Is Amazon Changing How We Write Books, As Well As How We Buy Them?

Tara Sperling’s post strikes a chord. Online distributors like Amazon steer us toward genres we enjoy, and away from the discovery of literary gems. The more we focus on preferred genres as readers, the less flexible our writer’s brain.1 Our own books suffer and our readers suffer in turn.

1This is a fundamental discovery of neuroscience at the end of the century. A brain you don’t exercise is a brain that ossifies. The more you limit your reading choices, the weaker the neural connections to writing styles and tropes beyond our preferred genre, Ultimately, we cease to recognize the titles as readable at all.back

Tara Sparling writes

Yay for uniformity!

The other day, I tried a little experiment, and attempted to browse Amazon as though it were a good old-fashioned, bricks-and-mortar bookshop. It didn’t end well. It’s a miracle that my laptop survived the experiment, given my frustration.

Most bookshops I know, whatever the size, broadly have 3 sections for adult fiction: ‘Bestsellers’, ‘General Fiction’, and the perennially popular* ‘Crime’.

The bigger bookshops, in this country at least, might have further sections for ‘Sci-Fi/Fantasy’ or ‘Irish Interest’: but broadly, and for decades, booksellers simply used to separate ‘Fiction’ from ‘Non-Fiction’ and ‘Children’s’.

My experiment on Amazon went broadly as follows: first I stupidly thought I’d browse through ‘Bestsellers’. But Amazon said ‘No’. Amazon decreed that I couldn’t merely browse by ‘Fiction’ bestsellers from their home page. There were only 5 Fiction bestsellers available on the landing page, and no option to click through to a longer list.

With some effort I eventually…

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