I have a problem. I don’t know what kind of books I am writing .

They are romance, but not in a generic bodice ripper sense. They have a strong paranormal bent but it’s not the only theme. Spirit guides abound and a ghost is featured in the second book in the series. And in the third book (revisions continue) romance, paranormal, spirit guides and the ghost all come together. But when I look at the list of Amazon best selling romance, I don’t know where these books belong. This will be important when I reissue the first two in the series and publish the third as on Amazon Kindle you need to pick two categories for each title.

I copied the best selling romance list below from The Passive Voice. If you are a writer or a reader you should subscribe to this blog written by a lawyer. Very interesting stuff on a wide variety of topics. One of the blogs this week was about the importance of Children’s Picture books and had a link of a Scottish grandmother reading to a baby. I was laughing out loud by the end of that YouTube video.

Anyway, here is the list of the Amazon’s best selling romance categories. It was also instructive to look at the covers of these books, but that didn’t help me figure out where my books belong.

• Paranormal Romance Kindle Bestsellers
• Romantic Mystery and Suspense Kindle Bestsellers
• African-American Romance Kindle Bestsellers
• Fantasy and Futuristic Romance Kindle Bestsellers
• Clean and Wholesome Romance Kindle Bestsellers
• Romance Collections & Anthologies Kindle Bestsellers
• Gothic Romance Kindle Bestsellers
• Holiday Romance
• Inspirational Romance
• LGBT Romance
• Military Romance
• Multicultural and Interracial Romance

I found another romance list on Amazon.

“For a title to appear in the Romance sub-categories below, the title’s search keywords must include at least one of the keywords or phrases listed next to the sub-category. These categories and subcategories are specific to books listed for sale on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. Other marketplaces may not support these keywords. ”

*Subcategory is specific to the U.S. marketplace or Amazon.com.

This information helps — sort of — romance/paranormal/ghosts comes the closest, but I still don’t know where my books belong. They are set in the Caribbean. That’s not a category. They have spirit guides. Not a category.  Two of the characters in the second and third book are twins. Not a catagory. I was surprised that there wasn’t a Christian romance category. Not that that would have helped me.

As I look at the list above I realize that maybe each of the books fit into different romance categories because they follow the same characters through a generation. Different characters take center stage.

Knowing the category of a book is important in marketing because of key words. I probably should have thought more carefully about this twelve years ago when I wrote the first in the series. But I’ve learned that my books don’t always follow the plot line I intended. Which is what created this problem in the first place. I still don’t know where my books belong.

Maybe I need to research Fiction categories.