Hi there,

Amazon announced a major change to their book store last week — and, in particular, to their category system.

Now, this affects all authors and publishers who sell on the giant retailer. But don’t stress. In today’s edition of the Reedsy marketing newsletter, we’ll analyze exactly:

• What the change is;
• Whether you should do anything about it; and
• What impact it may have on the marketplace.

Let’s get started!

So, what has changed exactly?

Amazon has greatly simplified the process of selecting store categories for our books.

Previously, we used to:

• Select two categories when first uploading the book to KDP, among a selection of categories that was very different from the categories readers could actually browse; and then
• Email KDP support to request additional categories, or category changes (up to a total of 10 categories per book/format).

As you can imagine (or may remember), this was a pretty cumbersome process. Not all authors were aware of the second point, which put them at a strong disadvantage. And many of those who were aware of it then abused the process to get their books listed in as many niche categories as possible.

Now, all this is over: you may have a maximum of three categories per book/format. And you can select or update them at any point — on your own — through your KDP Bookshelf.

The KDP category selection now mirrors the categories on the store.

To learn more about how to research, select, and update categories with this new process, read this freshly updated post on the Reedsy blog!

Should I stop reading and go update my categories, then?

It depends! If you’ve never requested categories from KDP Support, using only the two generic ones you could select with the previous process, then you should definitely log in to your KDP Bookshelf and go update those.

However, if you did avail yourself of the additional categories workaround, and your book is currently in more than three categories, it will retain all its existing categories — unless and until you update its categories in KDP.

In other words: while you may not request additional categories (or categories changes) from KDP Support anymore, existing ones will remain if you don’t touch anything.

In some cases, that may be beneficial. In others, not so much. Let’s see why.

In September of last year, Amazon started paving the way for last week’s category update by limiting the amount of categories a book could rank in to three. This change was more of a quiet, behind-the-scenes one, but had an instant impact on the store (more on that later).

But what this first change effectively meant is that, while a book could be listed in up to ten categories on the store, it would only appear in the bestseller rankings of three categories (out of these ten). These three categories were picked by Amazon at their sole discretion, and displayed in the “Product details” section of the book page.

In other words, if you listed your book in more than three categories, you lost control over which ones the book would rank in.

Of course, there are other benefits to being listed in a category than just the bestseller (and hot new releases) ranking. There’s the popularity list, to start with. And the added visibility in search results.

In short: it doesn’t hurt to be in more than three categories unless the three you rank in (determined by Amazon) are not the most relevant ones. If you’re happy with your three categories, I wouldn’t touch anything. If you aren’t, then the only option for you to make sure you rank in the categories you want is to use the new system and restrict your book to your three chosen categories.

In my example above, if my book weren’t ranking in the Authorship category (the #1 most relevant one in my niche), I would go update my categories and restrict it to three — just to make sure my ranking gets back in that category. But for now, I won’t touch anything.

Is this change good or bad?

While some authors may be angry about losing the ability to get their books in a bunch of mildly relevant categories, I hardly see anything negative about this change — aside from the fact that it comes years too late.

The KDP support workaround for requesting additional categories was not only cumbersome, it led to most categories being polluted with less-than-relevant books.

This not only made for a terrible experience for readers browsing the store, but also messed up Amazon’s recommendation engine (partly powered by category metadata). Worse, it created a winner-takes-all situation.

Think about it this way: mainstream bestsellers like the Harry Potter series used to rank in ten different categories — and because of their sales figures, they used to take the top positions of the bestseller ranks in all of these ten categories.

This left little visibility to other books, even if those other books were much better suited to that category.

Let’s take a concrete example. I used the Internet Wayback Machine to look at the bestseller list in YA Fantasy Fairy Tales back in 2021:

As you can see, the top positions were taken by Leigh Bardugo. Now, let’s take a look at this category today:

The Leigh Bardugo books are gone. Why? Because their publisher (or maybe Amazon) did not pick YA Fantasy Fairy Tales as one of the three categories to rank the books in:

This category change doesn’t just fight pollution, it actually levels the playing field a bit more by distributing the chances of ranking top in a category. In that regard, it’s one of the rare Amazon changes that should actually benefit midlist authors and publishers, rather than the current top sellers.

If you’re interested in following the aftermath of this category change, and the evolution of Amazon category visibility over the next few months, I encourage you to follow Alex Niehaus’ work at K-Lytics. Here’s a fascinating first bit of analysis he shared publicly on Facebook. The graph perfectly illustrates the impact this change had on the broad Teen & YA category.

“Much of the market effect has already been shown over the last 9 months because the 3-category limit was already introduced for bestseller list display last September. In essence: Thousands of bestseller lists have been "reset" to a lower level of sales that it takes to rank in them (see explanation in the image.) Teen YA was particularly affected. But similar patterns were shown in many lower-level categories of the other major genres, too (See K-lytics genre reports for more).” — Alex Niehaus, K-Lytics

As you can see, picking the right categories to list each of your formats in is more important than ever, and may now make an actual difference to your book’s visibility on Amazon. To learn how to make the most of it, take our free course on Amazon Algorithms here (also freshly updated with the latest Amazon changes)!

Happy writing, and happy marketing!

Ricardo

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