A recent piece of advice I heard from a successful author was for new writers to focus their attention on their chosen genre. But what does that mean?

I think it means to be successful you have to give your potential readers what they want. The problem however is discovering your potential reader base and what they like. At a broad level this is genre related, but it also goes a lot deeper into sub genres and styles that are author related.

Readers tend to follow authors they have already read and will choose new authors only if they are persuaded by the cover, marketing blurb and reviews that the new author might provide the same kind of experience.

So let’s first look at the main broad genre categories for fiction using Amazon’s Best Seller listings:

• Romance (17)
• Science Fiction & Fantasy (35)
• Mystery, thriller & suspense (42)
• Literature & Fiction (19)

The numbers quoted are the Amazon sub-categories within the genre. For example, for Science Fiction & Fantasy there are 16 categories for Fantasy and 19 categories for science fiction. Many of the categories cross-over. For example, under Romance there are categories for science fiction, time travel and action & adventure. And there are also further sub-sub-categories.

If you look at Science Fiction best seller listing, Amazon lists 19 categories:

• Adventure
• Alien Invasion
• Alternative History
• Anthologies and short stories
• Colonisation
• Cyberpunk
• Dystopian
• First contact
• Galactic Empire
• Genetic Engineering
• Hard Science Fiction
• Metaphysical & Visionary
• Military
• Post-Apocalyptic
• Space exploration
• Space opera
• Steampunk
• Time travel
• TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptions

Amazon permits authors to list their books under up to ten different categories although they only identify three categories in the description of the book. My own novel, Collision, is shown on Amazon under the following categories:

• Time travel romance (a Romance category)
• Time travel science fiction
• Time travel fiction

Collison is largely based in today’s world, but the time travel element puts it into the ‘science fiction’ genre. It’s described by my own readers in their reviews as a fast action-story and therefore it also fits into action & adventure. And there is a strong romantic B-story between the main lead characters and so it fits into the time travel romance category.

If you are a new author, finding where you fit your novel into this complex category matrix can be difficult, particularly if the scope of the novel crosses different genre. A good place to start is to look at novels of authors similar to your own and how they are categorised on Amazon. But don’t be surprised if you get some odd results. I’m sure other authors have found difficulty properly categorising their novels for Amazon’s system.

I would also suggest you check out the types of books that Amazon lists under each category or you might be surprised by the nature of the category. Originally, when I published Collision I used the “Romance Science Fiction” category. It was a mistake as many of the books in that category weren’t a good fit at all — most have covers with beefy semi-naked alien males.

So finding authors with a similar ‘feel’ to your own books is really what understanding genre is all about. The “Customers who bought this also bought” and “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” sections on Amazon’s site is also good place to find similar books to your own. If you use Sponsored Advertising on Amazon, then you can find which “Keywords” work best on Amazon’s sales pages. Book titles and authors names make excellent keywords. And from this information you can see which sales arise from advertising on a particular author’s book page on Amazon.

Taking Collision as an example, the author keywords that work best for me are Jodi Taylor, and Philip Peterson both of which are great time travel writers. But there are other sci-fi writers which the connection is less obvious and some writers that you might expect there to be a connection but there just isn’t. Finding those authors for which you share a common reader interest and studying them is perhaps the best way to understanding your own genre. That doesn’t mean you need to follow the approach of these writers, but you need to understand it.

At the end of the day every writer wants to produce a unique story experience. It just has to be the type of emotional experience your reader is expecting.