If It Ain't Broke...

So I’ve got something of a minor headache in terms of a publishing-related task. Historically, it’s been a little tricky for authors to get their books into the desired category on Amazon. Basically, the categories available during the publishing process didn’t always square up with the categories as they appear on Amazon’s site. As a result, books didn’t always show up where the author felt was most apporpriate. (In my case - after Amazon created superhero categories - I generally wanted my books in Teen & Young Adult Superhero Fiction, because that’s where readers seemed to find me.)

Thankfully, it was possible to request that your title be put into the appropriate category and Amazon would take care of it. Most authors took advantage of that offer, because we could only select two categories while publishing, but Amazon could actually put you into a jolly ole ten of them. Sounds great, but it didn’t always work out the way it was supposed to. (Case in point: years ago one of my Kid Sensation titles ended up in some non-fiction categories. Even worse, Amazon couldn’t identify how it happened or how to fix it. Luckily, the system eventually seemed to correct itself.)

These days it’s a little better in that the categories during the publishing process generally match up with what you see on Amazon’s platform. However, it’s still not pefect. For instance, although you can now pick three categories for your book to appear in, I found out the hard way that they still don’t always match what readers see when browsing on Amazon. Long story short, in the not-to-distant past, I changed my category selections for the first Kid Sensation novel – Sensation – in hopes of getting into a couple of additional relevant categories. The only thing that truly happened was that the book got kicked out of Teen & Young Adult Superhero Fiction, which was the primary category I wanted.

Unfortunately, there has never been a way to directly select that category for ebooks. There are some hoops you can jump through to make it happen (and I will show mercy by not boring you with those), but none of them are working for me. They seemingly work for other titles (for example, Smoked is actually slotted for that category); they simply won’t work for Sensation.  

Obviously the lesson here is, “If ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Truth be told, I don’t spend too much time fretting over it, but I would like Sensation back where I feel it belongs. (And needless to say, it’s frustrating not to be able to right the ship in this regard.) That being the case, I’ll tweak things every now and then when I have a moment, but so far nothing’s worked. Nevertheless, I’ll keep trying and hopefully, at some point, the book will find its way home.