One of the things I find most interesting, looking at it now, is how a novel is classified into its subcategories, particularly on Amazon.

My editor recommended this particular book be placed into the young adult & science fiction genres as it involved a protagonist who is maturing into his own life experiences. I didn’t disagree with her there. It was when I was categorizing it for Amazon where a bit more of a challenge for me arose…

This book isn’t entirely sci-fi from page 1 to the end – at least not in the traditional sense. There is a tie-in to a very personal human experience – of family abuse and neglect – that has to be navigated and resolved by a human protagonist, and it made me wonder how it would be received by readers. I figured it would be dependent on whether the reader had certain expectations about how the book was going to go based on the genre and I ended up kiboshing those expectations fairly early on.

I ended up doing quite a bit of internal debate before I ended up with the categories I chose… they were as close as I was going to get to what made sense. Although it did feel like I was trying to fit a round peg into a square hole at times. Does Amazon ever change its (sub)categories, or have they stayed fairly consistent over time?