Very simple. Aircraft, fixed or rotor wing or lighter than air; one motor or more, jet motor or propeller motor, fixed or folding feet, land or water feet. Oh, and if it is a pilot rating, can you get paid or not, and can you fly in or over clouds legally? You can look at a plane, balloon, glider, helicopter, and identify where it fits very easily.

Alas, books are not so easy, especially when you are sorting how to list them on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, or other services. As you know, I recently uploaded an urban fantasy novel to Amazon. It is set in the US in modern times, has sorcerers, witches and warlocks, mages, Familiars, what might be a ghost, romance, baking, a guy on a motorcycle behaving loudly, and an all-too-typical tornadic thunderstorm. So, where to put it?

Fiction ->fantasy -> Oh dear. Urban Fantasy is no longer on the selectable list for authors on KDP.* Hmmmm. Dark fantasy is close, because these are stories with anger, greed, violence, and bad people behaving badly. The protagonist is not a Nice Person. He’s good, but not always nice. So “dark fantasy” it is. That leaves two categories.

I leave “fantasy” and go over to adventure fiction -> paranormal -> general. It’s not specifically ghosts, vampires, werewolves, so general it is. And it is adventures, actions, and so on.

OK, back to fiction -> fantasy ->? Contemporary? Perhaps. LGBTQ+? No. Series? Most certainly. Until I can do more looking into exactly what’s in “contemporary,” series is safer. Wiki suggests that “contemporary” is almost the same as urban fantasy, but I’m not sure Amazon’s sales programs would agree. **

So, now for the keywords, which have to do the heavy lifting. I go with the obvious ones, like Familiar, sorceress, magic, Urban Fantasy, and so on. Then, and this is where it gets interesting, I added “ghost, Wild Hunt, horseman.” Among others.

When the book went live, I had a mild surprise. It did NOT show up as Dark Fantasy. It appears as “ghost thrillers, Witch and Wizard Thrillers, and Paranormal Suspense.” Oh. Hmmm. Because it is NOT a thriller. It does not have thriller pacing, the opposite in fact. I will have to redo the keywords at some point. On the other hand, when you look at which books are in Ghost Thrillers, a number are not thrillers.

I think the algorithm needs some tweaking.

*It might be for traditionally published, or on one of Amazon’s imprints. I don’t know.

**I picked categories a day or so before I finished uploading the book. This was good, because Amazon changed one of the categories to a romance category that Does Not Fit. I undid the change.

ALSO:

In the spirit of giving thanks, a post from October about “Why DO people read?” It’s a good thing for most of us—and I am very grateful that—that people like me, who right now have to read mostly for information, are less common than those who read for fun/escapism/story. What’s a little depressing is that the poll counts as “avid readers” people who read at least two books per year. But then you have the super-readers, who devour books at a pace that leaves writers whimpering. The poll’s term “engage with books” is also odd. What comes first to mind is a military engagement [which describes my battle with some academic tomes], rather than sitting and reading. https://wordsrated.com/why-people-read-books-readers-consumer-behavior/

It’s a car. An old car. A well-loved, restored, old car. Image Credit: Author Photo, Gallup, NM, July 2023.