What's it all about?

'So what's your book about?' – that's a question guaranteed to turn any writer's blood to ice water.

You spend years honing plot and character, perfecting the pace and polishing the dialogue ... and then, at the end of all that, you have to boil the whole thing down to a few sentences short and appealing enough to make potential buyers want to take your literary baby home.

'The elevator pitch' is a cornerstone of the publishing business: If you can't condense your book's plot to a few pithy sentences shorter than the average elevator ride, agents and publishers will already be drumming their fingers and looking for something more sellable.

Likewise, if your masterwork can't slot easily into an easily identifiable genre, it's going to struggle to get placed on any bookstore shelf.

So what, exactly, is my debut novel, 'How Soon Is Now?'

The elevator pitch: After being recruited by a secretive group of time travellers, a man discovers he can travel in time to inhabit his body at any previous point in his life. He agrees to use his new-found talent to embark on a mission for his new friends, but finds himself drawn ever closer to the terrible mistake which scarred his life...

Easy enough, though the bare bones approach strips the book down to plot and nothing else. What happens in a book and what a book is about can be two very different things – and 'How Soon Is Now?', as well as being a page-turner full of mysteries and twists, is about lots of different things. It's about memory, nostalgia, grief, loss, redemption and love, just for starters.

Now, to the genre. Well, there's time travel in it. Does that make it science fiction? I'm not sure. For one thing, there's no science or tech to it – no time machines or secret science labs. Time travel is a natural biological function for these characters.

Is it fantasy? 'Fantasy', to me hints at magic, dragons, Tolkienesque lore and warring factions, none of which applies to 'How Soon Is Now?', although fantastical things definitely occur. In 'How Soon Is Now?', fantastical things happen to normal people in the real world. In that way, it's far closer to magical realism than sci-fi or fantasy. There are several love stories in it, so is it a romance? 'Romantasy' –  a mix of fantasy and romance – is the big coming trend in the book world. Maybe it's that? And there's an unexplained murder in there, too – is it a crime novel? There's a chase, at one stage. Does that make it a thriller?

If we put all the various elements together, is it a sci-fi-fantasy-romantasy-time-travel-crime-mystery-magical-realist-thriller? Possibly not, much as it might nice to reach readers of all of those genres.

'How Soon Is Now?' does a lot of things all at the same time, but the main thing it does is tell a story about people, using its time travel 'hook' to dig into the thematic meat of the story while having lots of fun with the possibilities for paradoxes, replays of particular events and a few dips back into life in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the end, the business of selling books demands that books fit into categories, so Amazon sells 'How Soon Is Now?' as 'Books, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy, Contemporary', 'Books, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Time Travel' and 'Books, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Fantasy, Urban'.

Those categories will do just as well as any other, if they give readers a broad idea of what goes on within the book's covers. Labels should be guides, not straitjackets. Categorisation is a place to start, not a place to stay. Books, like readers, aren't obliged to stick to a single genre – and the best books tell the stories they have to tell, not the stories they're expected to tell.