We analysed the 200 top-ranked books in Cozy Fantasy

This is the top 200 books on Amazon returned by the search 'cozy fantasy' in the Fantasy category, sorted by Sales Rank (technical note: you can't search for books in strict rank order, so we actually capture the first 1000 books returned by this search, then sort them, and take the top 200 of those).

If you want to see the search, you can run it for yourself here. Searching on Amazon is never perfect, but if we get enough books, we can get a reasonable picture of what the reading public are seeing when they look for cozy fantasy titles.

For each book, Topic Tags are a list of what topics are mentioned in the blurb, title, subtitle and series name. These might be tropes, or themes, or niches, or subgenres – anything that might give us clues to the content in the book. If you’re familiar with Netflix, it’s basically like the tags Netflix attaches to their titles. For each topic tag, I have a list of matching words or phrases for each tag. For instance, ‘Crime’ matches to ‘rob*’, ‘heist’, ‘thief*’, and so on. Using this list, I scan the blurb, title, subtitle and series name for each book. If it has any of those matching words, it gets that tag. 

Of course, this kind of approach is only as accurate as the list, and it’s always going to be a bit of an average – so I put it together by talking to a bunch of authors in each genre, and trying to sort of find a consensus. If you’d like to see the list, you can download it here. (nerds: it's just a bunch of regexes).

If you see any that you think aren’t right, or find a book that should have a particular tag but doesn’t, please let me know. Ultimately this is a matter of general agreement that specific tags tell us something meaningful about the content of specific titles – it’s not up to me or anyone else alone. I tweak it a little bit every month or so, to make sure it stays current. If there are specific things you think should be on there based on your genre knowledge, I’d love to hear about them.

Covers are ordered using an image-processing and clustering algorithm to put the most ‘similar’ covers together. This is always a bit of a judgement call, but it seems to work pretty well, inasmuch as styles of covers tend to go together, and you’ll see a number of situations where books in a series with very obviously the same style of cover, but different tones, are put next to each other. (technical note: it’s the ‘wavelet hash’ method in the Python 'imagehash' library performed on images with zero saturation, but there are plenty of other approaches; it turns out this is actually quite a complex problem).

There’s no one perfect way of ordering covers; it used to be just in Best Sellers Rank order, but after discussions it became clear that we had an opportunity to add some more information – we have the Best Sellers Rank in the spreadsheet already, and if you want to see the covers in order, you can just go to the Cover Gallery in the (Airtable) Dashboard and sort them by Best Sellers Rank.

I tried sorting by ‘major color’ as well, which in some cases was useful, but talking to people suggested pretty strongly that they grouped covers by ‘style’ when they were doing their own research; e.g. they had ‘single man, facing front’, and ‘man and woman, facing each other’, ‘floating faces with text in middle’, and so on. So that’s what I’ve tried to recreate programmatically.

Amazon categories are assigned by a combination of what the author requests when they publish a book, and by Amazon's judgement on the best-fitting categories depending on the book's title, blurb and keywords. Amazon doesn't really enforce genre distinctions based on the content of books, only on cover, title, blurb and keywords.  Sometimes this process results in books being in the categories that readers expect, and...sometimes it doesn't.  

The relationship between Amazon categories and genre (as readers and authors see it) is a pretty wonky one; there is a new Cozy Fantasy category, but it's only for print books right now, not ebooks. It's likely that this will change at some point and an ebook equivalent will be added. If you're interested, there's a list of all the categories on Amazon here.

At the moment, I mark a title as ‘trad’ if the Publisher field is an imprint of one of the Big Five (now Big Four) trade publishers. Otherwise, I call it ‘non-trad’, meaning ‘independent- or self-published’. If you want to see the current list of ~290 imprint names, you can download it here. I revise this regularly; if there are any you think should or shouldn’t be on there, please drop me a line.

This is a bit subjective, and will always be open to interpretation; the reason we’re trying to make this general distinction, though, is to look for differences between self-published and non-self-published books in a particular genre. Some genres have striking differences between the two, but in others you can’t really tell. Neither is better or worse than the other, but it’s good to be able to perceive differences if they do exist.