{"id":5342,"date":"2022-09-20T07:40:23","date_gmt":"2022-09-20T11:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apexauthors.com\/?p=5342"},"modified":"2022-09-09T17:43:58","modified_gmt":"2022-09-09T21:43:58","slug":"choosing-the-best-category","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apexauthors.com\/choosing-the-best-category\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret to Choosing the Best Book Category"},"content":{"rendered":"
You already know what book categories in Amazon are, but there are two things you might not know:<\/p>\n
To recap: book categories are more important than you think, and you are probably missing out on some of the categories you can rank in. This is an opportunity, but like most opportunities also a responsibility. Today, we\u2019ll talk about how you can leverage it to make your book sales soar, starting with:<\/p>\n
We go into this in detail in a different article<\/a>, and another one<\/a>, (and even have a full training on it<\/a>), but here\u2019s the basics.\u00a0<\/p>\n Each book on Amazon gets an Amazon Best Seller Rank (ASBR). If your ASBR rank is 100, only 900 books on the whole platform are selling better than you. At the time of this writing, the books with the best ASBR across all of Amazon in the US are:<\/p>\n You can always find today\u2019s print bestsellers<\/a> and Kindle bestsellers<\/a> by visiting Amazon. When you do, you\u2019ll find those top-ranking books (whatever day you check them) are published by major companies with vast marketing budgets or written by a major celebrity. You\u2019ll notice the #1 and #2 from my list are both. They\u2019re selling as many as 5,000 copies a day. Most people can\u2019t compete with that. Neither you, nor I, have marketing pockets that deep or that level of fame.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Amazon categories are so important. Amazon doesn\u2019t just keep track of their overall bestsellers. They also maintain ranks for each book category. For example, their bestelling Science Fiction & Fantasy book today is The Midnight Library <\/i>by Matt Haig. It\u2019s sitting at #14 overall, which amounts to about 1800 copies sold per day. That\u2019s still pretty intimidating, but way better than 5,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not all!<\/i><\/p>\n Categories go deep, and the deeper and more specialized you go, the less competition you\u2019ll find. Let\u2019s keep going down the Science Fiction & Fantasy trail. For the day I wrote this article\u2026<\/p>\n The deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the easier it is to reach the top ten or even the #1 spot in a category. Further, Action and Adventure Fantasy novels are a very big niche, with some very big players in them. On the other hand\u2026<\/p>\n And here\u2019s the important thing. The #1 category bestseller in Science Fiction & Fantasy might sell more books overall than the #1 category bestseller in Test Prep for US Citizenship, but they both receive the same treatment by Amazon\u2019s algorithms when people search for the right keywords. Choosing a category with lower competition (by which we mean a higher overall ABSR in its #1 spot) gives you that search help and the resulting extra sales with less work and investment on your part.\u00a0<\/p>\n Which is a pretty good deal.\u00a0<\/p>\n There is another edge to this sword, however. If your category is too niche, even with all the extra search mojo there won\u2019t be enough people interested in the category to make you any real money. The trick is to strike a balance in the middle, where there\u2019s plenty of customers but it\u2019s not too\u00a0 hard to grab the top slot for a few days.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even better is to choose 10 categories with a nice variety of different competition levels, but more on that later.\u00a0<\/p>\n For now, here\u2019s how you choose the best category for your book, step by step.<\/p>\n Start with the keywords you researched for your book description, then branch out from there until you have 20-30 words that might find you a good category. Include words important to your genre, and strings people might use when searching for your book, or books similar to yours. Include two or three titles of books most like your own, but no more than that.\u00a0<\/p>\n One by one, put a word or phrase from your book into the Amazon search box. Scroll through the results to find books that are similar to your own. They don\u2019t have to be exact matches here, but just close enough that somebody could see the logic if you compared the two. Make a new list of each of these titles, adding to it as you go through each word from your first list. Most of the time, you don\u2019t need to bother scrolling to the second page of results. Nothing back there is going to rank highly.<\/p>\n Click to the listing for each of the books on your list, then scroll down to find what categories they rank in. Click on that category and find out the #1 bestseller in that category. Make a third list of those bestsellers. They\u2019re what the previous two steps were getting you ready to find. Next to the name, also list each book\u2019s overall ABSR rank.