A couple days ago, my editor Jonathan told me that my novel, Helium, is clearly “literary fiction.” I have to admit, I liked the sound of that. Me, on the same bookshelf with Zadie Smith, Percival Everett, and Hernan Diaz! (Yeah, right.) As a first-time novelist and a fairly omnivorous reader, it seemed like a rarefied place to be, a place where a writer can dream of accolades, adoring readers, and maybe even a royalty check or two.

Literary fiction. Really?

It brought to mind a post I came across recently by publishing insider @devonhalliday. In it, Halliday proposed a new understanding of the term, “literary fiction.” We should think of it, she wrote, as lying on one end of a spectrum that looks like this:

commercial → upmarket → literary

The spectrum is distinct from genre (e.g. thriller or historical fiction), she explained, and it requires a new way of thinking. If you want to know where a book lies on the spectrum, you need to look at the author’s language choices. It breaks down like this:

Literary fiction draws “attention to the language choices the writer is making.”

Commercial fiction draws “as little attention as possible to the language choices the writer is making.”

Upmarket aims for something in between.

In other words, determining whether a book qualifies as “literary” has nothing to do with quality—whether it’s “good” or “bad.” It’s all about the reader experience that the author is trying to achieve. If the author wants readers to “marvel at the ways I string words together,” then the book probably sits on the “literary” end of the spectrum. If the author wants the reader to “forget entirely that a book is a constructed thing made up of words,” then it probably sits closer to “upmarket” or “commercial.”

Which brings me back to Jonathan’s assertion that Helium qualifies as “literary fiction.” Maybe he’s right. I like to think he is. Then again, I’ve never set out to make readers marvel at my word-stringing abilities.

Adding to my confusion are my publisher’s plans for the printed version of my book. The paper will be cream-colored. The cover will have a matte finish. Matte. Is that a sign? Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that Halliday also included in her essay the following about the difference between “gritty” and “glossy” book covers.

Gritty tends to communicate “literary,” glossy tends to communicate “upmarket.”

I guess it’s decided, then.

No glossy upmarket cover for Helium.

“Literary,” here we come.