Rocket's Red Glare

Wrote one scene in the troublesome chapter. Two or three more to go. My questions keep expanding, though. They expanded right up into the "what is this novel about anyway" zone.

So I stopped and picked up a copy of PublisherRocket to see if it could give me a sense of Kindle categories and keywords and where my book seems to fit.

Well. Is good to know that what I think of as "Regional Mysteries" are still going strong. And actually a lot of more adventure/thriller oriented ones. That is, this is like the Tony Hillerman books, or (to a certain extent) the Spencer books; places where a specific environment/region is a major character. Florida Keys, for instance, in the books I saw in my category browsing.

I know from my own searches there are a bunch of archaeology-themed thriller things. Sometimes teams, more often series around a named character. Which is where I was intending to stage. I wrote this book as more an origin story than a stand-alone.

After poking around a little in Rocket I'm starting to see some numbers for archaeology adventures as well as travel adventure fiction (somewhat less common but also less defined). There seem, oddly, fewer Lara Croft clones than I had remembered from my own browsing. But that's probably good. The closest analog is probably the Amelia Peabody mysteries, which are a bit cozy, and also historical, but have a strong interest in archaeology and history.

Rocket is designed for gaming the system, especially gaming the search and display algorithms at Amazon. The strategy it suggest and is optimized for is not to find what is popular, but to discover what keyword or category searches seem underserved. It basically compares the number of people looking for increasingly specific things versus how many copies end up getting sold.

Well, I feel a little more educated now. I don't quite feel like I got my money's worth out of the software. I also feel I've spent long enough trying to re-write this chapter and -- after spending most of this rare productive evening re-reading all the surrounding chapters -- it may be better to skim over it or basically leave it out entirely.