Looking for your next read? Amazon categories will guide you even if you don't shop in the Kindle store.
From some of the unfortunate mistakes authors make to how categories affect your next book binge, peek behind the curtain and see the nuts and bolts behind this literary love story.
Looking for your next read? Amazon categories will guide you even if you don't shop in the Kindle store.
From some of the unfortunate mistakes authors make to how categories affect your next book binge, peek behind the curtain and see the nuts and bolts behind this literary love story.
Megan: [00:00:01] I'm not a therapist, I didn't write a book to help teens with their emotional issues. Bryant has emotional issues. He's not a character who should be leading anyone's therapy session. This is a bad idea.
Announcement: [00:00:16] Welcome to A Book and A Dream with Megan O'Russell: an author's adventure in writing, reading, and being an epic fangirl.
Megan: [00:00:27] Hello, my name is Megan O'Russell and welcome to Episode 57 of A Book and A Dream. I want to tell you a little love story. It's a love triangle between Amazon categories, authors, and readers.
Megan: [00:00:41] Now, if you're a reader and you have no idea what an Amazon category is, bear with me for a minute. Trust me, by the end of this, you will understand how very important these categories are.
Megan: [00:00:52] So, an Amazon category is basically the little niche that you're trying to get your book into. So, you're an author, you've written a book, you have survived writing the blurb and edits and a synopsis. You have barreled through it all. It is time to upload your beauty and then you get to the little tab on your author page where it says, "What category do you want to put your book in?" And then you have a nervous breakdown, or maybe you don't because you haven't realized why you should.
Megan: [00:01:22] So, Amazon categories are very difficult. It looks like you can only have two. You can actually have 10. You have to send them an email or like call a dude. It's a very strange process. I don't know. It's weird. There are hidden categories. You can buy a program to help you find the hidden categories. There is an entire industry built around finding hidden Amazon categories, and for very good reason. So, if you decide to delve into the world of Amazon categories as an author, you will soon realize why stabbing an icepick in your own eye would be less painful than this, because if you look on the Amazon page, it looks like there are some very basic choices and it should be obvious, like young adult, young adult sci-fi and fantasy, young adult sci-fi and fantasy dystopian.
Megan: [00:02:07] It's not that easy because there is a huge difference between post-apocalyptic and dystopian, and making the wrong choice in those categories can tank your book.
Megan: [00:02:18] There are also some categories that you wouldn't think of existing, like young adult, young adult literature and fiction, young adult literature and fiction divorce. I mean, I don't know a lot of teenagers who are getting divorced. I guess teenagers with divorced parents, but that seems like a tiny niche, which it really is. So when you're choosing your categories as an author, not only do you have to consider where your book is going to fit, but where your book can rank, because you see, Amazon has this lovely top 100 program for each of its categories that actually has books in it. There are some categories that only have like four books in them, which is crazy because it's Amazon and there's millions of books, but they exist.
Megan: [00:02:58] So when you're choosing your categories, you know, young adult literature and fiction, self-esteem and self-reliance, whatever it is you're going for, you want to make sure that you're choosing a category that is big enough to have competition. So you don't want to be in that category that only has the two books in it, because that is often like the nether realms of the interweb where no one goes. No one goes to that corner of the digital store. So you don't really want to shelve your book there because nobody is going to see it. Nobody's going to click there. It does you no good other than sometimes getting a cool little orange tag that you are in the top seller in your category of two...so not really helpful. So you want to be in one where you can rank in the top 100, but you have to compete for it.
Megan: [00:03:42] So if you're kind of lazy and you just, as an author, choose young adult sci-fi fantasy, fantasy, unless you're Harry Potter or The Selection, you're not going to rank well ever. So you have to dive deeper and do young adult fantasy, fantasy, paranormal romance. But then there's also paranormal, not romance. But then you can't really rank in romance. And so it becomes this huge tangled web of trying to figure out how you want to go. And even when you figure out, "OK, like this is where my book fits, I did lots of math," which most authors hate math. Not all authors. Some authors love figuring out mathematical things.
