Since I’ve been talking about book categories, I thought I should explain how that works and why it’s important. There’s a system of code categories that booksellers and publisher use to sort books. Some of the categories are pretty general, but then some areas get sliced and diced into pretty specific categories. For instance, there’s a code for firefighter romance. Strangely, although there’s a specific code for cozy mysteries involving crafts, there’s no code for paranormal mysteries. You can find the list of fiction categories here.

For traditional bookstores, the fine parsing doesn’t make much difference, since books are generally shelved in general fiction, romance, mystery, or science fiction and fantasy (some stores may break out horror into its own section, and some stores give all Christian fiction its own section). The codes are used more for databases and possibly for internal tracking (maybe to keep an eye on what’s selling).

But for online bookselling, they become more important. Instead of having to just go to the mystery section in a store and then scan the covers to see which ones you want, you can search a specific category. Each book can be put in more than one category if it fits multiple places. That can be both good and bad. If your book is a perfect fit for a category, that makes it easy to find. If it’s not such a good fit, your book can fall between the cracks. Since there’s no paranormal mystery category, I’m going to have to choose between maybe cozy, general and either amateur sleuths or women sleuths. I don’t know what the people looking for my sort of thing will be looking for.

Amazon also has some of its own categories, and I’m not sure how you get put in them or how they decide. I’m not even entirely sure how you find them. When I was digging through the bestseller lists for the potentially relevant categories, I tried clicking on an individual title, then found in its listing where they showed its rank in various categories, some of which weren’t listed as a category for browsing or bestseller lists. So, I was looking through general cozy mysteries, found a book that looked along the lines of what I’m writing, and found that there was a separate category for ghost mysteries, but it wasn’t listed for browsing, and there isn’t a code for it. But you can bring up a list of those books by clicking on that category in that listing. It may come from key words you can put in a book listing, possibly from algorithms that show what sorts of things people buy, like those “people who bought this also bought” lists. If a lot of people who generally buy ghost mysteries buy a book, it might get classified as a ghost mystery. Sometimes this is hilariously inaccurate. Recently, Enchanted, Inc. has been listed in “plays and drama,” which is just bizarre. I wonder if a lot of drama students who buy books of plays have been buying it.

This is what I’m talking about when I talk about trying to classify my books. Where are the people who are looking for the kind of book I write most likely to look for that kind of book? Once you know that, you can have a better idea of how to handle that book, like what to mention in the book description, what the cover should look like, etc.

You can call your books whatever you want to, whether it’s “light fantasy, “fun fantasy,” or “cozy fantasy,” but none of those are established categories, so you still have to find the right code to put on it. That’s the hard part.

I’m running behind schedule today because I ended up having to do a massive brain dump to get a bunch of stuff out of my head and on paper so it wouldn’t end up swirling around in my head and distracting me. I have a lot of thoughts about how books are marketed and sold that have maybe led me to realize what some of my problems have been, and they filled about four sheets of paper once I started writing. I’m not sure I prevented the distraction, though, because those realizations have spurred more thoughts.

One thing that’s frustrated me about publishers is that they only seem to know how to sell a book if there’s already something like it in the market. Something new and entirely different is a scary unknown, and they don’t know how to put it in their spreadsheets. Most of my books come from a place of writing the thing I want to read but can’t find, which means they’re really hard to sell. It would have to be something the publisher is utterly passionate about so that they’d put in the work it takes to create a new category.

I thought that independent publishing would get me out of that problem because I could publish what I want, without needing to look at comparable titles. However, there’s still that problem of knowing how to package and market something new. Readers usually discover a book by seeing it, and the cover tells you pretty quickly what kind of book it is. Categories are even more important online for discoverability. It’s not like going into a physical bookstore and going to the science fiction and fantasy section. You can slice and dice it into sub categories, which is good when there are zillions of books available and you want to focus on just what you want, but it’s bad when what you want (or what you’re writing) doesn’t neatly fit into any category.

I seem to write stuff that’s potentially commercial but not marketable. I came up with the idea for the Enchanted, Inc. series because I liked the Harry Potter books and wanted something like that for adults — quirky and whimsical and dealing some with the clash between the magical world and the real world. I had a corporation instead of a school and dealt with workplace issues instead of school issues, but there was still the struggle of personal life vs. fighting magical evil while trying to keep the magical world a secret. It seemed like a no-brainer to me, given the massive numbers of adult Harry Potter fans and the younger fans who’d grown up. There had to be a huge potential readership. But I can see how marketing it was a challenge. The Harry Potter books may have been popular for adults, but they were packaged as children’s books (there were “adult” editions in the UK — I have two of them — but they had arty black-and-white photography covers that I like but that wouldn’t have sold the books if they hadn’t already been wildly popular in other forms). They couldn’t really package my books like that and hit the right audience. They were contemporary fantasy set in a city, but they weren’t urban fantasy as was being published around that time. There was no established way to package those books that would signal what they were to the audience that would like them, so they threw them into the chick lit category, where there was a defined look, and did some marketing to fantasy readers and paranormal romance readers. But then when the chick lit market tanked, it took these books with it, even though by then they weren’t really chick lit. There was still no good fantasy category for them.

I’ve been considering trying some advertising for these books, but I can’t think of what audiences I would use to build a campaign. Adult fans of Harry Potter would be too broad (and expensive) a category. The closest comparison in adult fantasy I can think of might be the Dresden Files books, but those are a lot darker. There probably is some audience overlap, but I’d guess that most Dresden Files readers would see my books and be instantly turned off (I’ve had some amusing conversations about the similarities and differences between our books with Jim Butcher). Some paranormal romance readers like my books, but that category tends to go really sexy, and my books aren’t truly romances. Really marketing my books would require either a huge investment or a big stroke of luck. I think a publisher could have done it, but for whatever reason they were turned off by the idea of any comparison to Harry Potter, even the idea of pitching it as Harry Potter for adults. Publishers hate using major bestsellers that are a category unto themselves as comparable titles, and they really don’t like going to another category. In their mind, those were children’s books and mine was in the adult category, and never the twain shall meet. The next Harry Potter could only be a children’s book.

I think the solution to my issue may be going after a more defined category with an established readership, building a name and audience there, and seeing if I can drag them into other things I want to write. So this mystery thing may be a clever strategy.