What's in a tagline?

or, how to turn a big idea into a snappy phrase

Lately, over here at Galiot Press, we’ve been doing a lot of wordplay. And that doesn’t mean playing Wordle. It means thinking deeply about what words we want to use to convey what Galiot Press is about, what we will be publishing. We’ve been bantering and challenging and brainstorming and honing. Drinking coffee, eating chocolate. Mulling over while cooking or running. Because while our press will be doing things differently from others, and casting aside some conventions, we still need to play by some rules, and one of those is: we must have an elevator pitch. We must have a way to convey—succinctly, effectively—our brand.

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And here is the conundrum: To the extent that a publisher’s brand is known to its market, it’s often clearest when that publisher works in a specific genre. Crime. Romance. Fantasy. Science-fiction. Certain publishers come to mind to match those genres: Soho Crime. Harlequin. Tor.

But you’ll notice that, in this list of genres, one kind of book is left out: so-called “literary fiction”. While things are starting to change, most people—when they talk about book categories—will say that “genre fiction” is composed of those distinct categories of, say, thriller, crime, romance, sci-fi. Add historical, or humor, too. “Genre fiction” is apparently all of these. But what about literary fiction? Literary fiction isn’t a genre? Of course it is! It has its tropes and styles and subjects and readers just as any other genre does.

So, truly, to say someone publishes “genre fiction” is to say nothing at all, since every single book belongs to one genre or another.

Or does it?

Aren’t there novels that straddle genres, that blend them, that play with the categories with which we label narrative? Indeed there are. And this is precisely what we’re interested in at Galiot Press.

We aim to publish books that don’t adhere to specific genre categories. Books that are not thoroughly, exclusively crime, or literary, or historical. Books that do more than one thing.¹ We will bring you books that blur those categories. What matters most to us is that these books offer new perspectives—new to the reader, that is. That they provoke reflection and engagement. That they open eyes and minds and hearts. That they inspire creativity, activism, empathy, community-building, positive change. And that they do so with effective and crafted language. With thoughtfully-chosen words and structure and cadence.

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You see the difficulty. If a brand is to be one clearly defined identity, how do you identify a brand that’s about a challenge to categories? This is not a rhetorical question!

And so with our wordplay we’re working on how to get that into a slogan, a tag-line, a call to action. More than anything, what we want to craft—like the books we’ll be publishing—is an invitation to our readers to engage. We hope you’ll be among those readers!

1. Examples that come readily to mind for me, Henriette, are Tana French, who writes crime that pays great attention to language. Or Mick Herron, who writes thriller/espionage and who gives experiments with point of view a run for their money.

And the books that come to mind for me, Anjali, are Long Division, by Kiese Laymon, that plays with time and even book format—the text flips the other way in the middle of the book, and the back is a version of the cover—and This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which combines fantasy, science fiction, and romance in a semi-epistolary 200 pages that span all of humanity’s history.