KDP keywords and categories: how to choose them for your book

As of November 2026, KDP lets you enter up to seven keywords or short phrases and pick three categories for each book. Keywords help Amazon match your book to what readers type into the search box. Categories decide which shelves the book sits on and which Best Sellers lists it can appear in. You can change both whenever you like, and new categories can take up to 72 hours to show.

The way to choose them is to start from the words a reader would type, check those words against Amazon's own search suggestions, and then pick categories where books like yours already sell. The rules here come from KDP's keywords help page, KDP's categories help page and the Metadata Guidelines for Books, all read on 1 November 2026.

What KDP allows

Categories are set per format, and some exist for ebooks but not for paperbacks, so you may need the closest match for each edition. They also differ between Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, which is why KDP asks you to confirm your primary marketplace before you choose.

What you cannot put in a keyword

The Metadata Guidelines list these as prohibited keywords: references to other authors, references to books by other authors, references to sales rank such as "bestselling", references to promotions such as "free", anything unrelated to the book's content, and HTML tags.

The keywords help page adds a longer list of things to avoid:

• Leave out words already in your title, contributor names or chosen categories, because they do no extra work there.
• Avoid subjective claims such as "best novel ever" and time-sensitive words such as "new", "on sale" and "available now".
• Do not use Amazon program names, and KDP gives "Kindle+" and "KDP Select" as examples.
• Skip words common to the whole category, such as "book", and avoid spelling errors and variants of spacing, plurals or capitals.
• Leave out brands you do not own, and do not put quotation marks around phrases.

KDP says it has a zero tolerance policy for metadata "meant to advertise, promote, or mislead", so a keyword built on another author's name can get the book pulled rather than just ignored.

Browse categories and BISAC are different systems

BISAC subject headings are the US book trade's standard list, maintained by the Book Industry Study Group. Each heading pairs a description such as "FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Cozy / Culinary" with a nine-character code, in that case FIC022130, and distributors use them to tell bookshops and libraries where a book belongs. IngramSpark asks for BISAC codes at title setup, and uses Thema codes for markets outside the US.

Amazon's browse categories are Amazon's own shelves, and there are thousands of them in each marketplace. Before May 2023, KDP had authors pick from a BISAC-style list and email KDP Support for extra placements, up to ten in total. Build Book Buzz reported that the change that month put Amazon's full category tree inside KDP and capped books at three, applied when a book is next updated. The current KDP categories page does not mention BISAC, so for a KDP-only book you can ignore it.

A method that starts from the reader

1. Write down the phrases a reader would type when they want a book like yours. KDP's own suggested types are setting, character types, character roles, plot themes and story tone. Use the words readers use, which on Amazon.com is often US spelling, so "cozy mystery" will match more searches than "cosy mystery".
2. Type each phrase slowly into the Kindle Store search box and read the drop-down suggestions. KDP Help recommends this step, because the suggestions show what shoppers are already searching for. Note the phrases that appear and drop the ones that do not.
3. Run each surviving phrase as a search. If the first page is full of books like yours, keep it. If it shows something unrelated, change it, which is also KDP's advice.
4. Open five or six books that a reader of yours would also buy and scroll to Product details. Under Best Sellers Rank you will see the categories each one ranks in.
5. Open each of those categories' Best Sellers page, which lists the top 100. Ask two questions. Do the covers and blurbs look like yours? And what is the overall Best Sellers Rank of the book at number 100? The larger that rank number, the fewer sales it takes to get onto the list. A shelf of books unlike yours is the wrong shelf, however easy it looks.
6. Pick three categories: one broad shelf that describes the book accurately, and two narrower ones where you could plausibly reach the top 100.
7. Fill the seven keyword boxes with the phrases from steps two and three, leaving out any word already in your title or categories.

A worked example

Take a cosy crime novel about a baker who solves murders in a Cornish fishing village, published on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. The title already contains "Murder" and the chosen categories already contain "Cozy" and "Culinary", so the keyword boxes go to things the title and categories do not cover: "amateur sleuth woman", "cornwall village mystery", "bakery murder mystery", "small town british mystery", "clean whodunit no swearing", "seaside village" and "female detective series". Every one is a phrase a reader could type, in the order they would type it, with no quotation marks.

Two KDP pages look as if they disagree on phrases. The keywords page says single words work better than phrases, but it says so in a note about quotation marks, while the Metadata Guidelines recommend phrases of two or three words. Read together, they say the same thing: write natural phrases without quotation marks, so a reader who types only some of the words can still find you.

Keywords and categories are one of the retailer-placement moves in our ten publishing moves in order, and they are worth checking again once the book has a few weeks of sales. If you publish wide as well, each other store has its own category list, which our guide to Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play and Barnes & Noble covers store by store.