If you're reading this, it's because you thought that you wanted to hear my thoughts on various things related to the book industry, so I'm not going to apologize like I would if I were writing a long social media thread. You did, in fact, sign up for this. You may quickly decide that you made a horrible mistake in doing so, which is fine. You're not going to hurt my feelings if you don’t subscribe or choose to unsubscribe. (That's a lie. You will hurt my feelings. But only a little bit, I swear.) The truth is, I'll likely end up treating this like a blog.

If you're still reading this, you may also have already been exposed to one or more of my little fist-shakings at BISAC codes.

If you’re not in the book business, you may be unfamiliar with BISAC codes. BISAC is an acronym for Book Industry Standards and Communications. They’re numerical codes assigned by publishers (and authors, in the case of self-published titles) to a book’s metadata to help other organizations (mostly retailers) determine how a title should be classified. Unfortunately, though the codes may be standardized, their application isn’t, and that’s where we run into problems.

BISAC codes are, of course, assigned to books by humans, and there isn’t really any guidance as to how any of the codes should be applied. There are no standards for the standards. Assignment of BISAC codes seems to be entirely vibes-based. Two characters kiss? Call it “Romance,” HEA be damned. Someone gets murdered? Clearly it’s a “Mystery,” even if the case never gets solved. Dystopia, but by a “literary” author or publisher? It’s obviously lit-fic, in spite of its speculative elements. It makes the whole thing very subjective, when an objective system may best serve users. I know a truly objective system isn’t realistic, but there also has to be a better system than “vibes” or using BISAC codes as a marketing tool.

Booksellers are lucky in that they can follow or ignore BISAC codes as they wish. Unfortunately, the codes are a piece of a title’s metadata, which gets fed as-is to most online/digital sales platforms and are rarely, if ever reviewed, much less modified, by said retailers. This is why readers often find books classified as genres they clearly are not (see preceding paragraph). This leads to too many readers ending up with books that don’t live up to the expectations set by the BISAC codes.

So what’s the solution? I don’t know that there is one at the macro level. IT would require revamping the entire system or, at the very least, creating strict definitions for each BISAC category and su-category, which would likely end up getting ignored and not changing anything from where the system is now. Therefore, it falls to authors and publishers to do their research and determine where the market is more likely to think their book belongs, rather than going on vibes or hoping that labelling a book as “Romance” or “Mystery” or “Fantasy” or whatever will capture readers who may not otherwise be interested in the book in question. It’s important to be honest in choosing BISAC codes because doing otherwise doesn’t cause the readers to lose faith in a system most of them don’t even know exists, it causes them to lose faith in the author or, more rarely, the publisher. It behooves authors to try to work with their publishers (if they have them) to determine which codes are the best fit, rather than leaving it entirely in their publisher’s hands.

If you’re a reader, don’t blindly trust the category a book has been placed into on a website or in a bookstore. Ask your friends. Look for reviews. Read (or listen to) a few pages. Read the cover copy. Check out who the blurbs are from. If you have a book labelled as “Young Adult,” but all the blurbs are from adult fiction authors, it’s probably not actually YA, even if it has a teen protagonist. There’s a love story, but the author is on record as believing a Romance doesn’t have to have a happy ending? It’s probably not actually a Romance. If a book ends up being not what its category claims it is, don’t blame the bookstore or website; they trusted the information they were given.

We’re stuck with BISAC codes for the foreseeable future, so we have to learn to use the flawed tools we’re given in the ways that work best for us, no matter what role we full in the bookish ecosystem.

If you’re interested in learning more about BISAC codes and the organization (Book Industry Study Group) behind them, you can find their website here.