Categories and keywords and algorithms—Oh My!

By now you will probably have realized that when you self-publish on Amazon, you have to make some choices concerning metadata. That is, the information about a book that helps categorize, describe, and market it. It includes details that make a book searchable and discoverable in online stores, libraries, and databases.

All of these things constitute your book’s metadata:

• Title & Subtitle – The official name of the book.
• Author Name – The name under which the book is published.
• ISBN – A unique identifier for the book.
• Publisher – The individual or company publishing the book.
• Publication Date – The date the book is released.
• Edition – If it’s a revised or updated version.
• Categories (BISAC, Thema, or Amazon Categories) – Defines the book’s genre and subject.
• Keywords – Search terms that help readers find the book.
• Book Description – A marketing blurb used on retail sites.
• Format – Whether the book is a paperback, hardcover, e-book, or audiobook.
• Page Count – Number of pages (for print books).
• Language – The language in which the book is written.
• Trim Size – Dimensions of a print book (e.g., 6” x 9”).
• Cover Image – A high-resolution file of the book cover.
• Price – The listed retail price.
• Rights & Territory Information – Where and how the book is distributed.

What Amazon uses to make readers able to find your book is categories and keywords.

There’s a difference.

Categories

Categories are used for ranking your book. You can choose up to three of them when you upload your book to Amazon. However, there is no guarantee that Amazon will pay any attention to the categories you choose. For instance, I chose as my primary category for my Regency historical romances: Books › Romance › Historical › Regency ↗.

But Amazon chose to categorize it and rank it first of all under Historical European Fiction. There’s a complicated algorithm behind Amazon’s categorization. Factors that influence it are your book’s overall selling rank, clicks into the book’s page from external sites (social media, your newsletter) and its Kindle Unlimited reads. Strong preorders is also something the algorithm looks for. But all this still doesn’t explain why it didn’t put me in Regency, other than that it’s an extremely competitive category…

However, you CAN fix it if your book isn’t categorized the way you want it. You need to contact Amazon about it, which sounds daunting, but believe it or not, it’s fairly easy. You’ll probably get a canned response to start with, but if you reply to that, I believe a real person starts to interact with you. Here are screenshots to help you figure out how to do that:

• Log into KDP
• Click on the “help” link at the top right of the screen

• Scroll down to the bottom of the help page and click the “contact us” button

I did this and my books are now listed in the correct categories.

Keywords

Keywords are search terms associated with your book to help readers find it. Keywords have nothing to do with ranking, only with discoverability. It’s a good idea to get specific with keywords. Broad general categories don’t help. And Amazon finds all the terms in each string of words you enter into the keyword spaces.

Extremely useful tool alert!

If you’re planning to have a career as a romance author, it’s well worth it to buy Publisher Rocket. This tool combs Amazon for information about your categories, keywords, and competition. And it does it anew every time you query it, so the information is always up to date. Here is a screenshot I took of my search for Regency romance keywords:

The color coding on the searches indicates whether it’s a good number in terms of you having a chance to catch a reader’s eye, with green being the best, gold OK, and red indicating a super-competitive search term. With those competitive search terms it’s harder to show up on the first page of a search. The competitive score tells you how hard it would be to rank your book for that keyword when someone searches, 1 being easiest, 100 being hardest.

You can see how helpful this would be in deciding which 7 search terms (or strings of terms) to put in when you set up your book in KDP. At this writing it’s $199 to buy, but it’s not a subscription so it’s a one-time charge.

In the categories section, you get slightly different information:

I think the most interesting feature of this screen is how many books you have to sell per day in order to reach #1 in the category. Also, look at the high percentage of books in these categories that are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.

All this goes to say that choosing your keywords is very important. And Rocket also suggests keywords for categories just to be even more helpful:

What you can do to improve your amazon ranking and discoverability

First, there is no magic formula, but there are strategies. The more you understand how the algorithm actually works the more likely you are to

Optimize Metadata

This covers a whole world of activities, from how you choose your categories and keywords, to making sure your title and description include the kinds of terms and phrases that will attract readers.

One of the great things about self-publishing on Amazon is that it’s easy to change up your book description, and to add editorial reviews when you get them—by that I mean not reader reviews, but reviews from recognized editorial sources. (More about that in the next section.) To do this, and also to get access to your book’s sales data, you need to sign up for Amazon Author Central.

Once your book is published, you can’t change the title, however, without going through the whole ISBN process again, and uploading it as a different book. So make sure your title is good, because the keywords in it will heavily influence search results.

Get reviews

There are several ways to get advance reviews for your book. All of them involve paying something—although never for individual reviews. What you pay for is access to the subscribers who can choose what to read and review, and will leave an honest review as well. Sometimes readers download the book and don’t review it, and you have no control over that.

The places you can offer your book for advance reviews are BookSprout, BookSirens, NetGalley, and probably a few others. For self-published authors, NetGalley is a bit expensive, although you can go through a third party and be listed there for a reasonable amount. I use BooksGoSocial for that. The other two are not expensive, and it really helps to have some good reader reactions for your book. It gives you something to talk about on social media and in your newsletter.

Definitely sign up for Goodreads. This is a love it or hate it kind of site (it’s owned now by Amazon), but it has one really useful feature, in that readers can leave advance reviews on it. Readers can’t review your book on Amazon until it’s actually live.

WARNING!

Don’t encourage your friends and family to review your book unless they often buy books in your category on Amazon, or send readers directly from your e-newsletter to review your book. In order to help you understand why, I need to explain “dirty links.”

Dirty links have lots of information embedded in them about the user and the path they took to get to a certain place online. Here is an example of a dirty link:

That is the link I get when I simply copy and past from the address bar of my browser when I’m logged into Amazon and am on the page for my book, The Dressmaker’s Secret Earl. It contains coded content about me that I can’t decipher, but the Amazon algorithm can. It’s telling them where I came from, what kinds of things I generally buy from Amazon, etc.

To get a clean link, simply delete everything before “ref.”

Why is this important?

Because every click or purchase on your book provides information to the Amazon algorithm. It “sees” who’s buying, and if they’re not normally purchasers of books in your genre or sub genre, it confuses the algorithm. It your grandma, for instance, only buys cookbooks on Amazon (or kitchen equipment) and she goes to buy your book and leave a review just to be helpful, the algorithm might start showing your book to cookbook buyers.

Why does that matter?

Because the way you show up in searches is related to your click-to-buy rate. If lots of people who aren’t really interested in your book click on it and don’t buy it, the algorithm starts to demote your book in searches. That means if someone searches for your book using an appropriate search term, your book will come up far down the list. Perhaps many pages on. The goal is to show up on the first page of a search, because we all know people rarely click beyond that page.

More information

I am by no means an expert in the vagaries of the Amazon algorithm, but there are those who are, and who can tell you a lot more about strategies to get your book seen on Amazon. Dave Chesson is one. He is Kindlepreneur on YouTube. I highly recommend following him and watching his videos—if for no other reason than that things change so quickly in this game.

Make your Amazon Author Page

This is something you won’t be able to do until your book is up for preorder at least. But it’s important. It enables readers to follow you, not just buy your book. If they click on your name when they search for your book, they’ll go to a page where they can see all of your books:

And they can then choose to follow you:

You’ll notice that I’ve followed myself… If you do that, you’ll know when Amazon sends out a new release alert to your followers.