You ran a bulk sync on the Fiction category and your store now has thousands of titles - but you have realized you only wanted Mystery & Thriller. Now you are staring at a Shopify product list that includes literary fiction, romance, historical fiction, sci-fi, and everything else that falls under the Fiction umbrella.
This is a fixable situation. Here is how to approach it cleanly, whether you want a quick path forward or a more permanent solution.
Why This Happens and How to Avoid It Next Time
BooksCloud's bulk sync pulls all titles that match your filter criteria for the selected category. "Fiction" is a broad top-level category in BooksCloud, so syncing it brings in every sub-genre under that umbrella. "Mystery & Thriller" is a narrower sub-category that would have scoped the import to exactly what you wanted.
Going forward: always check whether BooksCloud offers a sub-category option for your niche before syncing at the top-level category. Choosing the more specific category from the start is far easier than cleaning up afterward.
But if you have already synced, here is how to fix it.
Step 1 - Identify What You Want to Keep Using Tags
BooksCloud automatically tags products with genre and category information when they are imported. After a Fiction bulk sync, your Mystery & Thriller titles will carry a tag like "mystery-thriller" or similar. Your first move is to find out exactly which tag BooksCloud applied to those titles.
In your Shopify admin, go to Products and filter or search by the tag you believe corresponds to Mystery & Thriller. Confirm that the right books are appearing under that tag. If the tagging looks correct, you now have a clear way to identify what you want to keep versus what you want to remove.
Step 2 - Bulk Delete the Non-Mystery Titles
Shopify's admin does not offer a "delete everything that does NOT have this tag" filter natively, but you can approach this in a couple of ways:
Option A - Use Shopify bulk actions with tag filtering. Filter your product list by a tag you want to remove - for example, "literary-fiction" or "romance" - select all, and use the bulk action to delete. Repeat for each unwanted sub-genre tag. This works well if BooksCloud applied distinct sub-genre tags to each title.
Option B - Export, filter, and bulk delete via CSV. Export your full product list as a CSV from Shopify. Open it in a spreadsheet application, filter by the tags column to isolate non-mystery titles, then use a Shopify bulk delete app or the Shopify API to delete those product IDs. This approach is more precise when dealing with large product counts.
Option C - Use a Shopify product management app. Apps like Bulk Product Editor or similar tools allow more sophisticated filtering - including "tag does not contain" conditions - making it easier to select and delete everything outside your target sub-genre.
Step 3 - Re-Sync Correctly Going Forward
Once you have cleared out the unwanted titles, run a fresh BooksCloud bulk sync using the "Mystery & Thriller" sub-category specifically. This replaces the broad import with a properly scoped one, and future syncs will stay within that narrower scope.
If you accidentally deleted some Mystery & Thriller titles during the cleanup, the re-sync will bring them back without any issues.
The Cleaner Long-Term Setup
After re-syncing with the correct sub-category, set up a Shopify automated collection using BooksCloud's mystery-thriller tag. That way, any future sync additions automatically appear in the right collection without any manual sorting on your part. It takes about two minutes to configure and prevents this kind of catalog sprawl from happening again.