Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I am indifferent to Amazon classifications; I don't even notice them, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if books don't frequently have a tenuous relationship to a category but have been shoehorned into it for marketing/exposure and the more categories the merrier at that.
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Of course, when we say "Amazon" categories they are in fact publisher assigned categories. And categories are signalled by cover images as well as direct assignment - there are large numbers of books that appear under SF/F that are obviously romance (or erotica or whatever) despite their publisher assigned classification.
While I try not to get too hung up on categories either, we are all guilty of judging a book by its cover and its apparent/reported/advertised genre. As noted elsewhere, I would not have picked up
The Girl With All the Gifts if I had known what it was in advance; I would quite simply have said "not interested". Similarly, any cover that looks like a standard romance cover gets an automatic pass from me, whatever genre I'm browsing.
These examples show that I do pretty much the same as Catlady does with sci-fi, I just have different targets. So, despite my claim above, I obviously do pay some attention to publisher assigner genre, but I do it on an exclusion rather than inclusion basis. I don't really care what genre is assigned to the books I choose to read, I just need to know what to cull from my browsing.
But the above is mostly about browsing. Given a solid recommendation from a reliable source I am happy to tackle most genres.