Categories and keywords for a book in a new language

A book in a new language deserves a new keyword list, not a translated one. Amazon gives you three categories and up to seven keywords per book, and those are the main ways a reader who has never heard of you finds you.

Anyone who copies those fields over from the original and translates them word for word is effectively giving them up.

What these fields actually do

When a reader types something into the bookshop's search box, the shop tries to match what they typed against books it knows. The title, the description, the categories and the keywords are what it knows.

The category is the shelf the book stands on. A keyword is your guess about what the reader types.

Amazon lets you pick three categories when you set the book up, and notes that categories differ between shops and between formats. In other words: the shelf in Germany is not the same shelf.

Why not to translate the keywords

Because a keyword is not a description. It is a quotation of what goes through a foreign reader's head at three in the morning.

An Israeli reader looking for a historical novel types one phrasing. An American reader types another, sometimes the name of a sub-genre that does not exist in Hebrew at all. Translating the Hebrew phrase gives you a correct phrase that nobody is searching for.

The way to do this without knowing the language is simpler than it seems: go to the shop in the target language, find three books that resemble yours, and read how they describe themselves. Look at their subtitle, at the first line of the marketing text, and at the categories that appear on the page. That is where the words are.

What Amazon forbids

There are a few rules that are easy to run into by accident. Amazon sets them out, and among them:

• Do not repeat what is already in the title or the author name. It is wasted — that is already searchable.
• Do not make quality claims of the "greatest novel ever written" variety.
• Do not use time-dependent words such as "new" or "on sale".
• Do not put in names of other authors who have nothing to do with the book.

That last rule is enforced seriously, and it is worth knowing: writing a famous author's name in order to get caught in searches for them is the kind of gamble that costs you having the book taken down.

Why three categories is less than it sounds

A category is not a label but a shelf, and every shelf already has books standing on it. A very broad category — "fiction", say — is a shelf where your book stands next to tens of thousands of others and is not seen.

A narrower category, one that describes exactly what the book does, is a small shelf where a reader who was looking for precisely that will find you.

In a new language this matters even more, because you are starting with no reviews and no previous sales. A narrow shelf is the only way to be visible in the first weeks.

How to do it in practice for a translated book

Four steps, in one evening.

One. Open the shop in the target language and search for your book as though you were a reader. See what comes up.

Two. Pick three similar books and write down the categories that appear on their pages.

Three. Write seven phrases a reader would type — not seven descriptions of the book. You can ask a native speaker to go over the list and say which of them sound invented.

Four. Update the fields, and give it time. Amazon writes that it can take up to 72 hours before the book appears in the new categories.

And the thing that matters most at this stage sits outside these fields altogether: the title and the marketing text. They get written afresh in the new language rather than translated, and we wrote about that at length in the title and the blurb get rewritten. The rest of the questions are gathered in the frequently asked questions.