?s about Kindle category & keyword choices and potential cutomer finding you eBook

My primary questions:
1) When potential customer enters some search terms in top field on most Amazon shopping page what influences the results that Amazon then displays? Clearly it is helpful if your title is on page 1 or 2.

2) What happens to any "value" you have accrued from having fairly good sales rank for a category/sub-category but after 6 months or whatever time frame you decide to change the category/sub-category for that title?

I know that some of this is a bit like strategizing for getting a good Google ranking for your website and a particular page on it via Search Engine Optimization approaches - an art not a science.

While the eBooks I deal with are non-fiction, I expect the principles are the same and want to keep the discussion generic to be of most value to all. However in my situation the eBooks will be of print books that already do quite well in their Print book cat>sub-cat.
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Details:
1) What influences Search results?
Does Amazon only use the 7 Keywords you assigned to the title; or do the words in the title; and/or the words in the cat>sub-category also come into play?
For example, one might choose Religion & Spirituality>New Age> New Thought> Self-Help as a categorization. Even if you did not have "Self-Help" as one of your keywords would a search on say Self-Help Prosperity
potentially show your eBook on principles of abundance even though Self-Help was NOT one of your keywords?

I know you get 7 keywords, but does Amazon treat them all equally? I would imagine that they might give greater weight to potential results for someone searching on
Self-Help Prosperity
to Book A whose keywords are:
Prosperity Abundance Success Life-Purpose etc.
than Book B whose keywords are:
Success Life-Purpose Prosperity Abundance etc.

I imagine that the Amazon approach is something like this:
A) use search terms that customer has entered; and look for potential results to display based on primarily Keywords, but also some of the category>sub-category; develope a score for how relevant the eBook title is to the customer; then
B) from this potential pool of titles, factor in by another score how many of this title have been sold; how well it has done relative to its cat>sub-cat; and perhaps even average customer rating (and how many ratings it has) to arrive at a score that reflects - sales, popularity, judgement of quality from reviews; then
C) use some formula to combine the two scores into a ranking for the order in which things are displayed.

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2) Changing category>sub-category months after you have launched - what happens?
Let's assume that you have adopted a strategy for placing your eBook in a cat>sub>sub-category **A that is far less crowded that >sub-category **B. Also assume that in **A you have achieved a sale's rank of #12. But upon further guessing and research you realize that while you are a big fish, your relative dominance of sales is in a fairly small pond and your total sales are somewhat disappointing. If you then change your cat>sub-cat to **B what happens? Initially you have zero sales with **B, but does your relative performance in **A do you any good in **B? Crude analogy might be going to a junior college your freshman year and then transferring.

As related but separate question about marketing in this area, I imagine that if you keep your 2 category choices constant but after 6 months or less do some adjusting and tweaking to the 7 Keywords you assign, that this will have an impact but probably is not as "radical" a change in approach as changing your cat>sub-category.

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One other question for a Print book that already has 80 reviews and you now just launch the eBook version, it seems that the eBook "inherits" and displays the reviews that were generated from the Print side. It also seems that reviews are always shared across both versions, which makes sense as primarily people comment on the content, although a user friendly .mobi conversion can also be commented upon.

As a practical matter, I'd expect that for the small co I work for if we changed cat>sub-cat down the line, it would only be to one of the two choices that were originally assigned.

As always I appreciate the thoughtful responses I have received on this website. It has really helped to cut my learning curve. I hope that any principles that are shared and discussed in this thread are of immense benefit to many people's situations.

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I am quite confident of the following, but unless I am in error no need to comment:
A) You get 2 categories and 7 Keywords (including phrases).
2) There is great overlap of categories available for print version and for eBook BUT they are not identical.
3) When Amazon actually displays browse categories AND then uses these for sales rank, there is a relationship between what Amazon shows on its website, but again these are not the identical wording to the list of what you can assign in the self-publish area.
4) When you search, the first choice customer has is whether they are searching All Departments or what I think would be more likely for a reading audience they choose from drop down Books versus choosing Kindle Store. If Books is chosen then the results will show tabs for Books and also Kindle Books,
5) If there are both versions (Print and eBook) regardless of which product page you are on, it is easy to get to the other format; also either LookInside feature will show you both Print and Kindle preview. BUT the book description that author enters can be different for the Print edition and for the Kindle edition. Product details for each version have different line categories.

DC ... What I understand is that Amazon uses a subset of the Subject areas that are established by and revised yearly by BISG (Book Industry Study Group). You can see the 2011 listing here http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-0-136-bisac-subject-headings-list-major-subjects.php

The subset of categories offered by Amazon when you self-publish an eBook using KDP overlaps with but is not identical to the categories that Amazon offers for Printed books.
It is not entirely clear how Amazon/Kindle uses the category choices you have made, but it is not a one-to-one mapping e.g. in the Non-fiction area that I am most familiar with when you go to browse the left column navigation has an "Advice & How-to" section, however there is nothing with even remotely similar wording that Amazon shows in the drop down menu choices when you assign two categories to your eBook; nor is that wording found in BISG subject listings.

This "category" is an Amazon "invention/creation" that seems to draw from a number of the official subject/category areas.

As I believe your post indicates, you already understand that under your product description on the prod page for your eBook you see Sales rank overall, and then only if the eBook is in the top 100 of some category>subcategory will it show up.

I'd suggest checking the BISG subject listings at link I showed; then going into your account at KDP and edit your eBook title, and on subsequent page click on the Category choices to see the full name that you chose. You can exit this area without saving or really changing anything. With that info should be able to get a clearer idea of what is happening.

Since I am about to self-publish via KDP 6 eBooks that already exist in Print form on Amazon, and because of the lack of one-to-one mapping I mentioned above, I am about to ask Amazon/KDP directly what Category to choose from the drop-down menu choices IF I want to then be in X category (for browsing and sale's ranking).

Hope you are able to figure out what is going on and move it be more satisfactory for you.

As the OP I discussed my question 2 in a PM with J. Tanner who often posts in this forum. With his permission I copy below his PM to me as I thought it might be of help to others interested in this thread.
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"I'm not at all sure about how changing categories is dealt with if you're already on a bestseller list. I've never seen it discussed. (I think it would be horribly unwise to change them at that point and I expect most would feel the same and not risk messing with a good thing.)

But I can't imagine it is calculated any differently when on an existing title vs a new title. Your rank would start at null from the point of change but ranks are based on such short term algorithms (calculated every hour) that you should be back up to your "real" rank on a list in fairly short order. Then it's just the waiting game while Amazon sorts out making the category "live" so to speak so it's visible.

-J"

shaldna said:

In terms of you name and book coming up higher in search terms - how often people click on your book after a search will drive it higher.

Click to expand...

Probably true, but I also expect that this has a rather trivial impact on where one appears in search results <you incorrectly wrote "search terms">. I expect that what really has impact that the person who is searching actually does something of "importance" when they get to the Product Page:
Look Inside
for Kindle - download sample
click on related book

But ultimately what I expect that drives things is that immediately or later, they buy your book. Amazon is after sales and profits. (The algorithm - and I am not really interested in trying to figure it out, or game the system - is I am sure quite different than what Google might use for placement in its search results.)