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How to Choose Amazon Fiction Categories

Amazon Fiction Categories — How Many?

Amazon’s categorization of fiction helps browsers find books. Amazon’s category system uniquely its own, different from the publishing industry’s categories, and vastly more numerous. The publishing industry invented fiction categories and not a lot has changed in the way it uses them to market books. These categories help authors find agents, readers find novels in bookstores and on bestseller lists. But Amazon’s fiction categories are different. If you self-publish a novel, you’ll have to choose from 10,000 categories. And you initially get just 3 (10 using a special trick — read on for more about that).

Self-Publishers Choose Their Book’s Amazon Fiction Categories

Amazon is the world’s largest book sales platform. With 10,000 fiction categories and sub-categories, it follows that one of the hardest steps is choosing your categories. But it’s a big factor in making your novel discoverable.

This is Part 2 of my series “Self-Publishing for Heroines”. Part 1 here.

Research Books Like Yours

To research to choose the best Amazon categories, though start by identifying books like yours. This can be in the story, the setting, the characters, or the narrative style. For my women’s fiction novel The Invisibles, I tried thee categories in the Kindle store to see what novels were doing well under these categories:

sisters fiction
friendship fiction
ghost fiction

The Kindle store had literally hundreds of books in these categories. Short of looking into each book’s other categories, its synopsis, the Look-Inside feature to see the quality of writing, I knew I needed a shortcut. So I used an analysis tool.

The good news is that manual searches like this can be shortened by using Kindlepreneur’s tool Publisher Rocket.It allows you to see the ranking, sales, and even price points of  individual books within a category. And Rocket suggests category phrases you may not have thought of. It made my job a lot easier!

This is me, pondering the 1,000s of Amazon fiction categories late into the night …

Dave Chesson, the inventor of Publisher Rocket, sells it for a low, one-time price. He also publishes Youtube tutorials on how to use it — for free. Seriously, I think this guy must have a trust fund and a big heart. Publisher Rocket provides several ways to search. One is “Competition Analyzer”. It won’t save you from the research of finding books similar to yours, but it can tell you where those books are placed in Amazon’s categories. And it gives you the exact search string in the Amazon store. Read on to understand how helpful this is!

More Than the 3 Categories Amazon Offers

Here’s another big tip: you can have 10 Amazon book categories, not just the 3 categories you’re offered while uploading your book. The way to request additional categories is through Amazon’s Author Central area. But you must request the exact category string. If you’ve used Publisher Rocket (or another search tool), you will have those.

I tried this process again with my book, The Time Gatherer. It wasn’t gaining good visibility in the 3 categories I’d selected, so I asked Amazon to add 7 more. After 24 hours, the book was ranking better in three absolutely different categories than it had in the old ones!

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Resources I used for this article on how to choose the best Amazon categories:
David Gaughran – Amazon Decoded & his website article
Dave Chesson’s Kindlepreneur – How to Unlock the Secret Kindle Categories
KDP’s article on Browsing and Adding Categories

The Timegathering Series

 

 

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