Amazon Keywords and Categories: A Plain-English Guide

Your cover and blurb convert browsers into buyers. Your keywords and categories decide whether anyone becomes a browser in the first place.

This is the least glamorous hour you'll spend on your book, and close to the highest-return.

What the seven keyword slots actually do

KDP gives you seven keyword fields. They're not single words — each field takes a phrase, and phrases are what readers actually type.

Amazon matches your book against search terms using your title, subtitle, series name, author name, description and these seven fields. So don't waste a slot on something already in your title: if your book is called The Winter Grave, "winter grave" is already covered.

Good keyword phrases:

• "slow burn enemies to lovers romance"
• "cozy mystery with a cat"
• "grimdark fantasy standalone"
• "small town suspense female detective"

Wasted slots:

• "book" or "novel" (every book is)
• "best seller" (not how readers search)
• Another author's name (against Amazon's terms and it can get your listing pulled)
• Words already in your title or subtitle

How to find the phrases readers actually type

Don't guess. Use Amazon's own autocomplete, which reflects real search volume.

1. Go to Amazon and set the department to Kindle Store
2. Start typing a phrase your ideal reader might use — "fantasy with a"
3. Note every suggestion that appears — these are real searches
4. Repeat with different starts: "romance where", "mystery set in", "books like"

Spend twenty minutes on this and you'll have forty candidate phrases. Pick the seven that genuinely describe your book.

The test: if a reader searched this phrase and found your book, would they be pleased or annoyed? Keywords that attract the wrong reader produce returns and one-star reviews.

Categories: narrow beats broad

You can select two categories in KDP, and you can request more by contacting support (up to ten in some cases — it's worth asking).

The instinct is to pick the biggest categories. Resist it. "Fantasy" has hundreds of thousands of titles and you'll never be visible. "Fantasy > Historical > Arthurian" might have a few hundred, and ranking in the top 20 there means an actual bestseller badge and genuine visibility.

How to choose:

1. Find five books genuinely similar to yours
2. Scroll to "Product details" on each and note their categories
3. Look for specific subcategories appearing repeatedly
4. Check the "Best Sellers Rank" figures to gauge how competitive each is

A book selling 3–5 copies a day can top a narrow category. That badge then drives more sales — one of the few genuine compounding effects available to you.

The description is also a search field

Amazon indexes your book description. This doesn't mean stuffing it with keywords — that reads terribly and kills conversion, which matters more.

It means that if your book is a locked-room mystery set in 1920s Edinburgh, those words should appear naturally in your description because they're genuinely what the book is.

Revisit every few months

Keywords aren't permanent. You can change them whenever you like, and you should:

• If your book isn't getting impressions, your keywords are too obscure
• If you're getting clicks but no sales, they may be attracting the wrong reader
• Reader language shifts — subgenre terms come in and out of use

Set a reminder to review quarterly.

A realistic expectation

Good keywords and categories won't make an unwanted book sell. They make a wanted book findable. If your cover doesn't signal your genre or your blurb doesn't create curiosity, fix those first — traffic to a page that doesn't convert is wasted.

Keeping the whole picture straight

Keywords are one piece of a bigger puzzle that also includes your blurb, your categories, your review count and your ongoing promotion — all of which affect each other.

BookSpur builds your marketing around your book's actual genre, themes and readers, so the daily work reinforces the same positioning your metadata is aiming at rather than pulling in a different direction.

Try it free for 7 days.