Categories are Amazon’s shelves. Pick the right ones and your book shows up next to exactly the readers who want it, sometimes with a bestseller badge on top. Pick badly and you’re one tiny book on a giant, crowded shelf.
When you publish on KDP, you choose up to three categories for your book (KDP Help: Categories). Here’s how to choose them well.
How categories work
Amazon’s bestseller lists are organized like a tree. At the top is a huge category, like Romance. Below it are smaller ones, like Contemporary Romance or Romantic Suspense, and below those, smaller ones still.
Every category has its own top 100 list, ranked by sales. A book near the top of any list gets seen by readers browsing that list, and the top books can earn a “Best Seller” or “#1 New Release” badge, which helps readers trust a book they’ve never heard of.
Your ebook and your paperback have separate category settings, so choose for each.
The strategy: big fish, small pond
Most new authors pick the biggest category they can find. The problem is that you’re competing with every bestseller in the genre. A new book at #40,000 in a huge category is invisible.
Instead, look for smaller, specific categories where a book with modest sales can still reach the top of the list. Ranking near the top of a small category gets you visibility, and visibility gets you more sales.
How to find your categories
- Go to the Kindle bestseller lists on Amazon: Best Sellers, then Kindle Store, then Kindle eBooks.
- Click into Romance, then keep clicking down the menu on the left into every subcategory that genuinely describes your book.
- Check the books already there. Look at the top 20 of each list. If they look like your book (same tropes, same mood, similar covers), you’re in the right place.
- Write down every good fit. You’ll narrow it to three in a minute.
How to read the competition
Every book page on Amazon shows a Best Sellers Rank in its product details: its rank in the whole Kindle Store, plus its rank in a few categories. The lower the number, the more it’s selling.
To judge how hard a category is:
- Open the book sitting at #100 on that category’s list.
- Scroll to its product details and find its overall Kindle Store rank.
- That number is roughly the rank your book needs to reach to get onto that list.
If the #100 book has an overall rank of #50,000, a new book with a decent launch can get on that list. If the #100 book has an overall rank of #500, that list is dominated by huge sellers, and you’ll struggle to appear.
Do the same with the #1 and #20 books to see how hard it is to get near the top.
Pick a smart mix of three
A good set of three often looks like:
- One broader category that’s clearly your genre, for readers browsing the obvious shelf
- One specific subcategory where you can realistically rank near the top
- One trope- or theme-based category that genuinely fits
The golden rule: stay relevant
Never pick a category just because it’s easy to rank in. Readers who find your dark mafia romance in sweet holiday romance won’t buy it, and the ones who do will leave angry reviews. Worse, Amazon learns who to show your book to from the people who buy it early. Put it on the wrong shelf and you train Amazon to show it to the wrong readers.
Every category should be one a reader of your book would actually browse.
Change them later
Categories aren’t permanent. You can edit them any time from your KDP Bookshelf, in your book’s details. Review them:
- a month or two after launch, once you can see which lists your book appears on
- whenever a book goes flat, since Amazon adds and reshuffles categories over time, and a better-fitting, less crowded one may now exist
- when you release the next book in a series, so the whole series sits on the same shelves
Go deeper
Chapter 13 of Plot. Publish. Profit. walks through blurbs, keywords and categories together, with a worksheet for all of it. See also: how to find Amazon KDP keywords for free. Or have me do it: blurbs, keywords & categories.
