Positioning Your Self-Published Book in Amazon’s Ecosystem

Amazon uses an internal ranking system to determine which of its roughly 12 million e-books published for Kindle are performing the best, according to metrics it has specified and weighted by its own proprietary values. Every e-book is ranked with a number value known as the Amazon Best Seller Rank (ABSR) number. ABSR numbers are constantly in flux, updated every several hours depending on how performance factors for each e-book have changed.

If your book gets a modest amount of ongoing sales, it will most likely be ranking somewhere between #100,000 and #1,000,000. Generally speaking, any book that breaks #100,000 and manages to stay there is doing pretty well (especially compared to other self-published books), though this single number fails to take into account other important success factors like paperback and audiobook sales or the amount of time and money spent on marketing to achieve its impressive e-book sales. A Kindle book with an impressive ABSR number can still be losing money if its author or publisher is spending more on ads than they get back in revenue.

ABSR numbers are useful for determining at a glance how a book is performing relative to all others. You can use the ABSR of books similar to yours to learn what is popular and what is stagnant. It will give you valuable input about which categories are most or least competitive and, therefore, which will be the ones you can get the most visibility in. You can view the ABSR number of any e-book under the "Product details" section of its Amazon listing.

There are many theories about how Amazon's Kindle store ranking algorithm works. While no one knows the exact equation, it's clear that certain factors have a large influence, such as the number of sales in a given period, how much money each sale is worth (an e-book that sells 100 copies priced at $9.99 is more impressive than an e-book that sells 100 copies priced at 99 cents), and how many verified or unverified positive reviews a book has received.

Additionally, all Kindle e-books on Amazon are ranked on a curve, with preference given to newer books over older ones. The longer a book has been on Amazon, the better it must perform to maintain the same Kindle store ABSR number. If you act fast and have a solid promotional strategy in place upon launching your book, it's easy to temporarily get almost any book into the top 10,000 on all of Kindle (and to #1 in at least one subcategory). Sustaining a high ranking for years to come, however, is another matter.

Amazon's Search Function

Amazon's search algorithm is designed to show you the books that consumers are most likely to buy when searching specific terms. When there is a pattern of shoppers purchasing the same books again and again from certain search terms, those books will show up for other shoppers who search the same terms. It's Amazon's way of maximizing its revenue and optimizing the consumer search experience.

If you searched a phrase like "American Revolution" in Amazon's online bookstore at the time the first edition of this book was being written in 2018, you'd get a variety of predictable results. Among them were:

• 1776 by David McCullough
• American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor
• The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Oxford History of the United States) by Robert Middlekauff
• How to Read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence: A Simple Guide to Understanding the Constitution of the United States (Freedom in America Book 1) by Paul B. Skousen

However, Amazon book search results can also surprise you. At the #1 search result spot for the phrase "American Revolution," a somewhat surprising result trumped the rest: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff.

Unlike the other books on the first page of Amazon's search results, Fire and Fury is not a book about the war for American independence from England in 1776. It's about controversial, recent American president Donald Trump's time in the White House. Most people searching for books related to the term "American Revolution" were probably not looking to learn about Donald Trump's presidency, yet this book outranked the more relevant titles.

There are many reasons Wolff's book could have been showing up where it did, despite its seeming inappropriateness for searchers. It was still relatively soon after the book's 2018 publication date. It was granted greater visibility by Amazon's algorithm because of its recency. All other things being equal, a new book will be shown more often than an old one.

Fire and Fury was also extremely topical at the time. The Trump presidency was a hot subject of discussion among both supporters and detractors. The book now has more than 49,000 Amazon user reviews with a 4.0- out of 5-star average rating. Previously, it ranked #7 "most read" on the Amazon charts and around #1,000 ABSR (though it has since dropped to less than #100,000). These factors created a more powerful effect than the specific relevance of the search phrase "American Revolution."

