The BISAC Subject Codes List* (or BISAC Subject Headings) is the US standard topical categorization used by companies throughout the supply chain. The Subject Heading applied to a book can determine where the work is shelved in a brick and mortar store or the genre(s) under which it can be searched for in an internal database.
Here is the official list of BISAC Codes.
All of us interact with these codes in NetGalley or Edelweiss and in our ordering platforms. Here is an example for the upcoming book Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin via Edelweiss:
FRONTLIST | On Sale Date: August 5, 20259781250348012, 1250348013Trade Paperback$18.99 USD, $25.99 CAD
I bolded the BISAC Codes for you. But now you can see how they are similar to subject headings.
I picked this book for many reasons, but most notably because of the middle BISAC Code. Let me back up a little more though.
BISAC Codes are applied by the publishers for the reasons listed above in the definition but to reiterate, it is for shelving and searching. In this case Black Flame (I have already read it for review in Booklist) is 100% Horror. And it is also a cursed film book and the story of a deeply closeted Lesbian. Now the Transgender tag is mostly added because Felker-Martin herself is transgender. FYI (There is a storyline that includes a transgender character.)
Now, in this case, the code is applied to a pro-transgender book, but what about when it is applied to a title like Irreversible Damage. Well much like I talk about sour library's subject headings having the potential to cause harm (please click here for a much larger post on who we NEED to reckon with that and FIX it), Publishers Weekly ran a story about how BISAC Codes can hurt more than they help booksellers here. From that article:
For instance, when customers search for “feminist, queer, or trans” titles on the Charis website—a part of the American Booksellers Association’s IndieCommerce platform, which is fueled by Ingram—homophobic or transphobic titles often pop up. “People find books Charis would never carry,” Look said, “and we have to manually take them off our website.”
Look recalled an instance when Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters topped the results on searches for books on transgender studies. “Other transphobic books would also pop up,” she said. “They need to add to the category of transgender studies, ‘criticism of transgender,’ so it doesn’t all come up together.”
This statement is very similar to what I say in the Actively Anti-Racist Service to Leisure Readers program that Robin and I offer. And again, it also mimics what I say about this same title in that presentation.
Another problem I have with BISAC Codes is that it labels the books as for someone and not for others. In that article there is a great example from a bookseller:
“BISAC misses connections between books that we booksellers make,” Smith said. “For us, it’s all about connecting the reader with the right book. We shelve books to guide customers between categories, not separate books.” If there is a question about best store placement, she said, she is more likely to ask the publishers’ rep for recommendations.
Another concern, Smith said, is that drilling down into hyper-specific categories can pigeonhole some books and authors, in, for example, such a category as fiction/Indigenous/Indigenous futurism. “Great Indigenous writers are great writers who happen to be Indigenous,” she said. “You risk ghettoizing certain subcategories if you follow BISAC too closely.” While books by authors like Tommy Orange and Louise Erdrich are not categorized as Indigenous literature, books by lesser-known authors—such as the nonfiction and poetry works of Linda LeGarde Grover, for instance—sometimes are.
This is also something I talk at length about in my program with Robin-- how we need to use the book's appeal NOT the author's identity to match books with readers.
In the article a bookseller also acknowledges that BIASC Codes help librarians as we are making purchasing decisions. And here is a mother problem I have. Again, let's use Black Flame as our example but this time for it's for the Horror BISAC Code.
Horror is listed first-- loudly and proudly. As it should be by the way, both because it is first and foremost a Horror story in the cursed film subgenre, and it is being published by Tor Nightfire, a Horror specific imprint. But until recently, Horror was a "bad word" in publishing and not proudly attached as a BISAC Code to many books. As someone whose job it is to write an annual preview article of the genre in the July issue of Library Journal each year, for many years, it was very difficult for me to find all the Horror titles that were clearly Horror but instead got a BISAC Code for supernatural thriller or Gothic or Ghost.
However, now we see the overuse of Horror for titles that may not be for Horror fans, because it is popular. Same thing for Romance. And we have genres that are on the outs that are getting left off. The Publihsers want to sell the most number of books. This we know
I am not proposing a solution here today, but rather, I have this post to remind you that the issues we have with Subject Headings and what booksellers are seeing with BISAC Codes are not that different. Read the article as it is tangentially to your work. I am glad these larger issues are being discussed outside of our library circles. They are important conversations that may not have an easy (or any) solution, but talking about them publicly helps us all work to do better.
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