An Easy Trick to Know Whether to Ask KDP to Change Your Book Categories

You’ve probably heard all the hype about KDP categories. After all, book categories perform a crucial role in helping readers discover and purchase your self-published books!

So, you did all your research and chose three categories when you uploaded your book. If you haven’t done that yet, here’s a great article from the Kindlepreneur to help you choose ebook categories.

But let’s suppose you’ve already chosen your categories and published your ebook. Once a few copies have sold, you can take a look at the Amazon product details to see how you rank in the Kindle store. Here’s a screenshot example of a version of Little Red Riding Hood. However, this is the information you get for all KDP books, regardless of their category.

*Screenshot of a Best Sellers Rank on KDP.*

If you select the blue category hyperlink in the product details you’ll get to the list of top 100 best sellers in it. That gives you some insights into the competition for your book if you haven’t made it into the 100 best sellers yet. Knowing the competition is your #1 step in marketing!

What does the Best Sellers Rank tell us?

Amazon maintains a list of the top 100 best sellers in every category. The lists are labelled Best Sellers.

According to the Best Sellers Rank list, this particular version of Little Red Riding (from above) has a best sellers rank of #69,387. That’s pretty good!

How good, you ask? Well, according to Kindlepreneur’s Book and Ebook sales calculator for KDP, that means the book sells 3 copies a day. Not a lot of cash. However, it does give the author the right to say the book is a best seller in three categories.

Screen capture from the Amazon Book Sales Calculator for KDP.

Of course, the best sellers rank also tells you what categories your book ended up in.

What if your categories aren’t the ones you chose?

Amazon KDP provides 3 tips for choosing the three categories you’re allowed:

Research your genre and subgenres
Pick accurate categories
Balance popularity and relevance

The thing is that every KDP store doesn’t use the same categories. For instance, there isn’t a YA category for ebooks (just print books) in Canada’s Amazon store at all.

So, you may look at the categories your book ended up in and think, but that’s not the best category at all!

You can go back to Amazon and try again using your bookshelf. However, the question is, should you?

Should you leave the categories as they are or request a change?

Let’s go back to the Little Red Riding Hood title for the Best Sellers Rank screenshot above. I don’t know if this author selected these categories or not, but I do know they’re not the same categories as my version of Little Red Riding Hood.

My Magic Forest Adventures ebook is in the following categories:

Children’s European Folk Tales (Kindle Store)
Children’s Wolf Books
Children’s Fox & Wolf Books (Books)

Now, let’s do some comparisons to find out whether changing categories will be a good idea, or not for the title above.

All authors’ goals, of course, are to maximize sales, so we want to increase our visibility in the KDP store.

In other words, we’re aiming to appear on as many KDP Best Seller lists as possible.

So what’s next?

Find out whether requesting a category change will move the book up or down on the Best Sellers Rank. And that’s easy-peasy.

Compare the #1 title in all categories (the category currently assigned and the potential categories).

#1 in Children's Multicultural Folk Tales - Best Sellers Rank is 55,581 in the Kindle Store. 

#1 in Children's European Folk Tales - Best Sellers Rank is 58,093

What about the category of "Children's Wolf Books?" There, the #1 Best Sellers Rank title is at 28,664 in the Kindle Store

Conclusion

The goal is to have your book appear as high as possible on a Best Sellers list for its category. While we’d have to go through every title on each list to get full details, we can make some assumptions based on the numbers we have.

The overall ranking for the #1 titles between Children’s Multicultural Folk Tales and Children’s European Folk Tales are very similar. Changing categories here wouldn’t likely make an impact. Don’t bother.

However, there’s a difference of 26,917 books in overall Best Sellers Rank between Children’s Multicultural Folk Tales and Children’s Wolf Books. Requesting a category change here to the Wolf Books would be a bad thing.

Why? Because the test book is ranking #2 on the Multicultural Folk Tales list with its overall ranking of 69,387. To get to #2 on the Wolf Books list it would no doubt have to be much closer to the #1 book’s rank of 26,917. Chances are high it wouldn’t end up in the top 100 sellers at all.

As long as you feel the categories Amazon assigned are accurate,  don't request a change unless you feel you'd rank higher in a different relevant category based on your overall Best Sellers Rank. Typically,  Amazon puts your book where it will be most successful.

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