Hard-Boiled, Soft-Boiled, Cozy, or Classic?

by Shelley Burbank

Apparently Amazon KDP Cares . . . When It Suits Them

My little novella, which has sold some copies since January (but nothing spectacular as anyone can see by checking out the best-seller rankings for both ebook and print versions,) caught the attention of Amazon KDP the other day, somehow. And not in a great way. 

For those of us who self-publish our books or have some say in how our small press publishers categorize our books, figuring out the "right" categories for Amazon is a bit daunting. Put your book in too wide a category and you have zero, absolutely zero chance, of being ranked where potential readers could actually discover you organically. You need to find categories into which your book DOES fall, but which are sub-genres, a bit more granular on the meta-data side of things. If your books don't neatly fall into a sub-sub-genre, you have a bit of a problem on your hands.

I use Publisher Rocket to look at potential categories. It's helpful, but not without some landmines, as you can see in this example. 

My Olivia Lively books are private detective fiction. That's a pretty wide category. They aren't cozy, though the style of writing and the Maine coastal setting kind of fit cozy. However, cozy mysteries, by definition, involve AMATEUR sleuths--not professional investigators, police detectives, FBI, or forensic specialists. 

So when it came time to pick categories, of course I chose Private Detective Fiction but didn't feel right picking Cozy Mystery. 

I picked Female Sleuth, as well. Another big category. 

Then I looked for a category that wasn't so crowded. I saw Hard Boiled Mystery and thought, "Hmmmm. Maybe..." I looked up the conventions. 

Private Detective? Check. 

Corruption plot? Check. 

Detective hired to do the dirty work of a suspect? Check. 

Morally-flawed detective character? Check. 

City setting? Half-check. (Portland is a city, but it's not exactly Chicago in the 40s).  

Male detective? Nope. First person? Nope. 

I thought this particular novella actually fit the hard-boiled detective bill pretty well. I would have called it Soft-Boiled Mystery (if such a category existed on Amazon) because a soft-boiled detective is usually a woman. From a post by writer Lisa DiSilverio: "The tone of a soft-boiled book is relatively light and sometimes veers into slapstick as in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series." https://www.lauradisilverio.com/mysteries-hard-boiled-or-soft-boiled/

Here's the thing. When I wrote my first Lively, I looked for comp titles, and Stephanie Evanovitch's Stephanie Plum books came pretty darn close. So did Elle Cosimano's Finlay Donovan. These defy currenty categories, too, in my opinion. Finlay can be a "cozy" in that she's an amateur, but Stephanie Plum is a bounty hunter, in the biz but not a detective. There's not much else cozy about these books. They deal with gritty subject matter, but they are also humorous crime fiction. 

Each of our main characters are, however, female sleuths. And they have romantic interests. And they get into some hot water along the way. And there's some humor. And some high heels. 

I consider Olivia Lively to be soft-boiled detective fiction because a) she's a female b) she's a private investigator c) she deals in moral ambiguity d) she works in a city, not a cozy small town. 

So this brings me to KDP. I got an email from them yesterday saying they determined my choice of hard-boiled as a category was "misleading to readers" (like there's a lot of them being misled, eyeroll), and that they had removed my book from that category. The actual wording was, " . . . did not match the nature of the content, and may cause a misleading customer experience."

Normally this wouldn't bother me so much, but, BUT . . . I've seen so many books miscategorized in MUCH more egregious ways.

A quick look today at the top spots in Cozy Mystery yield a couple of actual cozies but not all. Here are the top five.

Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz (Also ranking #1 in crime THRILLER, Animal Mysteries, and Amateur Sleuth but I think it could be a cozy? At a stretch? It's not obvious from the cover, and I'm not sure cozy mystery readers would pick this up in a bookstore.)

