[nikkie]

Originally Posted by DuskyRose

This I agree with. I think too many authors want to put every conceivable tag on their book so it will pull up as much as possible. I think the site should have some limits. I'm not sure the best way to go about it.

I hear you. We aren't sure what the limits should be either. If we try to limit it more, historically, some authors get really upset.

And maybe I'm missing it, because I've pretty much given up looking for it, is that subcategories under LBGTQ subjects/characters. I can select [Gay/Lesbian], but it's always general stuff that shows up. I can't search for Mysteries with gay detectives. I can't search for fantasy with gay characters. It's just all bunched up under one tag, and I have to guess by cover. And covers don't represent well.

This is a good point. Our store allows you to browse categories to find things like gay/lesbian or mystery but we don't allow you to filter those books in those categories by their second category. (Each book can only have 2 categories attached, and unlimited tags.)

Secondary categories has historically been quite an awkward feature. Most of our retail partners don't support ingesting them so they've just been listed on books in our store but not really aiding in discovery anywhere.

For this kind of search, I think that Thema is a much better classification system. I think pulling gay or lesbian from the qualifier list and one of the mystery subjects would be a very sensible way of classifying a book like this and make it easy to discover. We don't currently accept Thema metadata but IMO it would be a very sensible add. Our biggest problem is that most of our retail partners don't support it yet.

I may find a book I'm interested in with those subjects, then come to Smashwords to compare formats and prices, but I'd never just find them easily when browsing. So, I've quite browsing there.

Hopefully adding the ability to search by secondary category should help in the short term!