Yeah, I know. It is a losing game to push back against one professional or editorial review, especially when there are several others that are glowing, or at least glowing-adjacent. But let’s look at the bigger issue behind my hurt feelings. I can always cry another time.

An editorial review means that the book will get reviewed without foregone conclusions, unlike, in all probability, the Amazon review you extort from your mother. An author knows going into an editorial review that it could come up sevens or snake eyes or somewhere in between. You roll the dice and take your chances. (See the recent post Reviewing Reviews, or The Strange Little Business of Feeding the Marketing of Novels for more on this topic.)

A fourth editorial review of Over Brooklyn Hills came from IndieReader, and that review was ambivalent about the book. The problem was that Over Brooklyn Hills got reviewed as an Action/Adventure title because “Literary Climate Fiction” was not a category option when submitting the book for a review. I guess I should have chosen the “literary fiction” category, but maybe I was too nervous imagining the legions of writing program MFAs overwhelming that category. Unfortunately for the reviewer, who seemed eager to review an Action/Adventure novel, Over Brooklyn Hills is not an action/adventure genre title, even if it has some snappy plotlines. The book also has a lot of characters who are deeply drawn, which the reviewer found distracting as she looked for the action and the adventure. Well, live and learn, right?

Categorically, “Literary Fiction” is Left in the Cold

Sometimes a book gets put into an inappropriate category—an error that can be, in the case above, attributed to the author. Sometimes a book ends up in front of the wrong reviewer because the categories available during the review submission process don’t include the right categories and the book is thought to be one type of book by the reviewer, while intended to be a different type of book by the author.

The lesson to learn here is to be careful to select the right category for the book submitted for review. Unfortunately, there’s no such category for “literary climate fiction,” and that applies not only to book review platforms, but to basic BISAC:

BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) is the US publishing industry standard used to categorize books by topic and genre. These alphanumeric codes determine where books are physically shelved in stores and how they are indexed in online retailer databases like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The BISAC system is maintained by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and encompasses over 50 major categories and nearly 6,000 individual subject codes.

Honest, I looked. Between “FIC004000 FICTION/Classics” and “FIC043000 FICTION/Coming of Age,” there’s no “FICTION/Climate.”

480 Sub-categories Under “Fiction” and “Literary” Stands Alone

I’d also point out the BISAC has about 480 sub-categories under “Fiction” and many of these have sub-categories that have their own sub-categories and sometime sub-sub categories; one example: “FIC027440 FICTION/Romance/Paranormal(See a/Witches”). “Fiction/Science Fiction” has eighteen sub-categories; “Fiction/Thrillers” has sixteen; “Fiction/Mystery & Detective has twenty, with seven sub (sub) categories under “Fiction/Mysteries & Detective/Cozy.” You can have a mystery & detective novel that is “Cozy” generally or focused on animals; books, bookstores & libraries; crafts; culinary; holidays & vacation; and paranormal.

There is one “literary” subcategory under “Fiction.” One stinking top-level category for “Fiction/Literary.” No subcategories, no sub-sub categories.

Someone once mentioned to me that life was unfair. Now I know what they were talking about.

The post There Can Be a Tax on Taxonomical Confusion first appeared on David Guenette.

For the writer/production editor/publisher, the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) back in November 2007 changed the landscape of trade publishing for good and bad. Keep in mind that we are two decades into the real start of ebooks, even though, as an editor of digital publishing professional periodicals, I’d attended two earlier cycles of ebook conferences starting sometime in the late 1980s, and the idea of ebooks had been around for an even longer time. Ted Nelson and his book Hypertext, anyone?

As it turned out, it took Amazon’s commitment to this emerging marketplace to provide momentum out of the starting gate. Keep in mind that Amazon was still in early stages of its world domination and was a generally well-regarded corporation doing what many people thought were helpful things. Things like online shopping, fast shipping, competitive prices, and other sorts of attractive retail behavior. The common view of Amazon these days is negative, and for many good reasons. I won’t go into details here—they’re well-known. In fact, I’ve done my share of critiquing, including writing essays titled “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part One” and “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part Two.” If you want an excellent description of what’s going on with online platforms, read Cory Doctorow’s essays on “enshittification.”

What It Takes for Books to Gain “The Channels”

The third book of The Steep Climes Quartet, Over Brooklyn Hills, is on pre-order, with a publication date of June 15, 2026, but in order to make the book and the others in the series as widely available as possible, hoops must be jumped through.

Amazon is the single largest bookseller in the known universe, and the platform makes buying books easy (unlike the search function for most other goods available through Amazon), so there’s that. Get the book on Amazon and Bob‘s your uncle, that’s the thinking. But there’s also significant opposition to Amazon these days and, understandably, especially so from other booksellers and book buyers loyal to independent bookstores and those all-around anti-Amazon folks. Bookshop.org has done a decent job providing an Amazon alternative for online book-buying and has the anti-Amazon public’s support mainly because it directs the sales to independent bookstores.

If I want to sell my books in independent bookstores in addition to Amazon, I can. Well, I can if my book has a real ISBN and doesn’t use the one Amazon freely offers publishers, which isn’t a real ISBN, but an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that is independent of the ISBN usage by other bookstores. The practical consequence is that other bookstores simply won’t sell ASIN-only books, and it is not merely pique on their part, but also logistical: the rest of the trade book selling world uses ISBN inventory and pricing for their stock, something Amazon has known to be the case for decades upon decades. I also need to make sure that my books are available through a book distributor so that independent bookstores can order them, which for the trade market in the U.S. means Ingram, and don’t you know they own Lightning Source, an online platform for publishing both print and ebooks.

So now I’m using two publishing platforms, both of which produce the books as print-on-demand.

Of course, there also is the issue of ebook production, format, and distribution. For KDP, that’s easy enough and the ingestion interface has gotten better over time, so there are fewer publishers now having strokes when trying to get an ebook—a Kindle—out into the world. Of course, when you publish through KDP you’re limited to selling the Kindle ebook through Amazon, unless, that is, you use an additional ebook publishing platform, where the real value is in its distribution, ebook production being relatively easy. Alternate ebook distribution makes the ebook—ePub—available through Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and many other channels, including into libraries. I’ve found Draft2Digital effective in this way.

So now I’m using three publishing platforms.

The Signal-to-Noise Challenge Loudly Continues

Of course, so are millions of other self-publishers, or whatever the actual number is, using publishing platforms. There are 3-4 million such books reportedly getting published annually these days, at least according to people who wish to break my spirit, as the sheer volume of new books creates a signal-to-noise problem for those searching for a particular book or ebook. I’m jumping through hoops making sure that my books are available through many channels, all in the hope that people will seek the books out and buy them. There’s the needle-in-a-haystack problem, something metadata and the right keywords were supposed to solve, but now there’s a humongous haystack that keeps discoverability difficult. AI search that adds context derived from the actual content of the book instead of relying just on metadata is the next great hope, but really, the search engines and social platforms want to sell ads, promising discoverability for a price.

Who knew that I wasn’t going to become rich by writing fiction?!

Well, as things stand today, my goal is to sell enough books to more or less cover my costs, so that my modest retirement funds don’t too rapidly disappear. And I haven’t yet included audiobooks to the equation, not because audiobooks are a bad idea, but because the main platform, Audible, is now owned by Amazon, and the whole royalty setup is downright terrible for authors. Also, I’m still annoyed that most people seem to like audiobooks more than print or ebooks, and, yes, I’m still sulking.

The post The World of Amazon Publishing and the Hoops a Publisher Jumps Through to Participate in the World of Amazon Publishing first appeared on David Guenette.