Now Amazon is bot removing categories? WTF?

[TimothyEllis]

I just got this from Amazon for my latest book.

Hello,

We updated the metadata of the following ASIN(s) because we found categories that did not match the nature of the content, and may cause a misleading customer experience.

ASIN: B0FM3R7Z4Z || Category: Epic Fantasy || Marketplace: US

As a result, we removed the unrelated categories from your title(s). Your book(s) will remain available for sale on Amazon and no further action is required from you on this matter.

To edit your book categories, you can follow the instructions on this Help article: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200652170#add

For more details about our Content Quality guidelines, visit Help:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200952510

If you have questions or believe you received this in error, please reply to this email.

Regards,
The Kindle Direct Publishing Team

My entire universe of 13 series is one giant Epic Fantasy. It just happens to also be science fiction, and this series is space fleet.

I've checked the book in my dashboard, and the Epic Fantasy selection as one of my three categories is still there on the book.

I've responded to that, but I expect a bot to just misunderstand what I said.

This is worrying, but also something that should have been happening a long time ago.

Worrying because bots are doing it with no understanding of the book at all.

Should be done because of the mis-categerization of books that we know goes on.

[alhawke]

I'm surprised they informed you. I've been yanked off categories without any explanation before.

Hopefully someone human will respond back and restore it for you.

Was it only in the US? The different markets seem to act independently with these things on Amazon.

[TimothyEllis]

The review upheld their decision.

They said it was science fiction, so had obviously not read it at all, not even the sample.

I've resubmitted using Military Fantasy instead.

I don't actually recall seeing that category before. Or I'd have used it before now.

[Post-Doctorate D]

Outside the realm of books, there are a ton of things that cause a "misleading customer experience" on Amazon that Amazon doesn't seem to give a rat's behind about . . .

[TimothyEllis]

Outside the realm of books, there are a ton of things that cause a "misleading customer experience" on Amazon that Amazon doesn't seem to give a rat's behind about . . .

It makes me wonder if someone made a complaint on that particular book.

Otherwise, why would they care?

Still, I was only using Epic for lack of better alternative, so if there is one now, I guess I'll use that.

[Bill Hiatt]

Amazon isn't good at discerning the various hybrid genres that are becoming increasingly common in self publishing. Of course, some works have always been like that. Andre Norton had a Merlin book out when I was a kid that read a lot like Arthurian fantasy--except that Merlin was an alien. So is that sci-fi or fantasy? Anyway, a lot of sci-fi is called by some critics science fantasy, because the scientific foundation is little more than a pretext. It be hard to find even a theoretical foundation for what happens.

Most plots in science fiction or fantasy could convert rather easily to the other genre. Hostile aliens could become hostile faeries, for example. Alien worlds could be supernatural realms.

To go back to Timothy's original problem, John Conroe (who, when I first started, was one of Amazon's self publishing success stories, has a fairly long series (The Demon Accords), currently at 21 books.

The first book is listed has the following categories.

#303 in Horror Occult & Supernatural
#352 in Occult Horror
#481 in Contemporary Fantasy (Kindle Store)

The last book has different ones.

#2,106 in Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
#3,749 in Fantasy (Books)
#3,896 in Science Fiction (Books)

So Conroe is allowed to have a book in both science fiction and fantasy, but Timothy isn't?

Conroe is a textbook example of blending both genres. Though fantasy predominates in the first few, the blend exists even in those. For instance, vampirism and lycanthropy are both the result of a virus. Later on, a character is introduced who is an unusual strong male witch, with three out of four elemental domains, which hardly anyone ever has. But one of his tricks is an ability to manipulate technology, and in the same novel he is introduced, a female character pops up who, if I remember correctly, partly technological and has nanites that can reprogram things, as well as android-like physical abilities.

Later on, the male witch is trying to keep an evil grimoire, The Book of Deepest Sorrow, out of evil hands, gets attacked by someone who stabs through the book and into him. The book itself dies, but its spirit flows into him. He manages to control it, but somehow (it's been a while, so I forget the exact progression), the book also merges with an AI, which becomes a super AI who regards the male witch as its father. The AI does Ai-type things (like taking control of all the nukes on the planet so that nuclear war becomes impossible and creating tiny drones that can spy on anyone to make sure world governments are being cooperative). By this point, it's pretty hard to separate the scientific from the supernatural.

