It feels like the tags on the beta had kicked off extremely inconsistent in the range of scopes. In my experience from other sites, when I ask a question it should be reasonably clear whether I am expected to tag novels or fantasy or english-literature or 20th-century or j-r-r-tolkien (or john-ronald-reuel-tolkien) or lord-of-the-rings or return-of-the-king or gollum.
It should be clearly decided where to draw the line, and justified exceptions from that should remain exactly that.
It seems that people want to go at least as specific as authors or books / series / universes, so I would disallow (read: discourage in the tag wiki and start removing from questions) tags any more general than that (form, country, age), with the only exception of questions which really address, e.g., short-stories or russian-literature as a whole (for example, recommendation requests). Of course, there can be two tags of different scope to facilitate filtering, as is usual elsewhere (e.g., c++ move-semantics), but j-d-salinger short-stories makes no sense at all to me, neither does the sole existence of tags like prequels.
