When choosing categories for your Kindle ebook on Amazon, there are over 3,500 categories to choose from. Keywords are important – often it can be useful to target more specialist, niche subcategories, so that your ebook has a greater chance of ranking well.

However, you may not know that there are many categories which only appear if you have used a particular keyword. That is, some categories are hidden until you enter a trigger keyword.

For instance, if you want your ebook to appear in the category: Children’s Mystery & Thrillers/Fantasy & Supernatural then you need to use at least one of these keywords: fantasy, paranormal, magic.

Similarly, for your textbook to appear in the Textbook category in the Kindle Store, you’ll need to add this search keyword when you enter your title information:

kdp_textbook_submission

(For this to work, you must add the keyword exactly as it appears above, complete with underscores.)

There are many such keywords which ‘unlock’ otherwise hidden categories for your Kindle ebook. Below is a list of all the relevant categories – click on a category to see its ‘hidden’ subcategories and the associated keywords which make that subcategory selectable for your ebook, in your KDP account.

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Add a keyword to your ebook

To add a search keyword to your book, when you’re filling out the details on the Your Book page, enter the keyword in the Search keywords field in Section 3, Target Your Book to Customers.

Once you’ve added the relevant keyword, you can edit your ebook’s categories…

How to add or update your ebook’s categories