How to choose the best ebook category on Amazon

I
get a lot of questions from people who want to self-publish on Amazon,
and one of my first pieces of advice is to pay attention to book
categories.  If you're an unknown with little presence on the
internet, you're much more likely to be successful breaking into the
Amazon ebook market if you choose a category with less
competition.  The goal is to get into a top-100 list so that your
book is shown on the relevant page on Amazon, in essence giving you free
advertising and attracting new readers organically.



How do you know which categories have less competition?  Start here
and then browse through categories on the sidebar, digging deeper and
deeper until you find the smallest subcategory your potential book would
fit into.  Then page to the end of the top-100 list in that
category and see what the ranking is for the 100th book.



You'll soon notice that non-fiction is much
easier to break into than fiction since there are a lot more
subcategories and much less competition within each.  For example,
the Vegetable Gardening category shown above currently has books ranked
as low as 173,832 within the top 100, meaning you only need to sell a
book every 36 hours or so to stay in the top 100.  In contrast, the
very hot Paranormal Fantasy category has book 100 currently ranked at
2,597 in the Kindle store.  Yes, that means you'd have to sell 30
to 55 copies per day even to be book 100.  (You can convert between
sales rank and books sold here, although some of the numbers I list in this post are based on my own experience.)

You may have noticed that Aimee's Shiftless
is a werewolf book, which means it should most properly be in the
Paranormal Fantasy category (or perhaps in Werewolf Romance, which is
equally competitive).  But as an unknown author, that type of sales
can't be expected right off the bat, so I instead helped Aimee get her
book into some appropriate but much-less-competitive categories ---
Women's Fantasy Fiction and Coming of Age Fantasy.



These both happen to be
categories that you can't simply select using a check-box while
publishing your book, which makes them much less competitive since many
writers don't want to put in the effort to get listed.  Instead,
you need to use appropriate keywords (or to email Amazon's help line) to get your book in the appropriate listing.



You're allowed up to two
categories when you list your book on Amazon, and you should always try
to show up on two different best-seller lists for maximum
exposure.  The great thing is that you can change your categories
whenever you want, so as Aimee's book becomes more popular, I can move
her into harder categories.  For now, the two middle-of-the-road
categories she's using are keeping Shiftless
visible as she gains more readers, but at the rate she's going, I
expect to bump her up into Paranormal Fantasy within a few months!