Director’s Essay:

“Ideological Curation in Mainstream Publishing—the Case of Amazon’s Browse Categories”

Bernard Schweizer

In order to list a book on Amazon.com, a publisher or author has to upload a plethora of “metadata” detailing the content that potential buyers will encounter when they look up the title in question. Among the required information is “browse categories,” a set of identity markers with which every book must be branded before it can be sold on Amazon’s website. Browse categories are analogous to labeled bookshelves in a library or bookstore. Amazon’s sales rankings are keyed to these identities. Below is an example from Heresy Press’s The Hermit, with the browse categories indicated in blue. (Congratulations, Katya Grishakova, on landing a #1 ranking!)

While on the surface these identity markers reflect ordinary literary taxonomy, there’s more to such tagging than meets the eye—browse categories also function covertly as instruments of ideological curation.

To place a new literary fiction title on Amazon, a publisher or author must chose not only a “category” and one or two “subcategories” but also “placement” designations from an extensive menu of options:

Most of these designations are common and mundane, such as “Biographical,” “Historical,” “Satire,” and “Short Stories.” But three of the placement identities are rather dubious: “Black & African American,” “LGBTQ+,” and “Women’s Fiction.” This raises a number of questions: Why are fetishized identity markers getting mixed up with normal literary classifications? Why are there only three identity-based placement options? Why aren’t “Asian American,” “Native American,” “Muslim American,” “Hispanic,” or “Jewish Fiction” on the menu?

Presumably, the purpose of the outlying identity markers is to provide maginalized groups with visibility and cultural support. But if that’s the case, why is “Women’s Fiction” among the choices? Anybody with a casual knowledge of the marketplace knows that the vast majority of fiction published these days is written by women, while the vast majority of novel readers are women.

A spot check at my local Barnes & Noble revealed that of 22 titles displayed on the fiction bestseller shelf, 20 were by women. Or consider Harper Collins’s display at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair. The titles were not tagged “Women’s Fiction,” and yet all 9 books are female authored.

Presenting “Women’s Fiction” as if it were a marginalized or beleaguered category, commensurate with “LGBTQ+” and “Black & African American,” is disingenuous. Since women authors have 70-80% of the fiction market share, it would be more accurate to regard “Men’s Fiction” as an identify marker worthy of its own browse category.

But the absurdity cuts deeper yet: if you combine the overarching category “Literature & Fiction” with the identity marker “Women” on Amazon’s “metadata” template, you get a dizzying array of shades and nuances:

This thicket of variations is so dense you have to scroll far down to reach the bottom.

But try combining “Literature & Fiction” with “Men,” and the result is ONE SINGLE DESIGNATION, “Men’s Adventure.” Are men such benighted creatures that only the promise of adventure will prompt them to pick up a novel?

One is perhaps tempted to say, “So what?” But the thing is, Amazon’s eccentric taxonomy has real-world consequences. If a person entered a bricks-and-mortar bookstore looking for a gritty novel written in a—let’s say—Cormac McCarthy vibe, and if that person ended up wandering aisle after aisle labeled “Women’s Fiction,” “Women’s Adventure Fiction,” “African American Women’s Fiction,” “Women’s Dramas and Plays,” “Women’s Poetry,” etc., we could not fault that potential customer for leaving the store empty-handed. But that’s pretty much what the browsing experience on the Amazon website is like.

We seem to be confronted with a chicken-and-egg question. Are men in a decided minority among fiction readers (compared to women) because they are fundamentally hostile to literature, or does that statistical disparity reflect deliberate marketing strategies that define the male fiction consumer as a lost—or even nonexistent—cause? If the latter is the case, then it seems like a weird business plan to disqualify roughly half the human population from your clientele. But of course, if ideology is behind this, it would seem a bit less strange since ideology often runs counter to the evolutionary drive, as evidenced in the truism “the revolution eats its own children.”