Coming in Hot by Deany Ray (this is definitely a cozy vibe and cover)

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. (A NYTimes Best Seller and Read With Jenna book club pick. NOT a cozy vibe or cover. Too slick and NYTimes hardcovery--and now a Netflix tie-in. Though there is a mystery in it, it's not generally considered a mystery novel but more of a feel-good story.)

Flesh and Blood: A Kay Scarpetta Novel by Patricia Cornwell (Not a cozy. Professional investigator. Gritty. Dark. Bloody. It's in the title. MUCH more mis-categorized than my quiet little novella.)

Died in the Wool by Ngaio Marsh (Cozy title, cozy setting, but also a professional detective AND a classic, Golden Age of Mystery re-issue. It's more of a CLASSIC mystery or traditional detective mystery.)

There was a Sue Grafton Kinsey Milhone on the list at #20. (Another of my comp picks, and probably the closest, actually.) Kinsey's a private detective, not an amateur which is de riguer for cozies. Supposedly. Unless you are a famous author, a best-seller novelist, or have a big publisher behind you--then apparently, nobody cares. 

Now, least you think I wish any of these books or authors ill, I don't. In fact I kinda want to read all of them! 

It's Amazon's hypocrisy that bugs me. Categories are squishy. My "category mistake" was so less obvious than so many others, and it begs the question: Why are they picking on a basically undiscovered author doing her best to pick a category that isn't even that well-defined, not any more defined than ANY of these categories, anyway? Did someone "report" me? How did my little novella even get on the radar? 

Maybe It All Comes Down to the Covers

So, you might ask, what ARE the books allowed on the Hard-Boiled Detective Mystery list? 

You can go look for yourself, as I'm only going to talk about the ones at the #2 and #5 spots [as of this particular moment in time/date]. Enter the Martina Monroe Private Investigator "Crime Thriller" series by H.K. Christie. They are books in a series with a female private detective with flaws (her character's drinking and a DUI to my character's sorry taste in bad men) who returns to her hometown (a more cozy kind of set up). 

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Hard-Boiled-Mystery/zgbs/books/10468

These books look really good. What makes them different from my Olivia Lively books? Um, the dark covers? Maybe the writing style, but I can't tell that from the description, and neither can you or any of the so-called "misled readers." 

Another similarity? My novella is a literary mystery cold case. The #5 Christie book is a cold-case murder investigation. Okay, there are bodies, not books, at the heart of the Christie book. But are they really so different INSIDE? Again, I don't know how down and dirty these books get. I try to keep my books swearing and open-door-sex-scene free (because my parents read them and honestly? I don't think we actually need to rely on the crutches of foul language and sordid sex to get our points across. I take it as a personal challenge to talk about moral issues without getting "blue.") 

So HOW did my book even get on the KDP radar? Maybe they had AI search for swear words and bodily fluids and scan the cover for black and murky, and, not finding any, decided I'd miscategorized my book? 

I'll never know.

I Guess I Better Smarten Up

The lesson I'm learning here? After I'm finished with the Olivia Lively series, I'm going to make sure my books are firmly in a category, nothing squishy, nothing unique, nothing with one foot in two worlds. My covers will scream the category. My titles will scream the category. My metadata will line up precisely . . . somehow. It won't be by looking at the top books in the category, obviously, since that doesn't matter if you are a Jenna Book Club pick, NYTimes Bestseller, etc. Instead I'll scan the middle of the list and make sure my novels conform. 

I don't aspire to be a best-seller. I just want people to find my books. I thought Strawberry Moon had a better chance of getting eyeballs on it in a smaller category like Hard-Boiled Mystery, and since it ticked quite a few of the boxes, I went with it. So yeah, that category was probably a bad move based on my chick lit cover. It should have been black and muted, murky, and more "thriller" like, and probably readers looking for gritty, hard-boiled fiction wouldn't be attracted to my cute girl in sunglasses and the big pink moon on the cover. 

My bad, KDP! I'll do better next time. 

Has anyone else dealt with this issue? Drop a comment.  

