Best-Ranking Keywords in Amazon Categories

 

Keywords

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Many trade publishers and author-publishers don’t understand Amazon’s categories and fail to use the system to their advantage.  They either don’t use all categories available to them or, without drilling down further, they choose something generic like Fiction, which is useless as a category unless being at the very top of the Amazon rankings.  When you are picking a category you don’t want one with a broad, busy market, you want a category that’s narrow.  Why?  Because Amazon’s algorithm is ignited when a book hits the top of a category.

Amazon offers BISAC subject headings, which are industry standard – not always reflecting the actual categories in the Kindle Store.  David Gaughran wrote in one of his blogs: “While the system attempts to map your BISAC choice to a Kindle Store category, it doesn’t always work. This leads to the situation where you have:

  • Categories that appear only in Books (i.e. the print book listings and not in the Kindle Store itself)
  • International-only categories (for example, Medical Thriller was a category in the UK Kindle Store, but not in the US until Amazon recently added it)
  • Unique Kindle Store categories that are not selectable when uploading
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This inexact mapping between the BISAC-inspired choices in the KDP interface and the actual categories in the Kindle Store creates both a problem and an opportunity.  Amazon recently added new granular sub-categories in some genres, but others were completely untouched.”
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Solutions for Authors and Publishers

They can’t add *additional* categories, but they can assign one of your two to the category you want. There’s actually two ways of doing this you can try:

1) Take the category name and add it as a keyword for that title in KDP. This works some of the time, but not always and indeed it may only work for the new categories, and even then not always. Amazon has an in-built keyword search or long-tail keyword phrase finder in their search field.
Use Amazon’s help page: Selecting Browse Categories.

Here an Example:
If you wrote a non-fiction book in the Business and Money category, Amazon advices: “In order for a title to appear in the Business & Money sub-categories below, the title’s search keywords must include at least one of the keywords or phrases listed next to the sub-category.”  Scroll down the page and select your genre. Using the nominated keywords, your book will appear in a number of sub-categories.  Keyword choices are listed for all major genres, however not the same categories in each country.
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Experimenting with keywords inside the KDP brings up lots of possibilities.  They used to show up as ‘tags’, but as you have noticed, Amazon has stopped readers from being able to view and use tags on its main website.  When using these methods, you do not need to spend a cent on software or e-books promising magical sales results.  All you need to do is carefully select your seven precious keywords, and then have your ebook perfectly positioned for buyers to find. You will see, your book will show up in more than two categories now.

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2) Choose “Non-Classifiable” as one of your categories, and then email KDP with the *full exact path* of the category you’re aiming for. You may get pushback, saying that you aren’t allowed to choose that. The customer service teams are incorrect when they say this, and you need to stay firm and keep insisting. If the category exists in the Kindle Store, and isn’t a restricted one like Kindle Singles or Kindle Serials, you *can* get your book there – it just might require a little persistence.

Authors of Historical Fiction for example, don’t get many category choices at Amazon, contrary to B&N – Barnes&Noble – where twenty different sub-categories are offered.

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Many authors and even trade publishers often don’t care about category, sometimes even don’t register or place the title only in one category.  Of all the work you do placing your book on Amazon, this might be the most important key piece of marketing.  Make sure you put the book in the most narrow category you can.  Switch your categories from time to time.  The good thing about Amazon is that they don’t limit you to the number of changes you can make.
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Read More:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2EZES9JAJ6H02
http://www.selfpublishingreview.com/2015/02/how-to-choose-kindle-keywords/
http://www.lindsayburoker.com/tips-and-tricks/book-more-categories-amazon-with-keywords/
http://business.tutsplus.com/articles/how-to-choose-keywords-and-categories-for-your-kindle-ebook–fsw-39335

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