literary genre best represents our writing, we have to decide which categories to assign to it: are we writing a biography, a detective story, a fantasy or a thriller? Are there historical or educational elements? To what extent can it be defined as erotic?
The publishing tradition has never really been interested in dividing published works into literary genres. It was only in the 1990s, with the expansion of online publishing and sales platforms, that investments began to be made to standardise the categories of digital and paper books. The Anglo-Saxon world was the first to move in this direction, with the introduction of the BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communication) system as the American national classification standard and the BIC Standard Subject Categories system, devised by the British BIC (Book Industry Communication) group.
BISAC system consists of nine alphanumeric characters, to which correspond a macrocategory (first four characters) and its various subcategories (last five characters).
BIC standard, on the other hand, is structured in 19 general classes (subdivided into subclasses) identified with a letter of the alphabet, to which five qualifiers can be added to further specify the content (geographical, linguistic, historical, school level and reading age). In Italy, the BIC system is translated as CCE (Classificazione Commerciale Editoriale) and was widely used until a few years ago. In 2013, to overcome the difficulties of translation and data exchange between various systems at national and local level, the Thema system was created, a multilingual classification standard organised by subject categories.
Although the BISAC system is currently the ‘preferred’ by online stores, where possible it is advisable to indicate at least one Thema category, which should ensure a more effective global distribution.
