Julie BroadYour Non-Fiction Sidekick for Writing, Publishing & Marketing a Book That Builds Your Brand and Grows Your Biz

Amazon Category Updates - Ghost and Duplicate Categories

23 Nov 2023 · 1 min

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Julie Broad (YouTube livestream) explains recent disruptive changes to Amazon’s book category system. She reports research finding that 54% of categories are duplicates, describes "ghost categories," and explains that in June 2023 Amazon shifted to letting authors choose three Amazon-specific categories instead of relying solely on BISAC codes and Amazon’s internal mapping.

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It's been chaos working with Amazon as an author lately and the category changes have been one of those things that's really flipped things around. I did a live stream last month where I revealed research that shared that 54% of categories are duplicates. And there's also ghost categories. That's different than a book that seems to be getting ghosted by the algorithm, but probably not unrelated. So let's talk about what you must know about categories technically. You can now set your categories with Amazon, which is a huge shift from how they did things before, where they required you to choose a bisec code and they used metadata and their own metrics to determine your category. The bisec codes have long been the industry standard for selecting categories and even Amazon used to use these. The categories you would select were not Amazon categories. You weren't in a bisect category on Amazon, though they have their own. But that changed in June of 2023 when Amazon started having authors choose three Amazon categories.