Thursday Thoughts: About time for another Amazon rant?

What’s a week (or month) without a head-scratching, eye-rolling, why-did-you-make-it-like-that-it-makes-no-sense opinion piece.

Categories. When you publish on Amazon, you get to choose two categories for your book to be hidden in (Sarcastic? Yes.) for readers to find. Some are short and simple:

Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy

Although, is it really necessary to indicate that in the Kindle store, you are looking for Kindle eBooks? But I digress.

Some categories are a tad more specialized:

Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptations > Stargate

Why does that matter? Well, when you sell a book you move up in the ranks and the more books that are in your category the more books you have to sell to get in the top 10 or the top spot. For example, To reach #1 in the first category you have to have a daily sales count of 3310.

3310? Yup. that’s a lot of books. On the other side, if my book fit into the latter category of “stargate video adaptations”, if one person bought that book, I would be a #1 best seller.

However, that is not the bone I wanted to pick with Jeff. As, I mentioned, you are allowed to pick two categories but, what they don’t tell you is that you can be in up to 10, you just have to ask (meaning emailing a CSR).

So, I did that, again (Again? don’t get me started) and found out that different market places have different category paths.

US Marketplace: Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > First Contact

UK Marketplace: Kindle Store > Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > First Contact

When I sent the first category path to the CSR and asked them to put my book in that category in all marketplaces, I received this response:

“…we couldn’t add the same categories to any other marketplace as the paths varies from one marketplace to other, therefore, we couldn’t locate the paths other than in US store.”

Way to make the platform run uncomplicated and efficiently, Jeff.

Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, and a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words.