KDP Announces a Big Change

KDP Announces a Big Change

Categories

 

Amazon KDP announces a big change in connection with listing your book on its platform. The change affects the selection of categories.

Categories 

Categories are the sections of the Amazon Store where customers can find your book. Just think of a physical bookstore and how books are divided up into sections: science-fiction, history, war stories, biographies, children’s books and so on.

Prior to 30 May 2023 when you listed a book on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform (KDP), you selected 2 categories. These were BISAC categories. These two categories would indicate to KDP where your book should be placed in the Amazon store. 

Once the book was published you would then contact KDP and request that your book be put into 10 browse categories – categories that you would choose. But this has now all changed. 

The change

This is the change. You now select just three Amazon categories. Once you’ve selected your primary marketplace you choose your three categories.  

Since you can now choose your own 3 categories, KDP is no longer accepting requests to add categories.

The available categories will depend on your primary audience and marketplace (for example, amazon.com or amazon.com.au). 

So the new way of doing things is to select 3 categories. No longer can you request 10 categories. 

Here are 5 tips to choosing the three categories:

  1. Choose 3 accurate categories very carefully
  2. Less is more keeps the algorithm happy so its 3 and not 10 categories
  3. Focus on selecting the best 3 sub-categories; you wouldn’t choose History but you would select a history sub-category
  4. Make sure your categories line up with keywords
  5. Give the categories time to work. Don’t rush into changing them.

Update existing categories

So what do you do now if you already have listed a book? You need to update your categories.

  • Go to Bookshelf
  • Go to the title of the book and click on the 3 ellipsis buttons
  • click edit details
  • select your primary marketplace

If you want help with selecting categories Publisher Rocket is a great resource. What I really love about Publisher Rocket is the way it can help with research into categories.  

There you have it in a nutshell – the major change to category selection when listing your book on KDP.

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