Kindle Vella Categorization Issues
How to identify them and get them fixed
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For any writer who has tried the Kindle Vella platform on Amazon, you know there are pros and cons with the platform. One of the latest issues is stories being mis-categorized. When several of us reported the issue to Amazon, they attempted to fix the problem, only for it to keep cropping up. Here is what you can do about it.
Identifying the Wrong Categories
Even if you think your Kindle Vella has not been mis-categorized, I recommend you take these steps to make sure. When I look at my story on Kindle Vella, the categories seem correct, but that isn’t the only place our stories are categorized.
As they continue to integrate Kindle Vella into Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), they are also adding KDP categories on the back end of our Vella stories. This is a good thing, as it widens the potential audience our stories can reach by adding them into the same search results as KDP books. However, it doesn’t do us any good if our stories are appearing in the wrong category.
A fellow author pointed me to a tool that can help identify the categories Amazon is listing our stories under. It’s called the Book Category Hunter, and it’s a free tool on the Nerdy Book Girl website. All you need to do is search for the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) of your Kindle Vella story and see if any categories look off.
To find the ASIN for your story, go into Your Kindle Vella Library, and next to your cover image, under Details, you should find your ASIN listed (it remains blank until you publish or schedule your first episode).
Unfortunately, this is only the first step. We’ve discovered that you also need to search the ASIN of every episode you have published. Since every episode has its own ASIN, each one…
