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Monday, July 23, 2012

Amazon Categories, Keywords and Tags

As a writer or publisher, you get to choose Categories, Keywords and Tags for your book. How do you do it? For example, if you have published a Kindle edition of your book, select the book from your author Bookshelf, select the action Edit Book Details, and under Target Your Book to Customers, you will find the Add Categories button and the Search Keywords field. As for Tags, anyone can add a tag on your Amazon book page by typing into the Your Tags field.

Categories: 

How many? Up to two per book. 

How are they used? The categories you chose are listed at the bottom of your Amazon book page. In the past, Amazon allowed you to choose up to five of them, which is why some books have more than the allotted two. By choosing a category for your book, you are in fact choosing a browsing-path for readers, a path which consists of a hierarchy of sub-categories, indicating how your book can be searched and discovered. In the case of the paperback edition of my book, Apart From Love, I have just updated the categories as follows:

Books > Literature & Fiction > Drama > United States
Books > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Contemporary Women


Keywords: 

How many? Up to seven per book. 

How are they used? You can assign phrases, as they can be more than a single word. For example I used terms like love triangle, alzheimer's, family drama, father son relationship, mystery, forgiveness, guilt. Amazon uses these phrases in their search engine, in combination with words in your title, and your product description. 

Tags:

How many? No limit.

How are they used? Tags are listed on a book’s product page under the heading Tag this product. They are designed by Amazon to help customers--in our case, readers--describe and find products. Anyone, not only the author, and not only the publisher, can add tags to a product page, and indicate that an existing tag is useful. Therefore, tags allow the book to be defined by your audience.

Hope this helps.

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