<\/p>\n Your efforts thus far will have netted you a list of the top sellers in a number of categories that might be appropriate for your book, and the overall ABSR rank for the top-selling book in those categories. Choose the best ten, according to the following guidelines:<\/p>\n Once you have your top ten list, you\u2019re ready to move on and get yourself added to all of them…not just the two available in your KDP book setup.\u00a0<\/p>\n When you set your book up in KDP, you get to choose two categories. Worse, you choose them from a list which may or may not include the categories you determined were best for your book. To get into the perfect categories, and to qualify for eight more than the standard signup, you go through a process that\u2019s pretty simple, but not very intuitive:<\/p>\n Click Save and you\u2019re done. See? We told you this would be simple.<\/p>\n The categories in your KDP setup aren\u2019t even the Amazon categories. They\u2019re BISAC categories, which are used by the book industry as a whole. When you choose your two, Amazon then uses that information to slide your book into the category they think best matches.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s all well and good, and easy, but it\u2019s not in your best interest. Amazon spends no energy in its algorithms to make sure you land somewhere you can compete. That\u2019s not their job. That\u2019s yours \u2014 which is why it\u2019s so important that you take control of your book categories as soon as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n Google and Amazon are both frustrating in that they don\u2019t spend a lot of energy telling you whether or not you guessed right in your search mojo operations. You can do lots of work and then not know if it…well…um…worked.\u00a0<\/p>\n As of 2017, your book might show up in 10 categories, but your book page will show only three categories. You still rank in the others, you (and curious readers) just won\u2019t see them unless they manually search the right category and find your listing.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s no help for the reader part of this. There isn\u2019t really a way for casual browsers to see how well you did on the other seven categories. We just have to accept this and move on.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no easy way to check your own performance on all ten categories either, but there is a tool. Nerdy Book Girl <\/i>has built a free one. You can click on this link here<\/a>, input your ASIN or ISBN, and get a listing of what categories your book is in, and how well it\u2019s doing in each.<\/p>\n With that information, you can fine-tune your approach by advertising to categories you\u2019re close to #1 in, running discount deals, or even changing a category to one that\u2019s less competitive or that makes more money.\u00a0<\/p>\n Remember earlier when I said to avoid categories where bestsellers have an ABSR of 1,000 or less? That\u2019s good advice…to start. What you can do, though, is use Amazon\u2019s algorithms and AI to move your way up to progressively more competitive categories.\u00a0<\/p>\n Start low, until you\u2019ve hung out in the top five for a few weeks, with at least one appearance as number one. As your book\u2019s general performance is rising, remove your book from a category with low competition, then add the lowest-ranking one from the categories you initially discarded as too hot.\u00a0<\/p>\n When your book is doing well in a low-competition category, its search performance improves. If you leverage that to a solid entry in a higher-competing category, it results in higher sales, which lets you compete at even higher-performing categories, and on and on. This takes some work, but if you\u2019re building momentul it can really be worth the effort.\u00a0<\/p>\n Your next step is to check your current status. Based on what\u2019s going on, you\u2019ll have some work to do.<\/p>\n <\/b><\/p>\n Got it? Good! Now go out and make your book a bestseller.\u00a0\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You already know what book categories in Amazon are, but there are two things you might not know: Book categories are one of the most… Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3070,"featured_media":4998,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[49,801],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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How to Choose the Best Categories For Your Book?<\/h2>\n
Step One: Gather a List of Descriptive Words<\/h3>\n
Step Two: Look For Good Matches<\/h3>\n
Step Three: Check the Categories<\/h3>\n
Step Four: Identify Your Top 10\u00a0<\/h3>\n
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How to Get Into Those Extra Categories?<\/h3>\n
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Wanna Know a Secret?<\/h4>\n
How Can You Check Your Work?<\/h2>\n
Bootstrapping<\/h4>\n
Okay…What Can I Do Now?<\/h2>\n
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