Traci Ashbe Dark Epic Fantasy Author

A few years ago, authors were advised to try to improve their sales position on Amazon by suggesting a new genre. This naturally got out of hand very quickly and Amazon stopped adding new sub-categories by request. Also, hitting number one in a sub-category so that the author could claim best seller status became cliché and effectively meaningless.

Now, if you look through the drop down menus on a category like Fantasy, you’ll find a lot of choices and really no room to add more. The current advice is to choose categories that are as specific to your story as possible and add any additional qualifiers to the keywords and description, which will still make your book come up on a search for the specific term.

As a Fantasy reader, I found the current selection rather interesting and had to look up the meaning of Gaslamp Fantasy, which is a…