Category abuse? Or am I imagining things?

Don Donovan · Aug 20, 2016

My second crime/noir novel is on pre-order right now and it's doing pretty well. A couple of days ago it eased into the top 3 of Amazon's Hot New Releases list of the Noir category, and I was overjoyed. However, since then a couple of new books have shoved me out. They're clearly erotic romance, both by the same author, both showing the standard ripped abs on the covers, and the word "Romance" is even in the subtitles of each one. You know, "A Bad Boy Romance," that kind of thing. I notice the same author has two or three other similar books climbing fast up the noir HNR charts.

My question is, is this author gaming the system by somehow wangling her books into the noir category? I would bet not a single reader of those "romance" books has ever read noir fiction at any time in their lives. I looked at the romance HNR list. You need a much, much higher ranking to crack the top 3 in that category -- somewhere in the 700s -- and these two books in question don't have anywhere near that kind of ranking. How can they get away with this?

Jim Johnson · Aug 20, 2016

It happens in lots of categories. Creative use of keywords and a lot of headless male torsos everywhere.

dianapersaud · Aug 20, 2016

Keywords will get books placed in certain categories, as determined by Amazon.

Some people do abuse the keywords and others are sort of shoved there because of Amazon.

Nothing you can do about it. There are hundreds of threads about the same topic.

Adrienne Lecter · Aug 20, 2016

Have you read the books? They could just be romance and noir. Plus with covers that tell people what to expect, there's little fraudulent behavior you could report, if that was even a thing. MOre than one of my keyword categories got messed up because Amazon was being funny, particularly with romance. It happens. I'm sure that readers can still distinguish if those are the books they are looking for

SomeoneElse · Aug 20, 2016

I've also never seen anywhere where Amazon defines their categories. If they were ever actually going to police what went where, you'd think they'd need some strict definitions.

Keywords can have unintended consequences, too. I listed a bunch of synonyms for witch, including sorcerer, but that landed me in the 'sword and sorcery' category, so I went back and took it out because my book doesn't fit there. Someone less aware of keywords and categories might not have noticed something like that.

S.L. · Aug 21, 2016

Adrienne Lecter said:
Have you read the books? They could just be romance and noir. Plus with covers that tell people what to expect, there's little fraudulent behavior you could report, if that was even a thing. MOre than one of my keyword categories got messed up because Amazon was being funny, particularly with romance. It happens. I'm sure that readers can still distinguish if those are the books they are looking for

Just saw your thumbnails and realized you are in my also-boughts.

Category abuse? Or am I imagining things?

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