Amazon is Cracking Down on Categories and Keywords

It doesn’t pay to try to game the system

Let’s begin with a full disclosure: I don’t have any special inside knowledge about Amazon. What I’m going to share here is based on what I see in the industry, the stories I hear from other authors and indie publishers, and simple common sense.

Amazon is cracking down on authors and publishers who put their books in the wrong category and/or use inappropriate keywords to try to drive traffic to their books.

This is a good thing. Amazon is all about providing a topnotch customer experience—and book buyers aren’t happy when their search results get cluttered with titles that have nothing to do with what they want. So, kudos to Amazon for identifying those books and taking action to correct how they’re listed on the site.

Categories

Categories on Amazon are like sections in a bookstore or library. If you’re looking for a book on business management, you don’t go wandering around the romantic fiction department. Categories are an important way to let readers know what your book is about.

Amazon ranks books in overall sales and also within their categories. Some readers may check that (although I doubt that many do), but the bigger benefit of ranking well with sales is getting the attention of Amazon’s algorithms. The better your book is selling, the more Amazon is going to show it to prospective buyers.

So-called Amazon experts used to (and some probably still do) recommend that authors put their books in some obscure category that had minimal competition, then push sales hard for a narrow window of time so they could hit number one status in that category. With that, they could call themselves a bestselling Amazon author, even if they only maintained that status for a few hours.

Technically, it would be true. In reality, it’s an empty boast. And it has little, if any, impact on your sales.

Be honest: Have you ever bought a book because the book or the author included “Amazon Bestseller” in their credentials? More likely, you made your choice based on the title, description, cover or recommendations from others.

The best approach to choosing categories is to research all the available categories and select the ones that are the best fit from the readers’ perspective.

Keywords

The keywords and phrases you enter help the Amazon algorithms know when to show your book in search results. When choosing keywords, you need to think like a reader who might be looking for your book. What words or phrases would they enter in the search bar?

Don’t use keywords designed to trick the reader. For example, your book may be in the fantasy subgenre of sword and sorcery, but you can’t use “J.K. Rowling” as one of your keywords. And even though some people might search on “bestselling [topic] book,” that’s not an acceptable Amazon book keyword.

Note: When you’re running Amazon ads, you can use other author names as keywords, but you can’t do it in your book’s metadata.

What is Amazon doing?

As I said, I don’t have any special inside knowledge, but anecdotally, it seems as though Amazon has stepped up enforcement of its category and keyword policies. When it finds a violation, it may simply make a change (for example, changing the category). Or you may receive a notification and be given the opportunity to correct the issue yourself. Amazon may also pull your book. Repeated violations could result in your KDP account being suspended or terminated.

The solution

How can you avoid getting into trouble with Amazon with your categories and keywords? Simple: Play by the rules. Be ethical and honest. Don’t try to game the system or trick the readers.

Choosing categories and keywords

When I’m choosing categories and keywords for my books and helping my clients do it for theirs, the tool I use is Publisher Rocket.

Click here to read my blog about what Publisher Rocket can do. Click here to go straight to the Publisher Rocket site to see how it works and try it risk-free.