Genres are a weird thing. Think of them like a Venn diagram, a bunch of circles some of which may overlap, others that don’t. Genres are important because as a writer they define who will and who will not be your target audience, and sometimes if also defines how well you need to write your book.
When I first started writing in 2018, I quickly knocked out two short, dodgy, unedited books under a throwaway pen-name, just to get the feel of the way the system works. They were pretty risqué and to tell the truth in the end I was quite embarrassed about them, making sure there was no way they could be traced back to me.
Every now and then I search for them on the Kindle site and see that one now has 3.5-stars and the other has 4.1-stars over 86 reviews. Both were $0.99, but both totally forgettable IMHO (the six people that gave 1 and 2-star ratings were spot on!). Writing them taught me two lessons, firstly, that writing was good fun, and secondly, there is no accounting for taste. What my first books also taught me was that writing done to please others would be far more successful that writing done to please yourself, and that writing done to please yourself, probably will not please others.
The reason is, that while you as a person are unique, you always find yourself going the same (safe) road in life, same friends, same food, same politics, same type of holidays, same route to work and same types of books, music and shows. Anything outside your norm is usually enough to cause you to avoid it, and this is how the algorithm works. You are a male or you watch enough violent action movies on Netflix, and it is highly likely you will never see any of the hundreds of PG romance movies. Same with YouTube, Spotify, etc., they know what you like and what you will click on and so won’t bother even showing you anything different. Don’t believe me? then look at your friends or partners view of the same site.
The Amazon algorithm is no different, you will only get pushed the authors you have bought before, or what those in the same demographic as you have bought before, and 99.99% of other authors will never be shown. The problem with all the algorithms is there is no way out. If you start from scratch, you are immediately recommended the top authors, top YouTube influencers and the top musicians. So, while I do love Coldplay as a band, I also like The Nudge, and while I do like Iain Banks, Dan Brown or JK Rowling as novelists, I also like E.N Able. Neither of these unknown artists would ever have been recommended to me by the algorithm, and it makes me sad that there are literally hundreds of others I will never find.
You may hate violence or sex, you may hate westerns or sci-fi, you may hate romance novels where it takes 200+ pages of ‘faffing-around’ before the man or woman gets to first base and then pow the book ends. Yet people love these tropes, and millions buy and read them every day. If you make your woman a ‘slutty bitch’ and your man a ‘billionaire business tycoon’, then it doesn’t matter what the story is about, or how much it is the same as all the others out there then there will always be an audience for it. The same is true of military Sci-Fi, which is basically take any normal military or naval story, swap the Russians for Klingons, the machine gun for a laser gun, and the submarine for a spaceship. The problem is, they are not much fun to write, and writing such a book might as well be done by an AI. I actually expect either now or in the near future hundreds a day will be churned out onto Amazon, making it almost impossible for the actual writer of this genre to make a living. Same with other artists, new humans will get pushed out of the loop, unless they are well known, lucky or spend a lot on publicity.
Even I am not immune to the algorithm. I often find myself repeatedly buying into the same narrative or good-looking book cover only to find a shallow veneer, and then once in a blue moon, picking up a book that I would never in a million years think I would like and thoroughly enjoying it. I even find myself reading best-sellers with thousands of 5-star review which were so bad, my first two novels would have given them a run for their money, this is also why I like libraries where I can physically browse a shelf.
So, you cannot please everyone, but you can please yourself. I think everyone has a story to tell, I have been trying to convince a couple of my friends to give it a go, but as they will tell you, it is actually quite hard to do. I have no advice for them except to keep going, and like any long journey you will eventually get there.
But if it’s so hard to do, why write novels for fun?
Do you remember all those movies and books where the hero does a complete ‘dick-move’ like when someone walks into the haunted graveyard, or the woman gets into the car with the stranger, or the hero puts his down gun for the baddie holding somebody hostage, or the evil mastermind doesn’t kill the hero immediately they capture them? The “What-the-fuck!!” moment, that you just know would never happen in real life, and don’t you just wish you could make another decision and re-write the book where that did not happen? Well, if you are the author, you can!
I throw away chapter after chapter of these types of things because I re-read them, and they are unbelievable, or don’t make sense, or just because I can. I can also make the hero do awesome things, because I can, or blow something up because I can. And best of all if I don’t like someone, they are gone, or even better, killed gruesomely! Books are organic, they never go or finish the way you expect, just like one of those chose your own adventure novels from the eighties. I have dozens of half-finished novels that will always be half-finished, and even more one or two pages of drivel that may actually have a story in them. Like walking a strange road in a dark forest, I don’t know where I will end up, I may get eaten by a bear or find a lovely mountain view with a fairy-tale waterfall, and that is why I love it.