CHOOSINg BISAC AND AMAzON CATEgORIES

When books are published, they are classified into genres and subcategories so bookstores and readers can easily find them. Understanding how these codes and categories impact your searchability could be the difference between readers finding your book and not finding your book.

BISAC codes are used by the publishing industry to properly categorize your book. When a publisher enters your book into the system, it is done by relevant content. The BISAC system has about four thousand codes, which limits searchability. It is important to be specific about the BISAC codes the publisher uses.

Many times, a publisher will place a book in a general BISAC code to get the job done. The problem with indexing a book into a general code is that it is a catchall with millions of books. That means your book gets lost in the numbers. When using a BISAC code, it is important to make sure that your publisher uses codes that describe the book in detail.

We recently republished a book with additions. The original publisher placed the author’s book in a general category. When we looked at his ranking, he was ranked as 7,014. That means, in order to find his book, a reader would be shown 7,000 plus books before this author’s book. While the book was spiritual in nature, it was more of an African religion book. Since the BISAC code can be changed at any time, when we published the book, it went into a BISAC code related to African Spirituality and the book was on page two of the search with very few books in front of it.

The great thing about BISAC codes is that a publisher can initially use three when the book is uploaded and up to ten when a book is entered into the e-book system. That gives the publisher thirteen opportunities to classify the book.

The category system within Amazon is so large that specificity is important to locate any product. Plus, you have to remember that Amazon is really a large search engine.

Amazon has a different system that is more specific than the BISAC system. Amazon offers about sixteen thousand category choices, compared to about four thousand in the BISAC system. Most of the time, Amazon users will use keywords to locate products. The Amazon categories are flexible and new categories can be requested. Because categories can be changed at any time, the Amazon system also offers an opportunity to experiment and test categories as well.

The downside of this system is that some publishers will manipulate categories at the time of launch to propel an author to a bestseller list. This is not a good long-term strategy because you will want to sell books beyond the launch, but it is unlikely that readers will find your book after the launch if it is not correctly categorized.

Even though these systems are separate, categorizing is important to maximizing your book’s visibility.