by Melinda Clayton on the Indies Unlimited site:

I hate keywords. “Use keywords,” they say, for your blog post, your KDP book, your website, your AMS ads. Figuring out which keywords to use is harder for me than writing the actual post/book/ad. But I’m learning.

An example: the other day while checking the Amazon rank of one of my books after a sale, I noticed something odd. The rank in three different categories was showing. The first one was:

Books>Literature and Fiction>Genre Fiction>Historical>Cultural Heritage

That made sense. I’d selected cultural heritage as one of my categories upon publishing. The book is historical fiction, set deep in the Appalachian Mountains. The culture of that area during that time period is central to the story.

But the next line looked like this:

Kindle>Kindle Ebooks>Art, Music, and Photography>Drama & Theater.

The third line was even weirder:

Kindle Store>Whispersync for Voice>Drama

What the heck was going on? I went to my KDP Dashboard to check my categories. We’re only allowed two, and mine were Historical Fiction and Cultural Heritage. Nothing about drama, plays, or Whispersync.

Then I happened to notice my keywords, and there it was: Drama. Sitting right there in the middle of my keywords. Surely that wasn’t why those categories were showing on my Amazon product page. Then I did some searching, and what I learned was interesting.