Megan: [00:04:22] Some authors make their husbands do all the calculating to figure out how many book sales a day you would need to rank in a certain category and how many categories you want to have easy and how many categories you want to work hard for. And that's why I love my husband. He's great. I'll keep him.
Megan: [00:04:39] But you figured it all out. But then even once you think you know where you want to be, you have to really look at the other books in the category. Aside from the numbers and the algorithms, because let's say you're like, OK, I really fit in post-apocalyptic instead of dystopian. Have you looked at the post-apocalyptic versus dystopian covers? You want to blend into the category that you are there for, so you want to make sure that you fit with the reader's expectations, but you want to stand out so that they notice you, but you really have to fit in or they'll be like "you don't belong here," but don't blend in too much or they won't notice you, but stick out, but not... It's...it'll drive you crazy in some cases like post-apocalyptic versus dystopian. If you want to click over there on Amazon just for fun, it's easy to tell which category you should be in.
Megan: [00:05:30] Post-apocalyptic covers are generally, like, some girl with a machine gun. Dystopian covers are more Hunger Games-style with, like, a symbol or even [The] Selection where it's like a girl in a fluffy dress, which doesn't seem dystopian. And you're like, "Irony. I like it. It's the end of the world. Great." And so maybe you want to be like dystopian romance because you have a pretty girl on your cover. It's all so many judgment calls and so much stress. And then Amazon will kick you out of the categories you wanted anyway.
Megan: [00:05:57] And hopefully, hopefully you've chosen good categories. You've asked the Amazon elves to make it work for you. You've landed in the top one hundred in your categories. Things should go well. Now there are road bumps that can come up. Sometimes the Amazon elves get it wrong. Bryant Adams - How I Magically Messed Up My Life in Four Freakin' Days was in "teen counseling."
Megan: [00:06:21] I'm not a therapist, I didn't write a book to help teens with their emotional issues. Bryant has emotional issues. He's not a character who should be leading anyone's therapy session. This is a bad idea. And so you have to go and fix it.
Megan: [00:06:35] Or sometimes, I don't know, things go really, really, really badly because Animal Farm is in the category for children's pig books. So read Animal Farm to your children at night, folks. It'll be a joy for the whole family. Yeah. So we all get there, we hope we're in the right place, and that's when it comes to the readers who hopefully will know enough to not read Animal Farm to their four-year-old. Otherwise, you're going to need one of those teen counseling books, and don't count on How I Magically Messed Up My Life in Four Freakin' Days to fix your teen's emotional problems. Bring them joy, sure. Fix emotional problems? Probably not.
Megan: [00:07:17] So as a reader, how do these categories affect you? The answer is way more than you'd think, kind of a creepy amount if you get down to it.
Megan: [00:07:28] So, good ways that these categories can affect you. Let's say you just finished your new favorite book, and you are dying to read more books like it. Maybe it's The Selection. Maybe it's Ember and Stone. Whatever your jam is, you want more books like that? Cool. So, if you are a Kindle person or an Amazon shopper, all you have to do is go to that book's page on Amazon.
Megan: [00:07:50] You scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. And in product description, it'll have its ranking in the whole store and then it'll have its ranking in usually three categories. That could change with the next two hours...within the next two hours. Amazon really likes to do that to us. So, if you click on those categories, if everything went well, you can find books that are just like your favorite books in the top 100. So, lots of people have bought them and liked them, and there's this whole list of one hundred books in the same category as your same favorite. It's amazing. All the shopping opportunities. Go Amazon! Way the...way to do product placement well.
Megan: [00:08:24] Now, you do have to be a little careful because there are some books like Red Queen, which is randomly in mysteries and thrillers, which is weird because it's like a dystopian fantasy romance, but it's in mysteries and thrillers. So do your due diligence. It's fine. Victoria Aveyard can put her books whenever she....wherever she wants. Obviously, she's doing well, but look through it, read the blurbs, make sure it's what you think you're getting and you can buy that. You can also, on the lefthand side of your Amazon screen, I'm not going to walk you through doing it because it's different on all the devices, there is a way to click down through categories without going to a book. So, you can, like, tick boxes to be like "young adult fantasy, witches and wizards" and it'll probably all just take you to Harry Potter, but that's fine. From there you can find other things.
