This thinking seems to be particularly prevalent in the American market. In theory it helps marketers sell books, by making their contents immediately known.
“A Novel” is not a subtitle but the reading line on a book cover, which explains its contents to a potential reader and serves as a useful signpost when you’re rooting through an unsorted stack of books. When a book lives in the fiction aisle or is neatly tagged as such online, does it really need to announce itself as a novel? The answer to that is easy: We don’t always encounter books in the well-organized confines of a library, bookstore, or e-commerce algorithm. I’m not the only one to pursue the question. When I started emailing people in the book publishing world to see if they could tell me why this tradition exists, I received multiple responses along the lines of, “I’m not sure I have much to say.”
As a book marketing convention, “A Novel” is so common that it hardly seems worth remarking on. “Duh,” you may think, though it’s possible the phrase won’t cause more than a faint blip on your radar, too small to register as a thought. “ The Mars Room: A Novel,” “ Little Fires Everywhere: A Novel,” “ Purity: A Novel.” As you circulate around your neighborhood bookstore or trawl the fiction section of Amazon, your eyes may sweep across the words “A Novel” on many a cover.
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