amazon-category-research

A research guide for choosing Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing categories for books. KDP is Amazon’s service for publishing ebooks and print books.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding genre and subcategory options, checking bestseller ranks, estimating sales, and selecting up to three categories for a book.
Why use it?
It helps authors compare book categories using competition and bestseller information instead of choosing categories blindly.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cdeistopened/skill-stack/amazon-category-research
Any agent
npx skills add cdeistopened/skill-stack --skill amazon-category-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cdeistopened/skill-stack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 670 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00033 $0.00670
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00335
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00134
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00067

Measured 2d ago against content hash 222978b4146e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

amazon-category-research scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/amazon-category-research/SKILL.md · 94 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Amazon Category Research

Guided workflow for finding profitable Amazon book categories with low competition.

Quick Facts

  • You can only select 3 categories per book
  • Amazon has tens of thousands of subcategories
  • Categories drive algorithm visibility
  • Lower BSR (Best Sellers Rank) = more sales

Workflow

Step 1: Identify Your Genre Space

What broad category does your book fit?

Fiction Nonfiction
Romance Self-help
Mystery/Thriller Business
Sci-Fi/Fantasy Religion/Spirituality
Literary Fiction Health/Fitness
Children's/YA Biography

Step 2: Research Subcategories

Go to Amazon Best Sellers and drill down:

  • Click your main category
  • Keep drilling into subcategories until you find a niche
  • Example: Fiction > Fantasy > Short Stories > Coming of Age

Step 3: Analyze #1 and #100

For your target subcategory:

#1 Bestseller:

  • Find the book's product page
  • Scroll to "Product Details"
  • Note the BSR (Best Sellers Rank)
  • Plug into Kindlepreneur Calculator

#100 Bestseller:

  • Repeat the process
  • Compare daily sales estimates

Step 4: Interpret Results

Signal Meaning
#1 has high sales, #100 has decent sales Healthy category with room
#1 has high sales, #100 has very low sales Top-heavy, hard to break in
Both have low sales Small market, easy to rank but limited upside
Large gap between #1 and #100 Competition concentrated at top

Step 5: Competitor Analysis

For top 10 books in your target category, note:

  • Price point
  • Number of reviews
  • Cover design style
  • Keywords in title/subtitle
  • Page count

Output Template

## Category Research: [Book Title]

### Target Categories (pick 3)
1. [Category path] - BSR range: X-Y, Est. daily sales: X-Y
2. [Category path] - BSR range: X-Y, Est. daily sales: X-Y  
3. [Category path] - BSR range: X-Y, Est. daily sales: X-Y

### Competition Analysis
- Avg price: $X
- Avg reviews: X
- Cover style: [description]
- Common keywords: [list]

### Recommendation
[Which 3 categories to select and why]

Read the full file on GitHub · 94 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 94 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 222978b4146e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

amazon-category-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository cdeistopened/skill-stack (27 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 670 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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