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Originally Posted by AnemicOak
I'm guessing what they mean is the fact that some self-pub authors/small pubs deliberately mislabel the genre's of their books in the hopes of getting them in front of more eyes when folks are browsing. This happens at B&N and Kobo as well.
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Yep. Lots of indies and get rich quick types are gaming Amazon especially by changing the publication date on a daily basis so their book is always shown as just published. They also put the same book in genres they where they don't belong.
In addition, I'm not real fond of surfing the slush piles, like some seem to be. Most of the self published books are simply drek, not "choice". There is a reason that they are self published. I get that some people like that sort of stuff. Heck, Jim Baen use to allow people on his board to rummage through his slush pile and report any that they found interesting to him. It's not my thing and I get very frustrated having to scroll past page after page of that stuff.
There is no reason that I should be able to filter that stuff out, but Amazon doesn't support such filtering. I have tried going by popularity, but then most of the above crowd have also figured out that part of gaming the system is getting 6 or 7 of your buddies to give you 5 star ratings.
Eventually, some ebook store will figure things out, take advantage of technology and give customers a fully customizable shopping experience that lets you see the books that you are most likely to like. But that's going to take work and quality control. They can't simply push the work off on the various ebook publishers and authors and expect good results.
Amazon is a great experience if you already know what you want to buy. Not so good if you don't already know.