Day 3 – 6 – Kindle Scout – The Genre Conundrum

Reprinted from Kathrin Lake’s blog

Hope you had a great long weekend and are back and ready to learn about KS and hopefully share this experience too if you are interested in writing and publishing fiction. This is blog post #3 of my Kindle Scout experience. For those of you not caught up you may want to go back to the beginning post here, where I kick off on a journey to get a Kindle Scout publishing contract via a 30-day, ready or not, campaign.

During days 3 – 6 (over the Labour Day long weekend), as I watched my numbers slink downward, I think I am finding out something that the big publishers have always known and we hated them for it, but here it is. Book wise, anything outside the expectations of a genre is hard to get off the ground. Follow this. I have my book as a fictionalized memoir—remember that only fiction is accepted by Kindle Scout—and you only get to choose 4 of the five big genres and numerous sub genres from KS selections, and I am defying the rules of some of those genres.

Romance, Mystery & Thriller, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Teen & Young Adult, and general Literature & Fiction.

Why did Amazon Kindle Scout choose these ones? Because these are the genres that make money on Kindle eBooks and are dominated by independent authors currently, as in over 50% of the Kindle eBooks in these genres are produced by independent authors who don’t work with publishers or agents.

Really this is 2 categories and 2 sub categories.
The two broad categories are Romance and general Literature & Fiction

The Romance genre has expectations that a heroine is going to meet the man of her dreams… etc. In my version, she has already met him and it is their journey together that is the focus of the story. While there is a wedding forthcoming, it is not mentioned at the beginning and it is not the focus of the story. You are rooting for this couple to make it through their trials and tribulations and it is mostly humourous and sometimes profound. In short, not your typical romance fantasy fiction, more chick lit for wiser women in their 40’s. I think this is a market for the future, given aging demographics, but what do I know.

Make no mistake this is an awesome book and my beta readers loved it but 95% of the people on Kindle Scout are outside my network and have genre expectations. Martin Crosbie of Book Doggy book promotions, and a great author himself, endorsed the book on his Facebook page as a surprise and delight saying it was outside his genre but…

Full post here:

My style best suits the Chick Lit unofficial genre where there is a humorous first person banter by the female protagonist. But again, this may be lost in the readers of Literature & Fiction section since that humourous kind of banter is not associated with literature fiction.

And, as I said in the first blog post , there are no downsides since the campaign will open you up to new readers.

I promised to talk about the kboards.com last post since I knew about them but really had not used or checked out all the resources there. It’s an awesome reader and writer forum board site and had I known I would have checked them out a long time ago more thoroughly. In their writer’s cafe you find those successful indie authors who really know how to play the Kindle publishing success game. They come from all over, mostly the English speaking countries and beyond, and they are very helpful. Steve Vernon posts a daily list of authors running Kindle Scout campaigns and their days left encouraging others to vote for them – nice to get The Happy Hammock on that one. It is just sheer good will among authors here. There is so much to check out on the site that it is almost overwhelming so digest a little at a time. Thanks to writers like Bill Hiatt who showed me where to go to make a skookum signature with your book covers in it, you will have all your questions answered by the true experts who try, and often succeed, in making a decent living as indie authors.

So I know from using an email list service, Mail Chimp, that some of my email list did click on the campaign page link. Though I did have other links (Mexico Writing retreats, etc.) and you don’t want to nag too much, as every time you do you will get unsubscribes. So like all campaigns you have to have a multi platform strategy, and space out your emails.

I am pretty much stuck on the big three, FB, Twitter and LI (a little bit Google +). I have only recently started learning and ramping up my twitter and the also the VSW (Vancouver School of Writing) twitter account, which is posting my blog also. Since I am pretty much a FB girl this is all new to me so I rely on some advice from Gary Bizzo. Gary and I are going to try some twitter strategies in the next little while and see how they work and let you know. Gary has about 485K twitter followers but they are not necessarily readers of fiction, they are generally entrepreneurs, so we will see if we can pull off a spike of views to my campaign page. KEEP you posted here on that and Gary’s blog too.

• Have not touched the FB book promotion groups yet but will at some point- have been busy subscribing to many
• I have yet to go to other lists and network groups
• I have yet to get my handout cards sent to me and flaunting them at upcoming talks, courses and to people I meet.

I think the big trick is successfully asking people to send via their social media to their friends to get a broader multiplied audience, as in: You tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on, and so on… Like Martin and some of my friends have done… thanks friends!

Please share this blog and share the nomination link if you haven’t already, if you are so inclined and like my book page and excerpt.

Always wanted to go to an exotic writer’s retreat?  CLICK HERE for exciting info on our new permanent location for our 2018 Writing Retreats in Mexico!

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