Tellingly, if you searched the phrases "American politics," "American government," "American history," or "American president," the book Fire and Fury would also show up on the first page of results. The same applied if you searched even the word "American" by itself. The book was ranking so strongly for that one word it hardly mattered what modifiers you added or phrases you made it part of. However, since several years have now passed since its 2018 publication, fewer people care about former President Trump and the book has lost most of its search term ranking.

When you see the focus and tone of books that show up for various phrases, you will get a good sense of where your book will fit into the market ecosystem. And if you are writing on a niche subject, you may be surprised at how highly your book starts to rank for some specific and esoteric keywords.

After I published Sadistic Pleasures: Silent Crimes of Azerbaijan by Ashkhen Arakelyan, I was surprised to see it ranking #1 for the keyword "Azerbaijan" in the entire Kindle store. The book's subject is the longstanding conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory called Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh. I didn't expect it to get such visibility for a single parent keyword. I then widened my search and saw it ranking #1 for the same word in the entire books category. Then I dared to search every category of all items. Sure enough, at the #1 spot for "Azerbaijan" for every item on Amazon sat Sadistic Pleasures, ahead of various travel guides, history books, t-shirts, documentaries, maps, and trinkets related to Azerbaijan.

How did the author and I get this esoteric book from a first-time author to reach such prominence on a major search engine like Amazon? First, the keyword "Azerbaijan" is not a highly competitive one. Most of the other products trying to rank for it are books that have sat on the market for many years, such as Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War by Thomas de Waal (2013) and Kaukasis: A Culinary Journey Through Georgia, Azerbaijan & Beyond by Olia Hercules (2017). Since it was published in 2022, Sadistic Pleasures had a major recency advantage in the rankings. And for non-book items ranking for the same term, such as t-shirts and coffee mugs with the flag of Azerbaijan on them, there simply wasn't much ongoing demand.

Second, Sadistic Pleasures contains the word "Azerbaijan" in its subtitle and throughout its description. This makes the connection clear for Amazon's search algorithm. Though the book is also about Armenia and mentions that fact in its description, the title lacks that specific word. As a result, the book was only showing up on the second page of results for the keyword "Armenia." That's still an impressive feat for such a broad single keyword, but not as impressive as the #1 spot.

Third, the author and I actively sought out reviewers to leave verified purchase reviews, which add a lot of credibility to a product in Amazon's eyes. If dozens of people purchase and review a product shortly after launch, it boosts its visibility. This can even apply if the reviews are negative because it still shows interest in the product.

Kindle Parent Categories

Amazon currently organizes its US Kindle store into 31 parent categories that contain all 12 million of its e-book publications:

1. Arts & Photography
2. Biographies & Memoirs
3. Business & Money
4. Children's eBooks
5. Comics & Graphic Novels
6. Computers & Technology
7. Cookbooks, Food & Wine
8. Crafts, Hobbies & Home
9. Education & Teaching
10. Engineering & Transportation
11. Foreign Languages
12. Health, Fitness & Dieting
13. History
14. Humor & Entertainment
15. Law
16. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender eBooks
17. Literature & Fiction
18. Medical eBooks
19. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
20. Nonfiction
21. Parenting & Relationships
22. Politics & Social Sciences
23. Reference
24. Religion & Spirituality
25. Romance
26. Science & Math
27. Science Fiction & Fantasy
28. Self-Help
29. Sports & Outdoors
30. Teen & Young Adult
31. Travel

These parent categories are divided into more than 16,000 subcategories. As the number of books published on Kindle increases (with one new e-book published every minute or about 1,500 per day by some estimates), the categories Amazon uses to organize its content will continue to expand and subdivide (e.g., Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Family Relationships > Divorce).

How well books rank in subcategories fluctuates throughout the day as each book's ABSR number changes based on how many copies of each book are selling and how long they have been published. By watching which books tend to stay at the top of rankings in certain subcategories, you will get a sense of what readers are looking to buy.

