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:…