Why You Must Take Care Over Your Categories
The purpose of categorising a book is to increase its visibility and potential sales. In today’s digital age, online bookstores like Amazon play a crucial role in helping readers find new books. By accurately classifying your book, it has a better chance of appearing in front of the right audience at the right time. However, if your book is placed in an incorrect category, it may annoy or frustrate potential readers and could miss out on valuable marketing opportunities. Ultimately, incorrect classification could result in your book not being seen by the intended audience at all.
Ensuring accuracy in these details will greatly benefit your book’s introduction to the world.
These are the industry subject categories/codes, called BISAC (Book Industry Standards Advisory Committee).
There are levels of BISAC category: general categories, like “Philosophy,” and sub-categories, like “Philosophy/Eastern.”
Once your book has been scheduled, we enter the three categories you provide us with into trade databases using our Nielsen Book data and Amazon Advantage accounts in the UK. This helps make your book more accessible to potential readers.
When your book starts gaining attention online, the BISAC categories it was initially listed under may not match the categories it ranks for on major retailers like Amazon, Google, and Apple. Once readers actively search for your book, browse through categories, and make purchases, the retailer’s algorithms will take over and track their behavior to determine how to categorize your book. This process is highly automated and can vary by retailer and region. Some categories, such as History, may have sub-categories on Amazon that go beyond what is specified in the BISAC.
If you need to make changes to the bibliographic data for your book on Amazon.com, such as the paperback categories, you can do so through an Author Central account. You also have the option to request additional categories or removal of existing categories. Keep in mind that you cannot change Kindle categories on Amazon.com. For Amazon UK, if you find that your browse categories are incorrect, please reach out to us through the Author Forum in Sales & Distribution/Sales Online. We can request for Amazon to update the categories for both your paperback and Kindle versions of the book in the UK. However, it’s important to note that Amazon is more likely to remove a category than add one, and these changes may take several weeks to appear and are not guaranteed.