Oh, and not long after, we get an alien race, the Vorsook, who do alien-type things. But they also have a supernatural origin story. They are "God's eraser," designed to wipe out unsuccessful aspects of creation, but sometimes, they get carried away. While dealing with them, the heroes also develop the idea of opening a portal to drop a nuke into hell so that Satan will stop messing with them.

In other words, Conroe freely mixes the two genres, and Amazon has no problem with this. And he's been successful, so Amazon should know that it doesn't create a misleading customer experience.

[TimothyEllis]

I just got another email for my current pre-order, which doesn't have a file uploaded for it yet, so they're not even looking at the book.

It looks like they're going solely by cover and blurb.

And the stupid thing is, I'd already removed the Epic Fantasy category myself, and replaced it with Military Fantasy.

But obviously it had not been actioned yet.

[Post-Doctorate D]

On another site, there's an author that has been occasionally posting over the past couple months or so, arguing against genre labels such as "science fiction" or "fantasy".  He's argued that such labels did not exist before the 1960s(?) or so and that the labels and, in fact, the whole idea of "genre" was developed in order for booksellers to stick books on certain shelves.

I've been thinking that's a bit nutty.  I mean, if you want to read scifi, you need an easy way to find them, right?

But, maybe he's not so wrong.  If I recall, among his arguments are that (1) lots of books don't fit into easy genres, (2) people read less variety in books because they stick with specific genres and (3) okay, I don't remember his other arguments but there are more.

(1) We know that this is true because, both here and at The Place That Shall Not Be Named, we've had authors trying to figure out what genre(s) their books belong in.  And arguments are made that you should know your genre and other arguments are for writing to genre and so on.  And, maybe if we didn't have genre labels, we could just focus on writing good books and telling good stories and not worrying about how to pigeonhole them into a certain category.

(2) Prior to genre labels, people just read books without worry about what "genre" they were.  We go back and classify older books as this or that but, way back when, they didn't do that.  They didn't distinguish between fantasy and science fiction or even drama and fantasy.  There were just books and people weren't like, well, I don't read "fantasy" or I don't read "romance" or whatever.  It was like, they enjoyed a book or they didn't.  Maybe someone recommended a book and said the book was a good read and the person receiving the recommendation didn't ask, well, is it fantasy?  Or whatever.

So, I don't know.  But maybe there is a point there.  Maybe we have gotten too preoccupied with trying to categorize everything and make it fit a specific box for "genre expectations" or marketing or whatever.

[Bill Hiatt]

A common term for modern fantasy is urban, but if it's not actually in a city setting, contemporary might be more appropriate. But if it involves a contemporary character who spends the whole time in a magical alternate reality, then it's epic--maybe. Some purists would insist it can't be epic if it has a modern character. Others would disagree. And then, of course, if there's a romance involving at least one supernatural character and an ordinary person, it's paranormal. And if the romance part becomes equally dominate, it's romantasy (which was coined when? like five minutes ago?) How many subgenres of fantasy are there, anyway? Oh, and then there's YA, but Amazon will only let you combine YA with certain subgenres. I think there isn't a YA epic fantasy, for example, though there are books that could fit. And is there a meaningful difference between YA and coming of age?

When I was young, all of those were just fantasy.

Trads would insist on labels for marketing purposes, and up to a point, they are helpful to us as well. But some people self publish precisely because they don't want to get siloed into a narrow genre.  I've read some great stuff that doesn't really fit a neat category unless you make one for it--and then there's yet another subgenre.

[Lynn]

Some reader somewhere has probably complained about the series, or maybe they've decided epic fantasy books should have a high page count. With Amazon, you never know what they're doing.

[Bill Hiatt]

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.

[TimothyEllis]

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.

Book 10 crosses 650k words for the series.

I call that epic length.

The problem is probably that Amazon is ignoring the fact that the series is SERIAL.

So the entire series count is what makes it epic, not individual books.

[Post-Doctorate D]

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.

[Hopscotch]

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.   

[TimothyEllis]

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.

[Bill Hiatt]

Yeah, for all their failings, I'd still rather have categories than not have them. The trick is to get Amazon to be more careful about responding to customer complaints on genre and more consistent in its application of rules. If John Conroe can be in fantasy and science fiction, then Timothy Ellis ought to be able to do the same.