Amazon algorithm pseudo-slander
The story has surfing, a library quest to find a lost manuscript, hot and cold domestic discord, eighties kids ditching school and smoking weed, bar bands, messy pilgrimages and the ghosts of memory. A dual-timeline, nested narrative romp through Hawaiʻi and California, and I chose my platform-mandated three subjects and seven keywords accordingly.
Amazon, after ingesting the full manuscript and running its black-boxed analysis, decided it was literary fiction.
I don’t pretend to know the nuances of fiction subcategories, but to me that phrase communicates an in-your-head remoteness that’s the exact opposite of what I thought I was writing. And it shook me. A fresh avenue of self-doubt, inflicted by the Amazon algorithm. Maybe I’d used one too many words like “asymptotically.” Maybe the characters spent too much time in university and library settings. Maybe I can’t write.
Beers were consumed. And only after achieving the proper beer level did I think to Google literary fiction:
“Perhaps the best way to think about literary fiction is that it’s uncategorizable. Unlike genre fiction, which can be broken down even further into different types of fiction genres, lit fic doesn’t fall neatly into any of the genre boxes.”1
Well, damn. I like the sound of that. Literary fiction. Maybe I owe the algorithm an apology.