Adding New Categories To Your Book

You can now select only three categories for your book from within Amazon KDP
At the end of May 2023, Amazon KDP announced a raft of immediate new changes, the most important of which concerned the selection of book categories.

These changes have much wider repercussions than many might consider at first. For example, many books in the Amazon store related to self-publishing and dated before June 2023 will become largely out of date, because most cover the topic of category selection for your book.

Many authors were alarmed when they heard they could only select three categories. How would this impact their sales and visibility?  To better understand this, let’s look at how book category selection use to work, and how it works now.

PREVIOUSLY ....
AmaAmazon had a pretty flawed system where authors were asked to select two categories when uploading their book into KDP.Unknown to many, the categories displayed to them were notably limited and different from the larger selection of categories readers could actually browse through on the Amazon website.
Also, unknown to many authors, up to 10 categories could be added to a book, but for this to happen authors had to email KDP Support.
As you can imagine, this was a rather unfair and troublesome system because many authors didn’t know they could add more than the two categories provided in KDP.
This put many authors at a big disadvantage.
These new changes in Amazon KDP should eliminate category stuffing issue.
Added to this, Amazon Support rarely checked the category selections sent to them, so some more savvy authors started abusing the system by employing what some call “category stuffing.”
This malpractice places a book in niche categories where only a few sales are needed to reach the bestseller lists (perhaps even reach the #1 spot), even if the book is irrelevant in those particular categories. For example, a steamy vampire novel could appear in the bestseller list for photography. Why it took Amazon so long to resolve this flawed system remains a mystery. However, finally, all that is largely over.

AND NOW ....
Amazon has simplified the category selection process by listing all categories inside KDP. That means we can now select from a much broader range of categories than before. And, should we change our minds on the categories selected, we can update them whenever we like through our KDP Bookshelf.
One notable limitation is that Amazon now restricts books to three categories. On the whole, this is a good thing because it should prevent the malpractice of “category stuffing” I mentioned before. It should also fix a glitch many authors reported in November 2022 regarding incorrect categories showing for their books.
NOTE: The three-category limitation takes effect when you update your book. If no change is made, then you remain with the categories you had before the May 2023 changes.
 

CATEGORY SELECTIONS TIPS
Being limited to just three categories makes your book category selection all the more important.
When publishing an e-book in KDP, most authors will select the first two categories that come to mind when browsing the list of categories now provided in KDP. In many cases, this is a mistake.
One of the objectives in selecting categories for your book is not so much to select the most logical ones, but rather the “best fit” ones. By this, I mean selecting the categories where you book is most likely to be found in the Amazon Store. Amazon shoppers often discover books by entering keywords in the search box and by searching through the bestseller lists. Amazon has a “Top 100” list in hundreds of categories, and many readers will look at these lists.

So, one of your goals should be to try and select at least one category where your book appears in these lists with minimum sales effort needed. Popular tools like Publisher Rocket help with this, if you don’t mind paying for such products. If you are on a limited budget, there are free Book Category Selection Tools such as at https://bookcategories.spread.name/

IN SUMMARY
When selecting book categories, authors now have a full range of category selection within KDP without having to contact Amazon Support. All of this is, I believe, generally good news for all of us published in KDP.

Amazon still has some way to go to improve category selection. It has no search feature so that you can locate the best fit categories for your book, or how competitive each category is. Equally, it seems slightly ridiculous that mainstream categories like Romance, Mystery, Thrillers, Science Fiction, and Fantasy are far more limited that other less mainstream categories. For example, Romance has only 46 categories/subcategories while Science & Math has over 200 in comparison.

However, overall, these changes in Amazon KDP are an improvement. Let’s hope this continues.