I think Joleene has taken the words right out of my mouth. And of course, Amazon has taken far too much genre control out of their authors hands. I mean, since they’re struggling as a company to hit their projected quarterly profits (yes, I work side by side with a financial planner and I am learning a lot about the market) they should not be trying to mess with the people still very much responsible for what profit they do make. With sites like Smashwords, Kobo, etc. there are a lot more self pub friendly publishing sites that we as authors can use. They really need to get themselves in check.
It was recently brought to my attention (thanks to the Sensational Christmas Sale Event) that Amazon has classified Shades of Gray as a Young Adult/Teen novel.
Say What??
When an author/publisher uploads a book to Amazon they are allowed to choose a category to place their book in from a rather small list. Amazon then – apparently randomly – sticks the book in several other categories – like sci-fi shorts that you can read in two hours (This is a real category). And, as I said, they put Shades of Gray in the YA category. But why? How do they choose these seemingly odd extra categories for our books?
The question has been answered by Amazon help:
Hello Joleene,
Thank you for contacting Kindle Direct Publishing.
I understand you’re concerned about the category of your book, “Shades of Gray.”
Looking at your account, I see that based on your keywords…
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Author Maegan Provan 
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