Categories and keywords, without the folklore
A store has to answer two questions about your book: where does it belong, and who is looking for it. Categories answer the first. Keywords answer the second.
That is the entire mechanism. Most of the clever tricks assume there is more to it.
Categories are shelves
Choosing a category decides which browse list your book appears on, and which group of books your sales rank is computed against. It is the digital version of deciding which shelf a bookseller puts you on.
Two things follow.
A category you do not fit will not rescue the book. Filing a contemporary romance under a thinly stocked history sub-category does put it in front of people. They are the wrong people. They glance and move on, and a few of them buy, feel misled, and say so in a review. Stores watch how readers behave in a category, so the wrong shelf does not quietly benefit you — it accumulates evidence against the book.
Narrower is usually better than broader. Rank is calculated inside the category, so a book in a specific sub-category competes with dozens of titles rather than tens of thousands. Being visible on a small true shelf beats being invisible on a large one. A broad category is not more exposure; it is the same book, further down a longer list.
Keywords are phrases, not words
The keyword fields are not tags, and they are not a place to list themes. They are for the phrases a reader would actually type.
- Write phrases. "witch" is a single word competing with everything ever published. "cozy witch mystery small town" is something a person types with intent.
- Do not repeat your title or subtitle. Those are already indexed. Every word you spend restating them is a phrase you did not get to add.
- Do not stuff other authors' names. It is wasted space, and against the rules at most stores.
- Describe the reading experience. Readers search for "slow burn", "found family", "no cliffhanger", "clean romance", "standalone" — words that rarely appear in a blurb.
- Use the reader's words, not the industry's. Nobody types "speculative literary fiction."
In the Cover Maker. The shelf you pick is where your cover has to hold its own — so open that category, look at the top twenty covers at the size they display, and build one that belongs there. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
The subtitle and series fields are metadata too
Authors treat the subtitle as a design decision and forget it is indexed text that readers search.
For nonfiction, this settles an argument that otherwise runs for weeks. A subtitle that says plainly what the book is — who it is for, what it covers, what it will do — will be found. A poetic one will not, because nobody searches for a mood. A Field Guide to Sourdough for Small Kitchens is discoverable. Flour, Time, and Patience is not.
Fiction gets more latitude, but the series field is not optional decoration. Filling it consistently is what groups your books together, orders them, and lets a reader who finished book two find book three without guessing. Use the same series name, spelled identically, on every volume.
Two myths to drop
There is a secret list of magic categories. There is not. What exists is a public list of every category the store offers, and some are less crowded than others. A thinly populated category helps only if your book genuinely belongs in it. The lists that circulate as insider knowledge are usually just the obscure shelves, discovered and shared until they are no longer obscure.
Changing keywords daily helps. It does not. Search indexes take time to reflect a change, and sales data takes longer still. Editing every day means you never see the result of any single edit. Set them, leave them alone long enough to learn something, then change one thing.
What to do instead
Three steps, in order.
- Study the shelf. Find the books that would sit either side of yours — not the bestsellers in your whole genre, the ones at your level in your exact sub-category. Read their categories, their subtitles, their series names. The pattern is usually obvious within twenty books.
- Write the phrases a reader would type to reach that shelf. Say them out loud. If a phrase sounds like a marketing department wrote it, a reader is not typing it. Fill the fields your store gives you with distinct phrases, not variations on one.
- Revisit on data, not on a hunch. After real sales, you can see which phrases brought people and which category is actually moving copies. That is a decision. A 2 a.m. rewrite because the rank dipped is not.
Categories and keywords are worth doing carefully once. They are not worth doing anxiously forever. The cover, the sample, and the book do the rest of the work — see What makes a book cover sell.
In the Cover Maker. Your listing needs a cover at the store's size as well as a printable wrap, and both come from the one file — so the thumbnail a searcher sees matches the book you print. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Barcodes, and the price code beside them · More: Do you need your own ISBN? · Should you invent a publisher name? · Ebook cover size