Kindle Subcategories

Some books are large and complex enough in scope to have footholds in many subcategories. How do you categorize a life memoir covering more than 20 years of study about tantra, ancient religions, and modern social problems? An ambitious book I produced called Venus and Her Lover: Transforming Myth, Sexuality, and Ourselves by Becca Tzigany did just that. The book's scope was so large that the author and I decided to split its more than 300,000 words of content into two 7" x 10" 400-page volumes.

It was a struggle for us to find the ideal Amazon subcategories for Venus and Her Lover. We quickly found 14 possibilities just within Amazon's Religion & Spirituality parent category (and several others in the Travel and Parenting & Relationships parent categories):

1. Religion & Spirituality > Earth-Based Religions > Gaia & Earth Energies
2. Religion & Spirituality > New Age > Goddesses
3. Religion & Spirituality > New Age > Reference
4. Religion & Spirituality > Occult > Metaphysical Phenomena
5. Religion & Spirituality > Occult > Spiritualism
6. Religion & Spirituality > Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts > Gender & Sexuality
7. Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Inspirational > Biography
8. Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Inspirational > Conduct of Life
9. Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Inspirational > Relationships
10. Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Inspirational > Women's Inspirational
11. Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Personal Growth > Mysticism
12. Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Personal Growth > Spiritual Growth
13. Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Personal Growth > Transformational
14. Religion & Spirituality > Spirituality > Women

Then, it was a matter of determining which of them would be easiest to rank highly in (hopefully even the #1 spot) and cross-referencing those with the ones most likely to have viable readers browsing them. Though none was a perfect match, all were close enough to be effective at getting in front of some of the right readers. Fortunately, because Amazon allows authors to list their books in three subcategories, we didn't have to choose just one and hope for the best. Books published before June 2023, however, could request to be listed in up to ten.

Veronica Kirin's series of interviews in Stories of Elders: What the Greatest Generation Knows about Technology that You Don't include topics as broad as how family dynamics have changed in the last century, how technology has made many traditional jobs obsolete, and how sickness was dealt with before modern medicine. We were able to curate a list of 15 subcategories within parent categories related to History, Social Sciences, and Technology that had relatively low competition:

1. History > Americas > United States > 20th Century > 1945 - Present
2. History > Americas > United States > 20th Century > 1950s
3. History > Americas > United States > 20th Century > 1960s
4. History > Americas > United States > 20th Century > Depression
5. History > Historical Study > Social History > Gay & Gender Studies
6. History > Historical Study > Social History > Labor & Workforce
7. History > Historical Study > Social History > Race & Ethnicity
8. History > Science & Medicine > Anthropology
9. Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Aging Parents & Eldercare > Aging
10. Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Anthropology > Cultural
11. Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Customs & Traditions
12. Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Gerontology
13. Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Sociology > Social Theory
14. Nonfiction > Science > History & Philosophy
15. Nonfiction > Science > Technology > General & Reference

The best way to position a book (and, therefore, choose the best subcategories to list it in) is to understand readers' primary motivation for buying and consuming it. Will they read it to learn about the life of you, the author? Then it's a personal memoir or autobiography. Will they read your book to improve themselves? Then it's a self-help or personal development book. Will they read it to learn about different cultures of the world? Then it's probably a travel or anthropology book.

Granted, book category lines are not always cut so cleanly in every situation. Maybe it's obvious what subjects your book invokes, but the way it approaches its subject matter is wildly different from every other book in the same category.

Category conventions also shape the tone of voice and value judgments of the author. A New Age self-help book that curses at its readers might not fare well compared to others in the same categories. This type of book is typically defined by positive affirmations and supportive, fluffy wording. Then again, the same book might become a huge hit for defying common practice. Which way the cookie crumbles will depend on some factors you can control (such as just how far you deviate from convention) and some you can't (such as how saturated the market is with the same old script you are stepping away from).