Visionary Fiction Part Three: Action Plan
Around the turn of the millennium, several of us authors-without-a-genre had a vision that we framed into words on the then-Yahoo Visionary Literature Forum.
Marketing Categories
Visionary Fiction Part Two: What Goes into the Bucket?
Let’s suppose, as projected in Part 1 of this series, “The Bucket,” that Visionary Fiction has become as prominent a genre label as Science Fiction or Mystery. Now let’s consider the ingredients writers must put into a work to have it qualify for the Visionary Fiction bucket and what experiences or benefits readers can expect in a work pulled out of that bucket.
Visionary Fiction Part One: The Bucket
By Victor E. Smith
“We tried mightily to get the retailing powers to start a visionary fiction shelf. We came close with Walden, but the suits at B&N, alas, took the position of ‘no one is coming into the store asking for visionary fiction’,” said editor Bob Friedman of the situation as he saw it at Hampton Roads Publishing some years ago.
Visionary and Metaphysical Fiction: Wedding Bells?
Perhaps those nerdy BISAC categorizers knew more than they let on when they gave VF and MF a joint address in their code. To paraphrase a famous biblical injunction: “What BISAC has joined together let no writer put asunder.” Instead of arguing whether it is VF or MF, perhaps we can settle for V&M, with separate studies and/or bedrooms provided for the persnickety.
What is NOT Visionary Fiction?
It came to mind that a backdoor approach to the key question—What is Visionary Fiction?—might yield valuable insight into this genre’s elusive definition. So let’s take a look, for a lark, at what is not visionary fiction.
VF as a Genre: Part 4 – Populating BISAC’s VF Category
IN THE EARLIER SEGMENTS OF THIS SERIES we imparted good news (the up-and-coming BISAC system provides a high-level unique code for Visionary & Metaphysical Fiction) and bad news (authors and vendors don’t use the code often enough to make VF books easily accessible to readers). In this section I’ll follow up on the complexities of proper categorization and make some suggestions that will not handicap the individual VF author in the short run but build a robust VF collection in the near future.
VF as a Genre: Part 3 BISAC Buy-in
(The second of a four-part series that explores a hidden root of the problem in popularizing Visionary Fiction as a genre and proposes a nifty ready-made solution to it.) Click link to read Part 1: The Fiction Prejudice Click link to read Part 2: The BISAC Solution BEFORE GETTING TOO COZY in the permanent home (Main…
VF as a Genre: Part 2-The BISAC Solution
(The second of a three-part series that explores a hidden root of the problem in popularizing Visionary Fiction as a genre and proposes a nifty ready-made solution to it.) Click link to read Part 1: The Fiction Prejudice Marketing Categories Since libraries aim to retain books and bookstores to sell them, no wonder a category system…