Cover Craft: Examining Four Online Top Sellers' Covers & My Own Attempts

A first attempt at a cover design for my upcoming long short story.

Shelley here once again and wondering how two weeks could have passed so quickly since my last bi-monthly post! 

As I've been hard at work on my Strawberry Moon Mystery story--which will be a long short story or short novella depending on my ability to edit, pare, and trim--I've pondering what I might do with it once it's complete. 

I've been giving some thought to publishing it as a One Hour Short Read on Kindle. These are stories from between 33-43 pages, which is about where I expect Strawberry Moon to end up (15-20K words). As I have a bit of interest in design and art, though untrained, I wondered if I could create a passable book cover on my own, using Canva, that would align with the covers of my two Olivia Lively Mystery books published by Encircle Publications. 

I'd worked with the cover designer of those two books, giving her drawings with my ideas, so the concept was already clear in my mind. I had designated comp books with a similar vibe: The Finlay Donovan series by Elle Cosimano and Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple. I wanted a female character in bright colors, flat design, and a kind of "chick lit" energy. 

The designer, Deirdre Wait, executed these wonderfully. 

If I'm going to self-publish, I wondered, could I do the cover myself? And is my design style choice still working in today's competitive market? I moseyed over to Amazon this afternoon to look at the Best Selling Kindle Mystery Private Detective books to see what the covers looked like. 

Okay, the #1 book in that category today is Homemaker: A Prairie Nightingale Mystery that is due out next month. Written by Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare, it is published by Thomas & Mercer which just so happens to be an imprint of Amazon Publishing. 

Does the book's #1 status  have anything to do with the fact that Amazon is publishing it? And not until next month? Ummm...

Self-serving retail tactics aside, I am very heartened to see the cover design. I like the handwriting fonts and the big eye in the magnifying glass, the flat art, the vibrant colors, the female sleuth image. Not only does the story sound like a good comp for my titles (Prairie is an amateur sleuth, at least she starts out that way, so I'm not sure why it's in the Private Detective category), but also the character is tangled up with an FBI guy--just like my Olivia Lively character. 

Actually this is GREAT news. It just means that there are readers out there who want these kinds of books, and I've written a couple of them. 

The book in the #2 spot is Murdle, Volume 1 by G.T. Karber, published by McMillon/Griffin. Again, we have the flat art and color. Interestingly, the SAME colors. Again, I'm baffled by Amazon rankings because guess what? This isn't really a Private Detective story, either. It's a collection of mystery logic puzzles. 

Moving on. 

In the #3 spot is The Beast of Littleton Woods by T.E.Kinsey. This is book 12 in the series and it's published by . . . you guessed it. Thomas & Mercer. This looks much more like a cozy mystery with the dog image and the yellow eyes peering out from the roots of the tree. The curly script is also more cozy than my preferred Women Sleuths and Private Detective categories. 

(Even though it pops up as #3 on the Private Detective click, when you look at the book's bestseller rankings, Private Detective isn't even listed. It shows up as #1 in Amateur Sleuth and #2 in Cozy and #3 in Traditional Detective.) 

But okay, Amazon. 

Last one from Amazon. This is Closer Than You Know by Debra Web, published by, yup. Thomas & Mercer. 

The cover is more realistic with the author's name and book title getting equal play. The simple sans-serif font looks clean and simple. To me this looks more like a police detective or even a thriller cover that would appeal to both men and women readers. Sure enough, two of the rankings are for Police Procedural and Serial Killer Thrillers. The protagonist is actual a crime analyst. Is that a private investigator/detective? I really don't think so. 

NONE OF THESE FOUR BOOKS RANKING IN PRIVATE DETECTIVE MYSTERY IS REALLY A P.I. MYSTERY.

Whaaaat???

Yes, I could slightly tweak my search and end up with different books on the list. This baffles me all the time on Amazon best-seller rank listings. It's almost comical. In this case I searched by choosing: Best Seller/Kindle/Mystery & Thrillers/Mystery/Private Detective. 

