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You’re writing a romance novel though, right? Meaning that your book is written for a romance audience, and is intended to meet all of their expectations? If that’s the case, then being placed in the erotica category by choice or because of an action by Amazon is going to severely limit your advertising opportunities. And not just with Amazon, but platforms like Facebook as well.

If categorized as erotica, your book will still show up in general searches, and is only removed from those searches if adult filtered (meaning that you use explicit content in your forward-facing metadata, like your title, cover, blurb, etc).

If your book is not going to meet the expectations of a romance reader, then there’s nothing wrong with leaning into the erotica category, and that gives you more latitude to amp up the sexual aspects of the femdom relationship in your blurb and keywords.

Thank you for your response. I have a follow up question…

I think I am unclear on why it is so important to avoid being classified as an erotic book or erotica…

I know it means that Amazon will make the title less likely to show up in general searches (is that right?), but the kind of book I am writing would be the target of more specific searches anyway…

My book contains a femdom relationship as I said, (aka a female led relationship), all totally consensual, but full of BDSM, CBT, spanking, toys, etc., and people that want to read that type of story don’t want to wade through a thousand vanilla titles to find one, so they would put those words in the Search box anyway… So why would it matter that much if Amazon puts the dreaded “Erotica” label on it?

That’s why I’m confused. Please advise.

Unfortunately, I’m not really familiar enough with the femdom niche to suggest any keywords that you haven’t already likely considered. The good news is that femdom romance is going to be pretty small, so something like “femdom romance novels” is a good place to start and is going to return comparatively few books. The bad news is that a lot of the smaller niches have been conscripted by folks who are writing erotica and marketing as romance, femdom included. Fortunately, the more specific terms that a femdom audience might be searching for should be spared that sort of thing.

Something else to be aware of as you keyword the book is to be careful with the more explicit terms (even something like “erotic”) because Amazon can and will move books out of the Romance category if the metadata makes it seem like the book has been miscategorized.

Yep! That’s a pretty good start.

I am about 157,000 words into the first of at least two books about this couple and am starting to wonder how to keep Amazon from burying it. You probably get a hundred messages a day… I am hoping you might find a minute to write and suggest which keywords I might use to satisfy Amazon. Thank you for any assistance.