Some pages exist mainly to help people get somewhere else, home pages, section main pages, product-listing pages, and search-results pages all share this same core purpose: providing direct pathways to closely related content. A home page typically offers descriptions of the site's main sections alongside links to them, what the source material calls scope notes, helping visitors understand what each part of the site actually contains before they commit to clicking into it. Section main pages do the same job one level down, with excerpts or descriptions pointing to their own subordinate content.
These pages commonly take one of two forms: list pages, which present easy-to-scan vertical listings of individual items, or card-based pages, which use modular visual components to convey similar information with more visual weight per item.
A navigation page that people arrive on and immediately bounce away from hasn't failed by being unattractive: it's failed at its one job, which is convincing someone to go one step deeper.
The absence of description or preview content is the strongest explanation. A bare list of subcategory names with nothing else gives a visitor no way to sample the category or confirm they're in the right place before committing further effort. The source material is explicit that scope notes and previews of content exist precisely to help visitors judge relevance before they click deeper, without them, this page is essentially just a directory of labels, asking visitors to guess whether any given subcategory is worth exploring.
Having many subcategories isn't inherently the problem, a literary fiction category legitimately covers a lot of ground, and a well-designed page can present that breadth without becoming a dead end. Alphabetical ordering of subcategories is a reasonable, if secondary, organizing choice on its own; it isn't what's driving people away.A reasonable set of fixes: add a brief scope note at the top of the page describing what literary fiction as a category actually encompasses, and convert the page to a card-based layout featuring a handful of popular or newly released titles with cover images, so visitors immediately see concrete, appealing examples of what they'll find by continuing to browse, rather than being asked to commit to clicking into an unlabeled subcategory purely on faith.