Hey everyone and welcome to today's video.
Now this video is gonna be a short one, but a very important one. You see,
Amazon are starting to crack down on the category listings for KDP books,
and I actually fell foul of this in their reviews with a threat of suspension or
termination of my account. So you can imagine that was quite scary.
So what I'm going to do is tell you what the problem is,
how you can avoid this issue and prevent your account from getting terminated or
banned and what you can do going forward to prevent this issue.
So this is important if you are self-publishing or thinking of self-publishing
books on the KDP Amazon platform. Now,
if you're not into this channel before then welcome my name's Paul Marles and I
do videos on how to make it to keep it and great.
And that's your money I'm talking about. If you do like videos like that,
then please do give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button,
smash that notification bell to receive notification of when I produce more
videos like this. So what was the problem? Well,
I received this email, which says, during a review,
we found that the brows categories listed in the following books may cause a
misleading customer experience.
The browser categories listed aren't relevant to the content topics. It says,
as a result, the irrelevant browse categories have been removed.
No action is required, which is a relief.
But sometimes you can get these emails where you do have to action them.
So it is important that you are monitoring your emails from
KDP. Unfortunately, I get loads of emails in my inbox,
and I actually missed an email exactly like this, about a different book.
And that was about three months ago.
Luckily I didn't have to action that one either.
But here's the important bit in this email.
And that is adding irrelevant brows categories is a violation of our content
guidelines and may result in the suspension or termination of your
KDP account. So you can see why this is very important.
Now,
when I started doing or creating and uploading books to
the KDP or Createspace platform, as it was then in 2018,
they were a lot more lenient in terms of the categories. And in fact,
there were many articles written about creating books and publishing
them in categories where there was little competition and where you had a
good chance of ranking your books,
highly in that particular category.
Even if that category wasn't particularly relevant to the niche of your book.
But it seems like they are now cutting down on this.
And it seems like they are doing checks. Now.
I don;t know if this is from books that have been reported by customers,
whether it's from random checks or just from checks that maybe the top
ranked books in various categories.
I suspect it is this last case.
So what can you do about it and what am I going to do about it going
forward? Well, the best way is to avoid these issues in the first place. Now,
first of all,
I'm going to start checking my emails regularly and doing searches for emails
from KDP, because you never,
when one of the emails may come through where you do have to take action on it.
And that could be something maybe to do with an issue around the titles or
author name. And sometimes they might give you a period of time, maybe,
you know, six weeks in order to rectify it.
And if you don't may cause your account problems.
Next thing I'm going do and which I suggest you do,
particularly if you've got lots of books, is go back and review them,
check what categories they're in and check that they are relevant and
change them if necessary. What I'm also doing, which may be a bit extreme.
But I do have over 2000 books listed on my account. And that is.
In fact I started this a few weeks ago.
And that is going through my books and removing ones that haven't sold.
And the reason I'm doing that is because if they've never sold and they've been
on there for a couple of years, it's unlikely they're ever going to sell.
And all you are doing is attracting possible problems in the future.
You never know when another issue may come up.
Another addition to the Amazon terms of service may come up and it may be
something in a book that you've got listed,
but never actually sells or has ever sold,
which may then cause a problem for your account.
So what I'm doing is I'm being quite ruthless,
going through all my books and removing those that haven't sold at all.
Now, what can you do going forward? Well, there's three things that I suggest.
One is pick your categories carefully.
And I'm afraid there's no shortcut to this other than going through
all the different categories yourself. Now,
the most relevant ones are going to be non fiction,
juvenile nonfiction and education and reference.
Going through those and picking two categories that are the most relevant to
your book. Now there is no shortcut to this.
It does take time and sometimes it can be hard to find a relevant category
or categories or your books. But that is part of this business.
And maybe, you know,
if you can't find two categories that are relevant,
but can only find one, then maybe just list your book in one category.
Now I do get emails, people asking me, you know,
they want to list their books in many categories.
And I think theoretically you can list your books in up to 10
different categories or 10 additional categories. And to do that,
you need to email KDP support. However,
I think, having received that email,
you may be putting your book at more risk because if you can find 10
more categories,
it's possible that some of those categories may not be relevant to your book.
So you're putting your account at risk. Now you may argue that, okay,
well I've emailed KDP supports. I've given them these extra categories.
They put my books in those that may be okay. No, not at all.
I think what would happen is yes, they would put your books in those categories,
but it might only be later on that your book then gets checked.
Maybe if it does start to rank high in a particular category.
Just as a side note,
why would people want to get their books ranked highly in a category?
Well that's because if you do rank high in a category,
it does give your book a bit more umph.
It gives it a bit more ranking power and can often rank higher in the
general searches on Amazon. And also if you do rank number one,
you can get that little best seller's badge,
which looks better when you do have your books listed on Amazon.
Okay. So first thing, pick your categories carefully,
go through the list on the KDP platform.
Second thing you can do is use a tool to help you pick your categories.
Two tools that I use. Book Bolt, as we can see here,
this is the general dashboard and we can go to KDP categories and
here I've put in journal and you click on search and it will give you
categories relevant to the keyword you've put in.
Now it may come up with categories that still aren't relevant to your book.
However,
it gives you an idea of the relevance of that particular keyword to the category
listed. But you do have to use your common sense here. So a lot of books,
a lot of general journals, maybe in the self-help category,
maybe things like gratitude journals, meditation journals, that sort of thing.
So again, if we click search here,
we can see that it comes up with quite a few categories and it gives these
badges, these high, medium, low relevancy badges.
Now you may find a lot of these still aren't relevant to your particular book,
but it does give you a lot of help benefit.
Also something like Book Bolt is you can create covers there.
You can create interiors. I use this particularly for niche research.
I'll leave a link to it down below, and there's a code there
if you want to get 20% off it.
The other tool that I use is Publisher Rocket. Again,
this is one of my favorite tools for keyword research,
but it also does have a category search as well. Here I put in camping,
it could be a camping journal you're creating and I ticked book becasue we're
not creating eBooks. And again,
it comes up with some categories that could be relevant.
Doing this may save you a little bit of time.
Now you may find some of the categories listed here you might not find on the
KDP dashboard.
And so if it is a category that is particularly relevant to your book,
then that's a time that you might want to email KDP support and let them
know that you would like your book listed in that particular.
Category.
The next thing you can do is watch this video that I've done specifically
on KDP categories, how to go about choosing them,
the benefits of choosing different categories.
Thank you very much for your time. I hope you found that beneficial.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and do give it a thumbs up.
It does help. And until next time and goodbye.