Megan: [00:09:07] So if you're an Amazon shopper, it influences you because you can get to books that you choose by clicking on buttons. It also influences you because if you type in something like "fantasy romance with paranormal," I don't know why you'd type that in. That's a horrible search term phrase. But it'll pull from those categories. There's also keywords, but that's a whole different thing. So, it uses that information to display books to you. It is handing you a platter of books based on what authors have inputted in those categories, which is why as an author, it's so stressful because you want to make sure you're getting on the right serving trays so that you can be one of the popular hors d'oeuvres instead of one of the sad hors d'oeuvres that gets put in the trash.
Megan: [00:09:48] So, people who buy books tend to want to talk about books, whether it's emailing their great aunt, posting a review on Goodreads, posting about it on Twitter, on Bookstagram, whatever it is, word of mouth sells a lot of books. And so many readers buy books through Kindle and through the Amazon store that you're going to get a lot of books that are recommended based on Amazon purchases even if you're not buying off of Amazon. Amazon numbers of ratings can also affect things like what promos books are available for, so if you've ever bought a book off a BookBub promo, BookBub looks at those Amazon reviews. So, getting a proper category placement on Amazon reffect, err, affects reviews on Amazon, which affects promo opportunities for books.
Megan: [00:10:35] It's also a thing where Google will place books higher. If they're pinging really well on Amazon, that's getting lots and lots of traffic. If you Google a book, it's going to rate higher. And because all of those things affect how buyers buy books, that translates into other stores. So, if people are hearing about all these great books that were purchased on Amazon and they're in the Kobo store, things are going to rank differently on Kobo because people are buying them based off what they heard from Amazon shoppers. So that all trickles down into the other bookstores.
Megan: [00:11:07] It even trickles down into your local bookstore, because once buzz starts about a book, that's how local bookstores purchase things, because they've heard good things about the books, which start with Amazon purchases. Why? Because it's taken over the world. We all know it. It's just taken over everything.
Megan: [00:11:28] Now, there are other ways to do categories on other sites. It's a little bit less stressful in most cases. For things like Kobo, you get three categories on iBooks (Apple Books) you get two categories, on Draft2Digital, which is an aggregator service, you get, like, five categories, but there is no, like, secret back door shifty categories buying a program to find them from a dude who like kind of knows because he has backed the program. And yeah, there's like an entire market for authors to figure out these categories. It's absolutely absurd. But it's because it makes such a huge difference in how people buy books. And those decisions come down to how authors choose to place them.
Megan: [00:12:11] Now, hopefully, eventually, things will level out. And it won't just be Amazon being the big player, and there will be other methods for people to tell you what their book is and for them to get placement. There are still, like, library things and stuff like that, but that comes down to a lot of different categories. And that's a different story that we're not going to get into on this podcast/video 'cause trust me, you don't want to go there. It'll make your eyes bleed. And not from an icepick. They'll just bleed naturally. But those categories and key words are going to affect everything. So, yeah. It matters so much.
Megan: [00:12:47] So, if you are an Amazon person, next time you're clicking around trying to find a book, check out that product details, the categories, see what else you can find. See what authors got it super right and got their books in a great place. See if you can find any more animal Animal Farm-type situations where, you know, just causing childhood trauma, one misplaced category at a time, and appreciate the work that authors put into pulling their hair out trying to get their books into the right place.
Megan: [00:13:17] If you're an author...just keep going, man. You're going to figure out those categories eventually. And don't forget to put those greater than less than symbols in when you email 'em to Amazon or they'll reject everything. It's amazing how little things like those decisions can affect what goes viral, what we read, how we read. But in a digital world where authors are having more and more control over how they place and market their books, it's become a free-for-all where those tiny little stepping stones are what can lead an author to success. So, think about the categories of your favorite books. Don't be afraid to dive into those categories to see what your new favorite read might be.
Megan: [00:13:55] And, uh, yeah. Bezos rules the world, man. He rules the world.
Megan: [00:14:05] So I will see you next time. And, uh, good luck. And...may the Amazon be ever in your favor.