just because you have written a book does not make you an author

[V.W. Singer]

Originally Posted by hildea

[off topic] I really, really must recommend Team Human by Sarah Rees Brennan and Justine Larbalestier to people who hate and/or love vampire romances (but maybe not so much to people who are meh to vampire romances). It's really funny, although I'd better give warning that some people fall in love, so if that's kryptonite to you, better stay away. [/off topic]

Not all vampire novels. In mine (which is not published under this name, so this is not a plug) the vampires are not voluntary, not sparkly, not allergic to sunlight or garlic, but do have fangs, claws, even sonar. Nor is my novel a romance. They can eat hamburgers too, although blood does have that special kick.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by LovesMacs

You seek more granularity, the ability to filter search results with ever-increasing refinement. I'd like that too, and I believe moonshot would also agree.

The problem with this, to my mind, is at least two-fold:

1. At present, Amazon has no need to spend time and money implementing this when its potential return on investment is questionable.

2. More problematic is how books are classified in the first place. I'm speculating here, but I strongly suspect that books sold at Amazon (and probably other sites) are classified by very general tags or fields: fantasy, romance, mystery, etc. with few available subcategories (urban, Regency, procedural, and so on). This much is pretty obvious.

I don't know who assigns these categories, but books often end up in more than one category, whether through ignorance or design. Take a vampire romance: it's obviously a romance but maybe it's a fantasy too. And vampires? Gotta be a horror book. Is it a young adult book? Could be--it won't hurt to put it in that category too! Now that single book has fallen into at least four categories.

Take subgenres like urban fantasy: what indeed is an urban fantasy? Contemporary titles seem to have a lot of romance but I don't know if it is truly an essential element. This ambiguity further complicates this issue. At what point does a book cease to be one genre and belong to another? Must a book fall into a single category?

Amazon's current system lets you narrow categories but it doesn't let you exclude specific qualities. What if you want fantasy but no dragons, or fiction without profanity?

It's probably safe to say that Amazon and other retailers would have a very hard time implementing such refined search results.

Indie authors get to choose 2 categories. There is no actual urban fantasy category as the categories are mostly derived from the Library of Congress categories that have been set for centuries...there is also no cozy mystery category. Amazon has a many more categories defined for the reader (you see those when a book hits one of the lists--100 in cozy mysteries is a category and so in UF, I believe.)

I don't think publishers are restricted to two categories and I believe they can choose some of the "unofficial" categories. I've heard that indies can call and request some of the unofficial Kindle categories, but I've not tried it. Publishers have lied for years about categories. I can remember reading many a book that was really nothing more than romance, but if urban fantasy was hot, suddenly everything was UF. Same for epic fantasy. I'd find romance in fantasy that was just written as a long book so as to appear to be a fantasy one, rather than a romance one.

Amazon clamped down on Indies doing it by restricting us to two categories (we used to be able to declare up to 5).

Amazon also used to allow us to have tags, but those have gone away.