How to choose the best Amazon categories for your book

I just had to reblog this incredibly useful post with lots of insights for indie authors from the blog of my savvie friend, Nicholas Rossis. I draw your attention specifically to the downloadable Excel sheet of all Amazon categories! Look for subcategories with as few books as possible (see numbers in brackets) but at the same time, choose a subcategory with a relatively high ‘competitiveness’ number too. If you fancy using more than the max 2 categories, just use the rest as keywords as Nicholas explains. How cool is that? I hope you’ll find this excellent post as useful as I have. TIP: To change your 2 categories, don’t even bother with the KDP dashboard. Just send a message to Customer Service, give them the categories you want, and they’ll add them for you. They did this for me in less that 24 hours. Happy weekend, peeps!

Nicholas C. Rossis

First of all, congratulations! You’re now a published author – and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Second, you’d be amazed how often I hear that question in LinkedIn’s author groups. With some 3,000 new books published every day, I have serious doubts that you can just sit back and wait for readers to stumble on your book, or for word of mouth to work its magic. The chances of that happening are probably similar to that of winning the lottery, in which case you don’t even need the long hours and hard work that goes hand-in-hand with a career as an author (if you don’t believe me, you may want to check out this post by Pedro Barrento on Indies Unlimited).

So, what are the next steps after publication? Before I can answer that, I need to ask one question of my own first: is this your first book? You see…

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