And it’s not just that there are no (digital) book shelves on Amazon.com to acknowledge the male reading public. Other subpopulations are likewise being neglected. What about literary classifications that acknowledge elderly, conservative, libertarian, working class, anarchist, atheist, humanist, autistic, bipolar, neurodivergent, Mormon, Asian American, Native American, Muslim American, Hispanic, Jewish, or Hindu readers? Don’t they deserve their own browsing categories? Better yet, let’s get rid of identity tags altogether and instead celebrate sheer artistic merit. As the literary critic Dennis Scheck put it: “The point of literature is not to confirm or reinforce our identity. Literature gives us the freedom to leave our identity.”

“Fuzz”

by Jay Neugeboren

When I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the years following World War Two, my favorite person in the world was my grandfather Morris, a magician who performed under the name Marvello the Marvelous. My grandfather had once been a headliner playing the vaudeville circuits and Catskill mountain hotels, and I’d seen him perform lots of times—in shows he put on at the Flatbush Theater with a woman magician, Dell O’Dell, at Christmas every year, and at special shows he did for children—at synagogues, churches, American Legion Halls, and in small movie theaters he’d rent out twice a year on Sunday afternoons. I loved visiting him because he’d always teach me some of his tricks—sleight-of-hand routines with cards, coins, and scarves—and also because he’d take me with him to visit a group of families—he called them “gypsies”—that lived in his neighborhood.

I lived in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, not far from Ebbets Field, when the Dodgers still played there, and to get to my grandparents, who lived in Williamsburg, I’d take the Myrtle Avenue subway line to the Willoughby Street station. Williamsburg was mostly lower-middle class Jewish and Italian then, and was much quieter than my neighborhood, with fewer cars and trucks, fewer kids out playing, fewer people walking and shopping, and I was always surprised at how broken down everything seemed: streets, sidewalks, buildings, stores.

The Roma families my grandfather was friendly with lived in an abandoned sewing machine repair shop two blocks from my grandparents’ building, and starting from the first time I visited them, to my grandfather’s delight, the women were all over me, telling me what a great lover I was going to be some day, and how they could tell from how dark I was—skin, eyes, hair—that I probably had Roma blood in me. And when my grandfather was gone, they’d play this crazy game with me where I had to guess the number of teeth they had.

The women would line up from youngest to oldest, and I’d make a guess, and then they’d open their mouths and I’d count their teeth, and while I did they’d nibble on my fingers, and if I got the number of teeth right, the woman whose teeth I’d counted would unbutton my fly and play with me. The first time this happened was when I was nine or ten years old, and when I got to twelve or thirteen, this raven-haired girl who was probably fourteen or fifteen—her name was Fayola—took me with her into a bedroom, rolled me around in a bunch of scarves like I was a mummy, and told me to try to escape. Then she went down on me—the first time that ever happened—after which she set me free and, another first, invited me in, and every time I visited my grandparents after that, I’d visit Fayola too.

Once, on Memorial Day weekend, Fayola and I arranged to meet in Coney Island, and we did it while we were riding through the House of Horrors, and she kept laughing and saying stuff like “Oh Manny, Manny—do you still love my fanny?”—and telling me that even though I was a Jewboy I was sweeter than any man she’d ever had. I think my grandmother suspected what was going on, and when she knew I was going to visit the Roma families she would always warn me to watch out or they would steal me, to which my grandfather would say there was no chance they would steal me because they already had more children than they could count.

When my grandfather died—by then I was married and had a son and daughter older than I was the first time I met the Roma families—three elderly Roma women showed up at the funeral chapel. We embraced and we wept, but no matter my entreaties, they refused to come inside with me. Later, when I watched the casket that took my grandfather to the cemetery being loaded into the limousine, the women turned away and left, and that was when I recalled that whenever my grandfather came to their storefront with me he would bring a burlap bag filled with metal slugs the children could use in candy and gum-ball machines, and when I remembered the smiles he and the women exchanged, it occurred to me that my grandfather had had his share of fuzz too.

*****

Bio:
Jay Neugeboren has published numerous books, including award-winning works of both fiction and nonfiction, stories and essays published widely—in the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, Mother Jones, Tablet, Commonweal, Esquire, etc., and in more than 50 anthologies, including Penguin Modern Stories, Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories.