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.