What’s a Bookseller to Do with BISAC Codes?

To wrap up 2024, the Book Industry Study Group updated its list of Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) codes, used to standardize subject categories for books in the North American market, by adding 223 new headings and adjusting 129 existing codes. (One example: adding “cozy” to fiction/fantasy.) While publishing companies rely on BISACs to categorize their offerings, there is a consensus among independent booksellers that the system is, in the words of David Enyeart, manager of Next Chapter Books in St. Paul, Minn., “an interesting but minor tool”—one that can cause more problems than it solves for some stores. “We’re sitting on 9,000 books,” he said. “I can’t break them into 600 categories.”

Next Chapter, Enyeart pointed out, contains 45 categories in its POS system that “map onto spaces in the store, so we know where to shelve books and can compare and contrast sales.” New or updated BISAC codes have no impact on Enyeart’s system. “We’re driven by sales data,” he explained. “We’re not like libraries, which keep books forever and need that breadth.”

Booksellers told PW that as a rule, indies don’t need the granular kind of detail provided by the BISAC system. Instead, they must “pay attention and look at each book,” rather than relying on codes created or assigned by external entities, said Luisa Smith Smith, the head buyer at Book Passage in both Corte Madera and San Francisco, Calif. That’s even the case, she asserted, at such larger stores as the Corte Madera location. The store shelves 28,000 titles in 300–400 subject categories—mostly due to a large travel section and children’s department—but still, shelving is done according to customer tastes and bookseller preferences.

Noting that indie booksellers “hope that someone will discover something on our shelves,” Smith insisted that organic connection driven by market knowledge, not hyperspecific categorization, is what makes that happen. As an example, Smith cited Our Infinite Fates by Laura Steven (Wednesday, out now), a novel categorized as YA fiction/fantasy/romance, which she compared to the 2019 title This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, categorized as fiction/science fiction/time travel.

“BISAC misses connections between books that we booksellers make,” Smith said. “For us, it’s all about connecting the reader with the right book. We shelve books to guide customers between categories, not separate books.” If there is a question about best store placement, she said, she is more likely to ask the publishers’ rep for recommendations.

Another concern, Smith said, is that drilling down into hyper-specific categories can pigeonhole some books and authors, in, for example, such a category as fiction/Indigenous/Indigenous futurism. “Great Indigenous writers are great writers who happen to be Indigenous,” she said. “You risk ghettoizing certain subcategories if you follow BISAC too closely.” While books by authors like Tommy Orange and Louise Erdrich are not categorized as Indigenous literature, books by lesser-known authors—such as the nonfiction and poetry works of Linda LeGarde Grover, for instance—sometimes are.

Like Enyeart, Smith acknowledged BISAC’s use for librarians, noting that chain stores and online retailers can also benefit from the system. But indies “know our inventories, and should know the authors,” she said. “We should be the ones categorizing books for our customers.”

In other cases, booksellers say, the categories don’t drill down enough. At Charis, a feminist bookstore with a large LGBTQ+ inventory in Decatur, Ga., owner Sara Luce Look said she and her staff typically check Ingram’s iPage database when there are questions regarding how to categorize a book; while she occasionally refers to BISAC, she said, it’s mostly just to look at updates, because, she said, she’s “a nerd” who enjoys keeping up-to-date on BISAC. But the lack of filters in both the iPage database and BISAC, Look said, has proven problematic in the past—even for customers.

For instance, when customers search for “feminist, queer, or trans” titles on the Charis website—a part of the American Booksellers Association’s IndieCommerce platform, which is fueled by Ingram—homophobic or transphobic titles often pop up. “People find books Charis would never carry,” Look said, “and we have to manually take them off our website.”

Look recalled an instance when Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters topped the results on searches for books on transgender studies. “Other transphobic books would also pop up,” she said. “They need to add to the category of transgender studies, ‘criticism of transgender,’ so it doesn’t all come up together.”

Look said she is concerned about both who creates the categories and who assigns them. Not only do the searches pull up titles that offend her customers, she has also seen books—usually self-published—that are misrepresented. “These self-publishers pick BISAC categories so as to be seen in as many places as possible,” she said. That means that books categorized as, for instance, queer romance often have nothing to do with the category.

In the end, BISAC is “just a tool, just like iPage and Edelweiss are tools,” Look said. “A bookseller is always going to be a better search engine to guide readers through all this.”