Book category hunter: Free tool to find book categories on Amazon

Enter the ASIN or ISBN-10 of a book to see what categories that book is a part of so as to shop for your kind of book.You can also select which market you want to search in.

The below tool was created to help authors and readers learn more about books and to find which categories the book is a part of. For readers, this can help you to discover more books on Amazon. For authors, this can you help find categories or check to see which categories your book is a part of.

In order to do this, I use Amazon’s API. Understand that the links created from this use my Amazon Associate, and if you click on one and purchase something, I will be an affiliate commission. This doesn’t affect your pricing, but only adds money to my book and coffee fund. So, much appreciated.

A lot of people search for books by looking through the categories that they like the most, browsing the genre, essentially.

Additionally, every book genre has a rank, so even if you’re not necessarily a bestseller overall in the Amazon store, you could still be a bestseller in a specific Amazon category, which would increase the attention that your book could get.

And if that weren’t enough, Amazon automatically creates a few sub-lists within each KDP category that give you an even greater chance of being found. Two of the most important are:

• The bestseller list

• The new releases list

Ranking high in these places will increase your visibility in the Kindle store, which in turn will increase sales…you see where I’m going with this?

So, how do you find your next book’s categories? Well, using this tool is a great way to find what you need and fast! Let’s get into it:

Start by finding books that are similar to yours and collecting all of the categories they rank for. With my category tool you just need to type in the ASIN or ISBN-10 and it will pull all of those right up.

Now it’s time to go through each of these categories and see whether or not they are worth adding your book to. Remember, you can only choose three so let’s make sure you’re choosing the right ones!

Take a look at the rankings of book #1 and book #20 shown on first page of the best-sellers for a category. How high is the first one? Is it really competitive? Check to see how large the gap is between these books.

A small gap, like only a difference of a few thousand, means the category will be hard to rank for. But a large gap, say 20,000 or more, should be a prime category to target.

Side note: just because a category is easy to rank for, doesn’t mean you should do it. You need to make sure the category is relevant to your book, otherwise you could ruin the Amazon algorithm by trying to direct people to that category when you’ve got the wrong audience.

Once you’ve found categories that are relevant and easy to rank for, make a list of up to ten. You can have ten categories for each book, so choose wisely. Pick the categories that are A) most relevant, B) not too competitive, and C) Not too niche. Because some categories are easy to rank for, but no one is looking in those categories.

This tool allows you to search through every book on Amazon to find the different categories that it ranks for.

With just a few searches through this tool, you’ll have a huge list of categories in no time.

It works for any fiction and nonfiction book. Ebook or paperback book (because each print book actually has a different set of categories). So make sure you’ve done the research to get a comprehensive list so you can add to your book’s category options.