I'm not seeing zeroes, but sometimes, glitches are not universal. It could conceivably be a smaller-scale glitch.

Anyone seeing zeroes? I just took a look at sales dashboard - it's rather disconcerting. My account is fine, books are all there, etc. Could be the Daylight Savings Time switcheroo along with first of the month catching up stuff (I'm spitballing).

Post-Doc is right - a category label is a negative when a fiction might offer more than can be squeezed into a single genre.  We ought to go back to the olden days when the only cat was the author's name, like Bill Shakespeare.   

That destroys the category top 100 charts, which is where most of my visibility is.

The Epic category is so large, that I've no visibility there anyway, but most of the rest of them I get good visibility in.

Like I said before, I thought the idea of doing away with genre categories like Science Fiction and Fantasy, as the author I mentioned has been promoting, was a bit nutty.

But, reading this thread, you can see how the genre categories aren't really working or the definitions change or new ones are created but then the starting definition ends up changing over time and so on.  And, if you have people complaining about categorization based on their own opinions and then bots running around making bad guesses at categories, maybe it is time to move past it.

Prior to the middle of the last century or so, there weren't distinctions.  They began as a way to put books on shelves.  But, now, maybe it's no longer optimal, especially with computerization.

Does genre trump search?

That is, let's say I want a book with an LGBT+ MC.  But they are also half-elf.  And the captain of a spaceship.  But the spaceship is powered by magical fairy dust.  And this captain leads their ship in a battle against an army of cyborg invaders whose primary weapon are plasma beam pistols that have a side effect of disabling magic.  Where would I even begin to find such a book?

Or maybe I want a book with no LGBT+ characters at all.

Does genre help me at all?  Or is search (as in a book search engine) the better option?

Then again does too much specificity limit the scope of what people will read?  Some people might think they don't want to read a book with a character that's half-orc running a bake shop that solves mysteries on the weekends and never search for it and never find it.  But they might in fact enjoy it if that had stumbled upon it somehow.

I don't have the answers but I don't think what we have now is working out.

Epic scope often appears in the definition of epic fantasy, and epic scope might imply fairly substantial length. I think reader expectations are that contemporary and urban fantasy are relatively short and epic is relatively long. But Amazon starts getting that picky, we're probably in trouble.

I think one of our biggest problems is that most of the definitions are kind of developed on the spur of the moment, so maybe the definition makes sense in isolation, but the genres end up with overlaps and blank spots.