: Re: Would this story be classified as Adventure or Religious Fiction? A pious, benevolent, chaste, vegetarian Catholic monk from America in the 21st Century makes a road-trip to the West Coast from

@Samaraweera193

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Remember, genre classification is largely marketing. It's a matter of your book reaching a certain, pre-identified audience. So the questions you want to ask are "Who will this book primarily appeal to?" and/or "Who is most likely to buy this book?" On the surface, this book seems best suited to a religious audience, and would probably be marketed that way. However, there are some additional considerations:

1) It's possible for a book with strong religious themes to appeal to a secular audience as part of a different genre, and be marketed that way. A good example is the Chronicles of Narnia, which is generally viewed as Children's fantasy despite also being Christian allegory. However, in this case, the book needs to both have strong appeal outside of the religious message, and to not be perceived as "preachy" by the secular audience.

2) The "religious" audience is actually marked not just by religion, but by a range of social, political and cultural values, views and markers of identity. So a book that has strong religious themes but doesn't match the rest of the standard market for that religion may have an uphill battle to find a publisher/audience. (I've experienced this myself. My own work typically has Christian themes, but isn't necessarily a cultural or philosophical fit for the conservative, white, evangelical audience that is the core of the Christian market in the United States. So I need to make sure it has at least some appeal to secular audiences in order to sell it.)

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