About the low number of nominations: There's a thread on the Kindle Boards forum (
http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php?topic=30529.100) asking "Is there any genre you won't read?" I didn't do an actual count, but "horror" came up as often as anything.
I've learned with
Risen how that genre label can really work against you, especially with a book like
Risen which I wrote for a more mainstream horror audience rather than for hardcore horror fans. Stephen King is wildly popular, but many, many people who love King will not read anyone else in the horror field. (Maybe a little Dean Koontz.) I got a number of responses to the print edition of
Risen (you can look them up on Amazon, the original book edition) that started out, "I don't normally read horror, but...."
This can be good, but it's incredibly difficult to market a "horror" novel to a non-horror readership! (Duh.) On the other hand, people who picked it up expecting a blood-n-guts zombie novel were disappointed, and it got a fairly poor review in
Fangoria largely on that basis.
The horror element is largely psychological, even philosophical, rather than visceral. It's as much suspense thriller as anything else, but there's no denying the horror element and it does fit in that genre. I am afraid, though, that it misses its target audience by being a bit fish and a bit fowl.
Then there's the humor, and that comes from my ironic view of life. Humor and horror seem to intertwine in this world of ours. I think of the CEO of Segway who died recently when his Segway went over a cliff. What a tragedy, the senseless death of a good man, the people he left behind who grieve for him, etc. And yet...he drove a Segway over a cliff. You can't help but hate yourself a little bit for finding humor in that, yet there it is. Carl Hiassen could've written that scene.
Anyway, that might be a reason for the low nomination count.