Buddy, can you spare a Fiverr?

My Fiverr experiment continues. I decided to see if anyone there could help me narrow in to what genre my book is. This is to figure out what kind of cover I should be looking at.

Covers are signifiers. The blurb, the fonts, interior design, those also play a part. A cozy doesn't look like a political thriller, mostly. But I've been having trouble figuring out just what "modern Indiana Jones" looks like. 

And, apparently, so do other people:

But the problem is getting to the ears of someone who really understands the genre landscape and who can say that the Athena Fox stories are really more like THIS thing or THAT thing and should have the semiotics to entice readers who like THOSE. 

Fiverr was almost a wash here. Lots of people wrestle with the categories at Kindle/Amazon. And with the keyword system there. But the problem is, the people who are up on Fiverr willing to lend a hand aren't coming from "I read a ton and understand the evolution of the field and what you have is less Steampunk and more Clockpunk with a YA flavor..."

They are coming from an SEO direction. They all want to tell you how to beat the Amazon algorithm to get the most sales.

Now don't get me wrong; in the big Civilization game of the Amazon marketplace, more sales is more visibility. So getting more books sold DOES increase the chances of them getting in front of the reader who will appreciate them. (The downside to category hacking is the people who think they are buying dinosaur porn, find they've bought amphibian erotica, and spam your market corner with 1-star reviews.)

But that made it an impossible search and, when I contacted several people, an impossible conversation. Nobody cared about nailing down the right genre. Nobody was advertising that. It's, again, a conversation that's been in progress for far too long. An evolved structure. The only thing that distinguished one offering from another is the number of keywords they would find for you at which fixed price in their price schedule.

And more signs of a conversation in progress; a fair amount of "I don't do creche-rampages like other people do" or whatever they are saying that I don't care about. Yes, people are competing bloodily on a playing field with complicated rules (that Amazon is changing as is their whim). But I don't care. I consider this more hobby than not, probably a net loss activity, and I'm just not that interested in chasing down the perfect card-counting mechanic to break the bank. I just want a seat at the table. For a little while.

***

So I dropped some bucks anyhow. And I looked at who was doing formatting -- the next ugly chore. And again, elaborate pricing schedules that are carefully listing all the crap that you would THINK anyone who could finish a novel could already deal with. And the elephant in this room; "Up to 30,000 words!" Um, excuse me? You are offering to format BOOKS for Kindle and your cut-off is a third the size of a novel? What the hell?

Well, okay. If the client is dumb enough to think 30,000 works is a good selling length, then they probably DO need help putting page numbers on it.

You get what you pay for. And apparently, with Fiverr, often less than that.