Today we’re going to talk about how Categories can not only help you to sell more books but how they help you and how you can find the right category to you help you.
So, how can categories help you sell more books:
- If you can be the number 1 bestseller for a category, you get that super awesome sauce tag that says you’re a bestseller. Now, other than bragging rights to your friends, this tag shows up next to your book in the search results and even on your book’s sales page. So, when a customer is searching for a book on Amazon, your book will stick out. That bestseller tag is sort of like a marker that says “hey, this book is legit because lots of people have bought it. So, your conversions will be higher.
- The second way is that many people have a category they like and will frequently go to that category to look at the top 20 books and see if there is something new or a book that intrigues them. I personally do this to the Sci-Fi military category as well as the newly created “space marines” category.
So, with that being said, in order for categories to help you sell more books, you need to be in a category that you can get #1 bestseller for, as well as in the top 20 of a category people actually shop it.
How to Figure Out How Many Books You Need to Sell to Be #1 In a Category
Your ranking in a category solely depends on your Amazon Best Seller Rank, known as ABSR. The ABSR is a number from 1 to 4.8 million or however many books there are with #1 being the bestselling book in ALL of Amazon and 4.8 million being the worst selling book on all of Amazon. There is a separate ABSR for book, ebooks, and free books. So, make sure you’re paying attention to that as you do your research.
If you have the BEST ABSR out of all books that are in your category, then congratulations, you are now the #1 bestseller.
So, what goes into ABSR? This number is updated every 2 hours by Amazon and is dependent on the number of sales a book makes, KU pages read, and KOLL downloads. In the next episode, we’ll cover these three programs more in depth, but understand that these conversions are what makes your ABSR.
Now what’s neat about this number is that you can now know relatively how well other books are doing. But, at Kindlepreneur, we did something even better for you. If you go to Kindlepreneur.com/calculator, we have a special calculator where you put in the book's ABSR, tell the calculator if it is a book or ebook, and it will tell you how many books that book sold that day.
So, if the Kindle book has an ABSR of 70000, you now know that book sold 3 books. And if it has a book ABSR of 32000, it sold 7. So that book has sold a total of 10 units that day. Pretty snazzy, right?
And you can find that calculator at https://kindlepreneur.com/calculator
How to Find the Right Categories For Your Book
- Type in keywords that would best represent your book
- Click on those books and scroll down to where their categories are listed
- Record those category strings
- Click on the category
- Click on the #1 book and the #20 book and record their ABSR
Now make sure to select a category that fits that also gives you the best chance of being a #1 bestseller, and select a category that looks like it is a well-loved category so that if you hit the top 20, you’ll benefit from the traffic to that category.
You can quickly collect a list of categories for 1-4 if you use Publisher Rocket.
Bio of the Author in the Case Study:
Chris Fox is the bestselling author of Write to Market and other book marketing books. He’s also a seasoned fiction author who writes in the Sci-Fi Fantasy genre. You can also find him at http://www.chrisfoxwrites.com/
Resources Referred to in this Episode:
- List of Chris Fox’s Books
- Tool to Help Find Categories: Publisher Rocket
- More on how to find the best categories for your book
- Extra article on how to find Secret Kindle Categories that Amazon doesn’t show you
- Calculator used to tell what is the target books sold to make #1 in a category
- Kindle Direct Publishing 
