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Genre and the marketing of fiction

In the publishing industry the term "category fiction" is often used as a synonym for genre fiction, with the categories serving as the familiar shelf headings within the fiction section of a bookstore, such as Western or mystery.
Some authors known for literary fiction have written novels under pseudonyms, while others have employed genre elements in literary fiction.^[4][5][6]
Romance fiction had an estimated $1.375 billion share in the US book market in 2007. Religion/inspirational literature followed with $819 million, science fiction/fantasy with $700 million, mystery with $650 million and then classic literary fiction with $466 million.^[7]

History of genres

See also: History of fantasy and History of science fiction
Genre began as a classification system for ancient Greek literature. Poetry, prose, and drama had specific calculated styles that related to the theme of the story. Among the genres were the epic in poetry and tragedy and comedy for plays.^[8] In later periods other genres such as the chivalric romance, opera, and prose fiction developed.
Though the novel is often seen as a modern genre – Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel first came into being in the early 18th century^[9] – it has also been described as possessing "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", from the time of both Classical Greece and Rome.^[10]
The "romance" is a closely related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", whereas in the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society".^[11] However, many romances, including the historical romances of Scott,^[12] Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights^[13] and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick,^[14] are also frequently called novels, and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". Romance, as defined here, should not be confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo."^[15] Genre fiction developed from various subgenres of the novel (and its "romance" version) during the nineteenth century, along with the growth of the mass-marketing of fiction in the twentieth century: this includes the gothic novel, fantasy, science fiction, adventure novel, historical romance, and the detective novel.^[