Hmmm… How to categorize women’s fiction on Amazon for maximum punch?
It’s getting near that time for Occasional Soulmates… You know, all you indie publishers: the moment when you select the all-important subject categories for your soon-to-be-born masterpiece. Pick wrong, and nobody will ever lay eyes on it, at least not serendipitously. Also, you’ll never hit the Top 100, which, let’s face it, is a blast when it happens. Pick right and you might have an outside chance of being seen by gobs of new eyeballs, which can translate into sales.
My question to you is, What categories offer a book like mine the best opportunity for standing out in the crowd? (Read the blurb here.)
I’ve read David Gaughran’s ideas on how to approach this, and they make a lot of sense. In essence, he advises us to choose lightly populated categories so that fewer daily sales bump our books up into the Top 100. Occasionally this has worked for Yesterday Road. I think it got as high as #4 in the Literary Humor category. I have a feeling the Women’s Fiction world is going to be harder to crack.
So help a guy out! What’s the best strategy for a book about a contemporary but eccentric gal lookin’ for love in a tough love market? (With a twist, of course…)
16 comments on “Hmmm… How to categorize women’s fiction on Amazon for maximum punch?”
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WHAT THE HELL 
Any chance you can squeeze in a dystopian intergalactic boweevil love subplot before publication? Pretty sure you’d own that category!
Stop the presses!!
Absolutely be sure to include this book in Humour (or, Humor to you), because any reader looking for a good laugh is going to enjoy this book! And you always do humour so well, Kevin. Not easy to write funny.
Thanks for that, Susan! It’s a little fraught to shoot for funny, since people have wildly differing ideas about what actually IS funny.
KDP uses BISAC Subject Codes..you can look them up on the internet. A while back, I posted an article about keywords. It was basically stuff you can find on the KDP website but they make it so frackin’ obscure it is not readily available. If you have seen it already. Great! If you have not here’s the link:
http://redclayandroses1.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/keywords-and-visibility-on-amazon/
For you, I would go to Literary Fiction and then down past Historical fiction to Women’s Fiction. Include Women’s Fiction in keywords and then make sure to include the keywords you want….these are actually required for the system to work for you. It made an enormous impact on my sales to get the correct keywords in place.
I remember reading your post last year, and I used it to tweak my key words at the time. Not sure it had an effect, but I felt better having done the best I could think to do to improve my chances.
And that’s really all we CAN do, isn’t it?
Yes! It is. I saw your name listed on another blogger’s post today as one of her favorite indies. Along with about seven others. Yay! You made the list 😀 That speaks volumes.
Yeah, that really made my day!
The other tip I would give is to look at the number of books in each category / subcategory (the number in brackets). It’s usually – though not always – easier to get into the top 100 of categories containing less books. Clearly, the category has to be related to what you have written (because you will face a lot of criticism if it isn’t) but it is worth having an associated category (or two) along these lines, as well as the main category that most fits you book.
Great advice, Dylan. It’s tricky stuff, in that you don’t want to swim in a pond that no one ever comes to, yet you don’t want to flail around in the ocean either…
This is true, which is why you don’t rely on just one category/sub-category, but don’t forget when you split millions of customers into small ponds, they are still very, very big ponds.
Good point!
My specialty is offering worthless comments that add nothing to a discussion. So there you have it.
Taken under advisement…
I think you knew that, though.
Better believe it, man. Yet you’re strangely prescient.