Isn't it interesting that 3 of the top 4 ranking on Amazon in this category are published by an imprint of Amazon? 

On to my cover. 

This is the potential cover for my Strawberry Moon Mystery that I created using Canva Pro. Originally, the colors were slightly more muted and gray, but after feedback from readers on the blog, I found a way to change the colors of the images to better reflect their suggestions. Of COURSE the moon had to be pink. Or pink-ish! Does it make any sense that Olivia's wearing sunglasses at night? Nope but it continues the trend from the two full-length books. Also, the moon woudn't be reflecting in her glasses because the moon is behind her. But it makes for a more compelling image, right?

It doesn't have the panache of that handwriting font. It seems a little stiff in comparison, not as "messy" which is what they are trying to get across, I think. I might need to add a nose and some shading. Maybe I should play with some handwriting fonts. I might need to hire a cover designer to make it really work. 

And it's NOT red and black. 

But in a pinch? Maybe I could get away with it. I think this plays in the same sandbox with my comp titles, which will now include the Prairie Nightingale book as well as Finlay Donovan. Olivia, unlike these two, is actually a licensed P.I. running her own Lively Investigations business, but I think she fits in.

Cozy? Me? I thought I was Hard-Boiled!

 By Thomas Kies

The ARC for WHISPER ROOM (release date, August 2) is available now for review and a few people have already commented on Goodreads.  I’m more than pleased that universally, so far, their reviews have been exceptionally positive.  I’m a bit taken aback, however, that two of them describe my book as a Cozy Mystery. 

I’m far from insulted, but I’ve never considered my books to be cozy by any stretch of the imagination. They’ve always been described as dark, twisty, and scary.  My neighbor read my third book, GRAVEYARD BAY, and when I asked him how he liked it, he told me, “The ending gave me nightmares.”

No cozy there.

The cozy mystery is a subgenre that has been described many ways, but I’ll try to distill it down as best I can.  The protagonist is usually female, an amateur sleuth, and the violence and sexual activity takes place off scene.  The setting is generally a small community where most people know each other

Interestingly, that kind of describes WHISPER ROOM. If you close your eyes and squint at it from a distance. 

Merriam-Webster defines genre as “…characterized by a particular style, form, or content.”

Primary fiction genres are: Romance, mystery, science fiction/fantasy, action/adventure, thriller/suspense, horror, historical fiction, and young adult.

Then there are subgenres. Amazon numbers them as 16,000 and calls them categories. 

Subgenres for fiction are: psychological thriller, cozy mysteries, historical mysteries, romantic suspense, spy thrillers, police procedural, private detective, legal thrillers, heist, locked room, noir, and supernatural thrillers.

Now, many of the subgenres for mysteries are obviously hybrids from the broad definition of genres listed above. 

My first book, RANDOM ROAD, was labelled a mystery but in reality, it was a romance novel with a mystery as the engine that drove the story forward. Girl gets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy, girl solves mystery, boy dies.  So, let’s add the genre of Tragedy to our list. 

How did Amazon label RANDOM ROAD? Hard-boiled mystery, amateur sleuth, women sleuths.  Nothing about romance at all.  I guess I hid it well.

I’ve taken a hiatus from teaching my Creative Writing courses at the college until this coming fall, but I think one of the exercises I’ll try is asking the students to take a book they’ve recently read, as well as a classic they may have read when they were in school and give it three classifications like Amazon might.

Like TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.  Would it be a Legal Thriller, a Coming-of-Age novel, or maybe Horror (Boo Radley was pretty scary…until he wasn’t)? 

Amazon actually classifies the novel as Teen & Young Adult Classic Literature, TV/Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction, and Classic American Literature.

I’ve never even heard of TV/Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction.

So, back to WHISPER ROOM.  The blurb reads: Sex, Blackmail, and Murder…Welcome to the Whisper Room.

Doesn’t sound cozy at all to me.