Amazon KDP Categories: How to maximize your exposure 

JD Caron
August 12, 2022

Get a full list of Amazon KDP categories

When you purchase Publisher Rocket, you'll get a full list of Amazon KDP categories along with the difficulty of ranking in them. It really is the fastest way to find them for US, UK and now, DE Amazon categories.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Denis with “Weekend Publisher”. I am a book marketing coach. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to add more categories to your KDP book. So let's get right into it. I have this fancy presentation prepared for everyone. So here we are. How to add more categories for your KDP book. Okay, in this video, this short video, I'm going to try and keep it as short as I can. I'm going to show you how to “The wurst way to add categories”, how to “Add more” that makes sense and how to “Find your categories”.

Okay, so let's start off with “The wurst way to add your categories”. And me working as a book marketing coach, this is how probably 98% of people that I speak with this is how they add their categories. So I will show you how. So when you're uploading your book in your dashboard, normally people are taken back they're like, whoa, okay, so I have keywords, I have to enter up to seven keywords. And this is a whole other thing that I'm not going to get into. So people will put like, oh, just like a fantasy book. Okay, and I don't know, they would just make up some other ones right and this is not the good way to do it. But I'm not going to talk about it in this video. I’m getting distracted. The worst way here would be here. So you see here choose up to two categories. And it shows why categories are important and blah, blah, blah. So you go here, you “Set Categories”, and then you have to stumble into a category or two that sort of fits your book. So for example, say I'm creating a cookbook on how to cook sausages. Talking about the wurst way. So if I'm picking here cooking you know what, not pet food, that's not even close. Entertaining, yeah, sure. So I save it this way. This is the worst way for a couple of reasons, two main reasons. This right here is one of the reasons, you only get to choose up to two main categories, when in fact, we can actually choose up to 10 categories per book type. So that'd be 10 categories for your eBook, and 10 categories for your paperback. And then the second reason why this is the wurst way to do it as well, is that you only get, forget what it is like 30% or 40%, or maybe even as low as 25%. I forget exactly the exact numbers, but you only get a limited amount of care categories to actually choose from. So if you are aiming for, you know, the best seller in that category, or to try to find a category to rank organically, and so you get that more organic exposure, these are going to be the most competitive categories. Because again, there's not a lot of people that know this way that I'm about to show you how you can get more categories. Okay, so we're gonna move on to is how to “Add more” and it is quite simple. We just go to Google here we go to KDP Help, press Enter. That's going to be the very first option here. There was a kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help. Go to the very bottom here, this classic orange “Contact Us” button. How can we “Help Amazon store and product detail page, update Amazon categories” as the very first option. So here we say it says update all your credit record requests in one message. A lot of questions when I'm doing small group coaching is okay, do I put them all into one email? And according to Amazon, yes, you do. So what you need to do is you enter. So if you're doing your categories for the US, and you're also doing your categories for the UK, and you're doing the categories for your eBook and the paperback, you put it all. You dump it all into one message. So we have here you would put your format the ASIN of your eBook. So again, you didn't mention this, I shouldn't say again, but your book has to be launched. So some people ask me, Okay, is there a way I can no forewarn or get ahead of the game and say to Amazon, you know, when I upload this book, update these categories, it's just not possible. So as far as the last strategy that I walk with clients with is that as soon as our book is up that day, or the next day at the latest, we want to be updating our categories, okay. Because it's all part of the launch strategy in terms of in the first 30 days and get in the hot new release section of each of these categories. So we'll put in our ASIN here. We'll put in the US marketplace, a book format and go Kindle and the categories here. So categories to be added and categories to be removed.

So when I'm uploading my book here, I'm going to select just one category that just sort of fits it right, like this one would be entertaining, like going back to the reference in the cookbook of cooking sausages. So this one, I'll just select this one, just as because you have to select one to actually upload it. So I will just put here categories to be removed. I put everything that's currently there. So I just, I don't try to figure out okay, what did I select? What didn’t I select blah, blah, blah, just remove everything that's there, and put these ones in here. Okay, so that leads me to the next part of our presentation is, which ones do we put in? And again, remember, we get to use up to 10. So I'm going to recommend a piece of software, I do have a link for it down below, and it is an affiliate link. So if you are finding this valuable, if you click on my link, I do get a little bit of a kickback at no extra cost to you. But I use a piece of software called “PUBLISHER ROCKET”. So there's several modules here, there's four main modules, there's Keyword Search, Competition Analyzer, Category Search, and AMS Keyword Search. And then we have this fifth one here, this Tutorials. So we go to category search. So in my case, in my example, and I haven't done any work ahead of time, I'm just going through this on the fly here, we could see, we have found cookbooks, food and wine here, I could check out all the categories here. Or, I could just type in I don't know that might be on a whim here, or if I just type in sausages. Now, if I type in Barbecue, barbecue, there we are. So either you can use the Browse feature by clicking on the check it out or we can use this type of head feature here to find everything that comes up with the word barbecue. So cookbook, I'm assuming majority of those sales are going to be paperback. So we hear outdoor cooking barbecue and grilling. Boom, I could tell exactly, I found exactly already one of the keywords or if not one of the keywords one of the categories that I want to pick. And what I love about it here is that it gives you these other columns here.

So I'll give you the ABSR of number one that stands for Amazon Bests Seller Rank. To most people, this is going to be most important. So sales, number one, and sales to number 10. So if I want to be a best seller in that category, I need to sell 113 copies within a 24 hour period to become the best seller. So whoever is number one in this category is killing they're doing really, really well. So you would just repeat this over and over again, you can pick up to 10, it doesn't mean that you have to pick 10 with eBooks, I found it easier to come up. And it's certainly with fiction, it's easier to actually find more categories. The categories with eBooks and the categories with paperbacks are different. There is a little bit of overlap, but they're different. Another thing I like about Publisher Rocket is up in the top left here on the top right, you get to pick the US categories. And over here, you get to pick the UK categories, or you got to look at all the categories that are in the UK. So let's see if there is a cooking barbecue category in the UK. There is sort of but you could tell it's really different, right. Like it's not outdoor cooking. It's just food and drink and barbecues. So this one here sales number one, oh, look at that. It's even higher actually. But look at the sales number 10, only three. So we can realistically, organically rank depending on your marketing strategy. You can organically rank in the top 10 for this category. So this is my by far my favorite tool for finding categories.

Again, the link will be down in the description. And in the pinned comment, I'll put it there. There's also a link down article and also how to find your categories as an extra resource. So that is it. What we went over is the worst way to add your categories and that is in the back end to your dashboard. How to add more and that's just by searching or by Googling KDP Help going to the bottom left “Contact Us” and then updating your categories through theirs by reaching out to KDP Help and finding your categories using Publisher Rocket. I did mention a fair amount about my, well let me just here. I did mention a fair amount about my coaching. I'll leave a link down below as well so you can find out more about my small group coaching. And if you found this useful, leave a like and subscribe and I'll see in the next one. 

Insert About the Author

About the author 

JD Caron

Meet JD - a natural leader with a talent for coaching. He spent time in the military and as a 911 dispatcher, honing his skills in teaching and guiding others through emergencies.


After struggling to self-publish his first book, he discovered a passion for helping others succeed in their writing endeavors. 


When he's not coaching, JD can be found exploring Europe and soaking up history at every turn.

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