My story has a teenage kid literally adventuring around fighting vampires (kind of similar to Blade). It's pretty bloody, brutal, and violent. You could call it 8 different things. Young adult? Adult? Adventure? Horror? Sci fi? It doesn't fit neatly into any one category.
Pick the most likely landing spot on the shelf and choose/design a cover to fit in with the books around it. So long as it checks a few boxes it'll fit in fine.
YA/Teen is an age category. Sounds like it fits well there, whether in addition it is horror, SF, UF or whatever.
You don't "call" it anything. You build it to fit within a genre, complete with all of the genre expectations that readers want.
This is terrible advice, imo. How boring to have a landscape of literature tailored to fit within convenient genre expectations, and what a lot of works that would be lost had their authors followed this.
I would say we have to write to a genre in a way that alters the genre. There's never a question of novellists fitting convenient genre expectations - they aren't called novels because of the parts that have been done before And the expectations aren't convenient, they're nineteen sorts of horrible. Straight away it's 70,000 words to ensure that anyone coming to the table has given up six months of their life. Minor crafting errors like character arcs repeating themselves, or forgetting a character's name, or splitting an infinitive, are met with zero tolerance. There must be a fight in the first two pages. Female main characters must be feisty. They don't even agree all this stuff as an industry and let us know. The only silver lining is that anything that makes it through is stranger for it. But to the OP, YA Vampires are a well-trodden subgenre. The charity shops (who have the twin benefits of a more considered perspective and more ability to send unsold stock to landfill) usually bunch them together under YA. If they're more precise it becomes YA (Horror) or Supernatural Romance.
Nice! I check a lot of those boxes - all except the 70,000 thing. I'm on edit #1. It'll take me to edit #7 to get there!! BUT I WILL GET THERE DAMN IT!!! lol. Turns out there IS a fight in the first two pages, my female character is badass, I religiously adhere to a character-name excel spreadsheet, and I use exactly zero 'ly ending adverbs in my entire book, so by definition I have no split infinitives. I'd also say there's tons of stuff that's unique (i.e. alters the genre). My book is the furthest thing possible from romance. Romantic vampire books are an abomination of the genre if you ask me. Anyways!! Awesome, hugs! Trev-
My feeling is that anytime you say 'have to' or 'must' etc. in relation to writing, you're likely making a mistake. In this case, I think there is sufficient empirical evidence to show that many writers can and do follow genre tropes without altering the genre. It's a matter of the writer's personal goals with respect to their writing, which is up to them to decide.
It's up to literature - writers' personal goals can't be a critical consideration if there are novels whose authors are forgotten - which before long is all of them But this is also entailed a priori by the term 'novel': a novel isn't novel in respect of its following genre tropes and being old, but in its being new and differing from genre tropes The difference either alters the genre or not - and I say it's the alteration of genre that distinguishes a novel from a mere book, or a string of random characters It's like the old Mallet's Mallet word association game - but I don't know if that was ever shown in the US so I'll leave that there If a writer doesn't alter the genre, and only follows its tropes - then an infinite number of equivalent books could be generated without them So they haven't written as a novellist, but as an 'infinite monkey' with any value produced accidentally. Fortunately, as well as them being forgotten with speed proportionate to their dullness, literature has evolved ancient symbiotic relationships, (e.g. with Rattus rattus, and Homo frigidus) to expel them from its natural habitats If a critic can't say what writers must do, what's the point of them?
I write knowing I can't fit expectations of a genre. That would be others' expectations. My writing is really my own, and if my writing makes another genre, so be it. I can't advertise a new genre with what I write, though. Since I use things of fantasy, I figure it should go under fantasy. Some writing turned out to be more horror, though, or something else, even though things of fantasy are still used in them.
If you're not self-publishing, it's your publisher's call. They can put it wherever it best fits the market that they feel that the story appeals to. I'd guess that "young adult" would be where they'd put it.
