G is for Genre Chart

 

Regular readers will have seen this chart mentioned quite often, and right now, all seven STAC Mysteries are currently in their Kindle genre chart: Books/Crime, thrillers & Mystery/British Detectives. As I write, The Filey Connection is placed at number 10, and The Chocolate Egg Murders at number 13. The remaining five are spread around the middle of the top 100, and the lowest ranked is My Deadly Valentine at number 83.

What makes this chart so important?

To answer that, you need only look at the overall rankings of the STAC Mysteries. Filey is number 1032, Chocolate Egg at 1107 and My Deadly Valentine is number 6994. What chance do the top two, never mind the rest, have of coming to the readers’ notice? None.

The average surfer will probably look at the first three or four pages, up to, perhaps number 100, then call it a day. The categories help narrow down the search, and the genre chart lets the reader see what is most popular in the individual categories. It helps raise the books’ visibility.

Some charts are easier to break into than others. My idiot alter-ego, Flatcap, is placed quite highly in Humour/Parenting & Families, yet its overall ranking is about 50,000. In order to break into the British Detectives chart, an overall ranking of about 8,000 is needed.

Naturally, all of this is beyond the control of the author. All any writer can do at the outset is ensure readers know the book is out there. After that, it is the readers who decide.

And I’m grateful that so many readers take to my cosy mysteries.

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The STAC Mysteries are available as paperbacks and as e-book downloads in all formats, or direct from Crooked Cat Books in MOBI, EPUB and PDF formats