How To Pick Categories
Michael asks:
“Here’s a random question which I can’t remember if you have answered before: how do you pick the categories? And do you swap books between categories sometimes for more exposure?”
He was asking because CLOAK OF SHARDS was briefly #1 for Low Fantasy on Amazon UK. (Thanks everyone!)
So, here is the approach I use to decide what category will have my book on Amazon and the various other stores.
1.) Decide the genre.
This may seem obvious, but it’s a good idea to know the genre in which you are writing before you write the book. This is surprisingly difficult for new authors, who often will write a book that’s a mash-up of different genres and express surprise when it’s hard to market.
Here’s the thing. We can argue all day long about whether or not genres are artificial constructions or not, but readers don’t care about that. Readers are more about finding books that they like. People who like Westerns want to read more Westerns, people who like mysteries want to read more mysteries, and people who like sweet clean romance want to read more sweet clean romance. So, if someone who likes sweet clean romance picks up a book marketed as sweet clean romance but instead finds it’s an explicit novel about a harem romance, they’re gonna get really ticked off. (More on this below.) So it’s good to figure out the primary genre of your book so you can get it to readers who will be interested in it.
Like, for example, CLOAK OF SHARDS. If you’ve read the CLOAK GAMES/MAGE series, you know there are science fiction and alternative history elements in it. But the main genre is urban fantasy, which is why I design the covers to suit the urban fantasy genre and market it that way.
2.) Pick appropriate categories.
Once you know what genre your book is in, you can pick appropriate categories for it.
There are, in fact, multiple categories any particular genre book could enter. Like, FROSTBORN could fit in Arthurian Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Military Fantasy, or Sword & Sorcery. It wouldn’t be outrageous to put the FROSTBORN series into any one of those categories. Depending on the retailer, CLOAK OF SHARDS ended up in Low Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, or Alternative History, and it would be a good fit for any one of those.
Each retailer will have slightly different categories, so it will be worth your time to click around and find ones that look like a good fit for your book.
3.) Choose the least populated of the categories.
Once you have found appropriate categories, it might be worth your time to pick the least populated of them.
This is more useful on Amazon than the other stores, but depending upon the Amazon category, a lower sales rank is needed to get into the top 100 of a category. Like, as of April 25th, 2022 when I’m typing this, the book at #100 in Epic Fantasy on the US Kindle store has a sales rank of #3,279. By contrast, the book at #100 on Arthurian Fantasy has a sales rank of #40,245. The Arthurian category is less competitive than Epic Fantasy, and you can get a slight boost in visibility by ranking in a lower-trafficked category. This isn’t a huge advantage, because if your book is selling well enough to sit consistently at the top of a competitive category it’s probably doing all right, but every advantage helps.
4.) Use appropriate keywords.
Some of the retailers – specifically, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Smashwords – let you use keywords when setting up your book description. (Google, being Google, just generates search results out of everything in the book description and the available sample pages.) For Amazon, the keywords you pick can result in your book ending up in different categories. Like, you can’t just pick “Arthurian Fantasy” from the listing of categories, but if you select “Historical Fantasy” from the categories and then put “Arthurian” as one of your keywords, your book will be in the Arthurian category. This can be a bit convoluted, but since it’s easy to vanish down the Amazon keyword rabbit hole, it’s best not to overthink it and put your book in the most competitive relevant category you can find.
Which leads us to the fifth point, which is also a warning.
5.) DO NOT CATEGORY STUFF.
This is when an author puts their book in a completely wrong category in an effort to get greater visibility. Like, for example, say you’re browsing a very obscure category of books on Amazon. Say, Industrial Fabrication Manuals. Most of the books in the category look like manuals for industrial fabrication processes, but you notice that the #1 book in the category has a cover with a shirtless man and a title like RAVISHED BY THE HIGHLANDER or PURSUED BY THE BILLIONAIRE.
What’s happened is that an author has put a book into a completely inappropriate category to get a bestseller tag. Like, RAVISHED BY THE HIGHLANDER might have a sales rank of #750,000 or so, but in the Industrial Fabrication Manuals category, that’s more than enough to get an orange #1 bestseller tag, and the author of RAVISHED BY THE HIGHLANDER can boast that he or she is a bestselling author!
Needless to say, it’s best not to do this. It always backfires in the end. If you see a book that’s sitting at the top of an egregiously wrong category, it will quickly accumulate negative reviews. For that matter, once enough people complain – and they will complain – Amazon will eventually remove the book from the category or maybe even delist it entirely. The other retailers will also respond to complains of this nature with varying degrees of alacrity.
Obviously “Industrial Fabrication Manuals” is something of an extreme example. Where this usually catches people up is romance writers like the example mention above, “spicy” romance writers who put their more explicit books in a category that tends to favor less explicit romance.
All that said, while it is important to get your book in an appropriate category, it is not super important to get it into the exact right one. You can get some readers off organic book discovery on the various sites, but there are more effective ways to get new eyes on your books – making the first tone free, newsletter short stories, box set sales, and so forth.
-JM