This is number 128 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHERE IS THAT BOOK about a demon with Julius Caesar?”
I was raised in the era of the Dewey Decimal System and vast card catalogs that had codes for authors, titles, and categories of books in the public library. I cannot count the number of hours I spent with a pad of paper, copying down the Dewey Decimal codes for books I wanted to check out.
So, when an interviewer asked me about Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon, “What genre would you call this? As they say, what shelf do you put this on?” I immediately jumped to section 813 in the library. That’s American and Canadian Fiction in the Dewey Decimal System. From there, things were broken down into categories like 813.5 for American and Canadian Fiction of the Twentieth Century. Or 813.54, American and Canadian Fiction of the Twentieth Century, 1945-1999.
Sadly, the Dewey Decimal System was invented in 1876 and made no consideration of American and Canadian Fiction of the twenty-first century.
Now libraries generally use the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). It has a lot more numbers, and far more divisions generally divided into Class, Subclass, Topic, Cutter Number, and Publication Date. So, Bob’s Memoir would fall somewhere in the range of P=Literature, S=American, 370-380=Prose Fiction. Then I’d get some kind of Cutter Number=Author Code and the Date=2025.
Unfortunately, none of those definitions will help find my book in either a brick and mortar or online bookstore. My interviewer would never find Bob’s Memoir. And the numbers just keep growing and growing.
Into the gap steps the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) with coding designed for finding books in a bookstore. It’s called the BISAC Subject Codes. You can freely look up codes on the BISG website. But the category names also show up when you upload a book for distribution with an online bookseller or print on demand service. As a general rule, they don’t use the code numbers, but rather their names.
When I was asked the question above, I had to think hard about it. The book covers 4,000 years of history from a mythical character’s viewpoint. So, it could be Historical Fiction. But Bob is constantly interfering in things, so it could be Alternative History. Usually, though, the outcome is the same as with actual history, so it’s not really an alternate. I finally suggested Historical Fantasy. When I uploaded the book, I discovered—much to my surprise—that code FIC009030 is Fiction/Fantasy/Historical.
The next question that comes to mind is ‘What about erotica?’ We’ve reached a point in our culture in which anything that has an explicit sex scene in it is automatically deemed erotica as a way of shunting it out of sight. Put it on a high shelf in the back of the store where only adults are allowed. The BISAC codes have twelve subdivisions of erotica and not one of them comes close to describing Bob’s Memoir. There is a category much farther down the alphabetical list of Romance/Erotic. Perhaps a better classification, however, is Romance/Paranormal/Demons, a new category created just this year. We’re getting popular!
The important thing, however, is to try to match the category as closely to your story as possible. This is where it will be ‘shelved’ online or in a bookstore. So, you want the category to be closest to where people are looking for something like your book to read. Usually, you can pick two categories. On some sites you can pick three.
I wrote the five books of The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins back in 2019-20. My intent was to create a do-over story (not a BISAC classification) in which the old man was returned to his fourteen-year-old body, but in a completely different alternate reality. The closest BISAC category I’ve found is Alternative History. The world in which Jacob finds himself has different laws, relationships, and even family dynamics. Many of the things he discovers are ideas he had endorsed in his previous life that had been implemented in this timeline, but with a very different perspective than when the old man had propounded them. His fourteen-year-old self didn’t see the world in the same way.
I actually set the main category as Fiction/Erotic/SciFi. It could have been classed as Romance/Polyamory. The question was ‘Where would the most likely readers look for it?’
Of course, most readers won’t look online for a category in which they want to invest their reading time. Some readers don’t search at all, but depend on the bookstore to recommend books based on what they’ve read before. Those recommendations come from the same category and list of keywords. There are exceptions. But if they search, most will search for a topic they want. So, the writer is given the option of also providing keywords, or search terms that will lead readers to their book. For Double Team, my keywords were ‘national service, coming of age, polyamory, music, performance, politics, reform, do over.’
You can make up your own list of keywords. The important thing is to think of what your reader was searching for when they came across your book. You may be limited to a certain number of keywords, or to a certain number of characters. You will be asked to separate the terms with commas or semicolons. This is to keep terms like ‘coming of age’ together and not get confused with simple ‘age.’
Double Team and the entire Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins eBook series is available on ZBookStore.
You should begin compiling a list of search terms for your novel early in the process. What concepts might a person be looking for when they stumble across your book? You should not need to include either the category or words in the title in your keywords. They will already come up.
A good technique is to look at the listing for books you consider similar to your book and check what keywords and categories those books are listed under.
I will say that the only online bookstore that came up with Double Team when I searched for ‘national service’ was ZBookStore.
Using our imaginary story, The Year I Lived, that I might write in November, let’s see if we can come up with a good category and some keywords (understanding that the story has not yet been written). Since the story is set in 1979-80, the first thing we can put on the list is Fiction/Historical/20th Century/General. Second, simply because I don’t know better yet, is Fiction/Action and Adventure. I am specifically leaving all categories of erotica off. Even though it might have a sex scene or two in it, I’m rejecting the notion that makes it erotica.
Next, let’s look at the keywords. The description says Lowell is remembering the things that happened in 1979, so I’ll start by suggesting ‘memory’ as a keyword. Interestingly, on ZBookStore, the first book in the results when searching for the keyword ‘memory’ is Nathan Everett’s City Limits. Since keywords are not limited to single words, let’s try ‘rags to riches’ as a search term. Fourteen books come up when entering that search term on ZBookStore.
Only two results come up when I use the search term ‘recovery.’ One of them is Devon Layne’s Double Take. If you remember the synopsis from last week’s post, Lowell starts the story divorced, unemployed, homeless, and hopeless. I tried entering the search term ‘homeless.’ Two results. One was Devon Layne’s Not This Time. The other was Nathan Everett’s The Volunteer.
There were two results when searching for divorced, none for hopeless, and none for unemployed. Many other terms, like community leader or police brutality brought up no results on ZBookStore. All of these terms brought up multiple pages of results on the big online booksellers.
The lesson is to go to the various online bookstores and do searches for your proposed keywords. Then look at the results and consider whether or not your book should be listed in that company. Certainly, in the case of The Year I Lived, the terms memory, homeless, and recovery all put me in exactly the company I want to be in on ZBookStore. That’s not necessarily true of the behemoth booksellers. Search every term you can think of that will describe your book and see what company it would put your book in. Yes, it is desirable to be high in the list of books with that keyword, but it’s not a good thing to be the only thing in it. That likely means no one is searching for that term. Just carefully consider the kind of company you want to be in.
All the things we’ve discussed so far will help you sell your finished novel. What we haven’t looked at yet are things that will help you get it written. Next week, “Building Character.”