T is for Top 100

 

Writing the book is, in many ways, the easy part. Once it’s written and out there, getting it noticed then becomes the main aim, and it’s a time consuming, frustrating job.

Amazon come in for a lot of criticism, but in their defence they provide authors with all the tools they need to raise their books’ visibility, and the best amongst them are the genre or category charts.

The STAC Mysteries are classified under Crime, Thriller & Mystery/British Detectives. As I write this, seven a.m. on a Tuesday morning all seven STAC Mysteries can be found in that genre’s top 100.

The Filey Connection is placed highest at about number 20, My Deadly Valentine is lowest at number 94 (and by the time I post this, it could all have changed again).

The categories were designed to make life easy for book buyers. The genre chart is a useful by-product, and it’s one any author can use.

I follow the chart movements daily, always ready to tweet or post significant events. Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend was the first title to make the top 20 of the British Detectives chart. My Deadly Valentine set a precedent when it entered the Top 100 on the day of its release. None of the previous titles had done so. It peaked at an absolute high of number 22. The Chocolate Egg Murders went one step further. It, too, entered the chart on the day of release, but within a week it had made the top ten and eight days after launch, it sat at number 5. You can imagine how I felt with one of my titles sitting alongside the greats of whodunit writing; Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Christie.

The genre top 100 helps raise the visibility of the author’s work. Most buyers look at the first four or five pages of a site. If your book is in the genre chart, it will be found in those pages.

But you should never forget that it is not you, the author, who puts the book in that chart. It is the readers. I offer my thanks to them every time I see my book(s) climb another few places.

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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