Is This Historical or Fantasy?

by J.U. Scribe

Both carry the idea of constraining something into a fixed space. We put things in boxes mainly with the purpose of organizing things to make it easier to retrieve certain items. As people we love to put things in figurative boxes whether we are consciously aware of it or not. [ ]

In books you have categories. You have: fiction and nonfiction. Seems pretty straightforward so far. From fiction we have numerous categories to categorize one’s work whether it be: romance, science-fiction, fantasy, historical, teen-fiction, adventure, mystery, horror, Children’s, etc. This doesn’t even include poetry or other literary works that are more prose or have a different structure. However you might be wondering why are categories so important anyways? And how does this tie in with marketing or self-publishing?