How to Find More Gothic Romances... Part I

Wow. It's been too long since I last posted. Please forgive me. Life is hopping, but in a good way. :)

I wanted to start a little series on ways to find new gothic romances-- as in contemporary ones or novels/works that might be new to you.

I think starting with Amazon makes sense since they sell a lot of books and most people have Kindles as their e-readers (or maybe you're like me and you just use Kindle for PC!). I'm going to focus on e-books today, but many of the tips for hunting for Kindle editions will work for print, too.

I'm going to write about these as they come to me, so consider this part I. If this trick is a "duh" to you, please forgive. I'm assuming some readers might not be aware of these ways to find new books. If you have other ideas, leave them in the comments.

1. Look under Gothic Romance.
If you know a bit about Amazon, you probably realize that authors or publishers can categorize their books under two areas when they post them to Amazon. I tend to have most of mine put under gothic romance and whatever else is applicable. So, it's easy to go to the Amazon homepage and go to the search pull down. Click Kindle Store there. Then, type in Gothic Romance. One the list comes up, you'll notice that Relevance is next to the "Sort by" list on the upper right hand side. I leave it that way and scroll through. This gives me a list of the top 100 gothic romances. One of mine shows up at #34 today. ;)

When you glance through the list, you'll see a lot of vampire stuff and fantasy. I skip over much of that as I do some of the poorly edited/terribly blurbed ghost stories or gothic romances on there. I know as a writer that if the blurb/description of the book is not up to par (ie, only a line or so that doesn't adequately describe the story as a writer should be able to do or a blurb fraught with mistakes), the book will usually follow suit.

I usually find a gem or two that I'd like to check out in the .99-3.99 range. Here are two I found today.

This one isn't a novel, but it looks fascinating, and I'm going to snag it free:
The Tale of Terror: A Study of Gothic Romance

And this one looks promising for $2.51:
http://www.amazon.com/Nachtst%C3%BCrm-Castle-Gothic-Austen-ebook/dp/B002PK120K/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1330529211&sr=1-10

And a pricier one but pubbed with Dorchester recently:
The Ravencliff Bride

So, that's a start. If you want print, you can search for Books and gothic romance. To be on the safe side, I might hop over to Goodreads and check the reviews for that second one. I'd hesitate on buying it longer than I would taking the freebie. ;) The third one is a bit more than I like to pay for a Kindle edition, but your opinion might vary.

I'll cover something else of this nature in my next post since I'm running out of time this morning. Have you found any good reads using this method?