You know how your book is #2,345,654 in Books?
You’ve seen how a lot of books are ranked for something more specific?
Do you want yours to rank for categories other than “Books”? Are you pretty sure you’d be topping the fiction > horror > supernatural > pirate > romance category, if only your book was listed there?
You have two options.
1. Be incredibly popular. Someone at Amazon will sort your book.
2. Ask nicely. When trying to figure out how to do this for my novel, I contacted Amazon Author Central. So the first thing is to get an Amazon Author Central account. After that, just follow the instructions they sent me. (pasted below)
Hello,
The “Browse Subjects” feature is designed to find the best-selling titles in a particular subject area. If you’d like to update the Browse Category for your title, please take a moment to search through the “Browse Subjects” section of our Books store. Click on each main category to see a list of sub-categories. Clicking on one of the sub-categories will bring you another sub-category list and so on.
The browse categories you choose must relate to your title. For instance, if the item in question is a book, only those browse categories that are related to books can be assigned to it. It is not possible to select browse categories related to Office Products for your book.
Once you’ve identified one or two “browse paths” appropriate to your book, write back to us by clicking the link below. In your e-mail, include the ISBN of the book, as well as your desired browse categories.
https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us
We can’t currently add new categories to our browsing lists, but feel free to check back from time to time. These classifications do expand and change as our bookstore grows.
The browse paths will appear on the book’s catalog page once they’ve been assigned. Your title will only appear on the “Browse Subjects” bestseller lists if it is one of the top sellers in that particular category.
Pretty easy stuff, huh? Of course, things won’t get changed overnight, but they’ll get to it.
Here’s a list of places where you can get an author page, as well as a listing for your book(s). Getting yourself into as many databases as possible can be a good way to make yourself findable. I may eventually put descriptions and/or instructions for each of these places on the list, but in general it is very easy as long as you look around the site and can follow directions. Always make sure to link back to your website, your book’s website, and to where people can buy your work. I believe that you can list yoursef and books for free on all the listed sites.
- FiledBy.com – Just click on the “authors” link at the top to get started. Here’s my author page so you can see what one looks like. I’m just a free member there.
- GoodReads.com – It’s like facebook, but for books and reading only. Here’s my GoodReads page.
- LibraryThing.com
- AuthorsDen.com
- Nothing Binding
If you know of any other place to list yourself or your book for free, please let me know in the comments.