The Secrets of Book Categories on Amazon

Brought to you by: Author Marketing Experts

Amazon – eBook and Print• Did you know? For books, Amazon is two sites:– one for eBooks– one for print

• Why does it matter? – When you’re picking a category on Amazon it’s important

to know that you have more than a few options– If you can dominate a category (meaning be number one)

you can start to trigger the Amazon internal algorithm to get more book exposure

Category Selection• Amazon allows you up to two categories per

book, so you want narrow categories• How do you find narrow categories?

Category Selection• This link: http://www.amazon.com/-/b/?

node=1000 will take you to this page

Category Selection

• Clicking on the bolded genres will help you delve into that category even deeper.

• Traditionally this has been the best way to find your narrow, niche, category.

• Expert tip: Now there’s another way!

Category Selection

• Head on over to Amazon.com and on the search bar, highlight “Kindle Store” and click GO. Don’t put anything in the search bar.

• This drops you to the eBook side of Amazon, so the other half of the Amazon book site.

You’ll see a page that pops up that looks similar to this:

• From here, click Kindle eBooks on the left hand side.

• Start doing searches based on your market/genre.

• But here’s the surprising thing: most authors don’t use this method. How do I know this? Well, have a look.

Category Selection

Category Selection• Let’s say you’re a business author and you

have a book on business leadership. Here is the page you’ll wind up on.

Category Selection

• Note the categories off to the left

• Now let’s dig deeper.

Category Selection• Let’s say you have a book on business life. • So anything related to health and business,

business organization, even work-life-balance. Here is the page you’ll see:

Category Selection• Now, take a closer look at the

category “work life balance” … it only has 132 books in it. Is that possible?

• Yes, it is. • The reason is that many

publishers don’t know to do a second category search this way so they’re putting their books in overly crammed categories that seem to fit.

Category Selection

• The categories you’ll get doing this search look different than the ones you’ll get using that other URL

• It’s a good idea to do both searches.• Expert tip: Remember, you are allowed broad

categories, but you want a narrow subset of those categories that has few competing titles.

Expert Tip• Also, remember if your

book is fiction that themes are very active on Amazon now.

• See our previous post: http://www.amarketingexpert.com/big-changes-amazon-categories/

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