Amazon KDP keywords: how to fill all seven slots without wasting one

KDP gives you seven keyword fields, each up to fifty characters. They are not tags — they are search phrases fed into Amazon's index, and most authors fill them in badly in the final minutes before hitting publish.

Start with what to exclude. Do not use your title, subtitle, series name, author name, or your category label. Amazon already indexes all of those. A fantasy novel that spends a slot on the word 'fantasy' has thrown away one seventh of its discoverability.

Do not use variations of spelling, plurals, or misspellings either — Amazon handles those. And never use another author's name or a trademarked series title; that violates KDP's terms and can get a book blocked.

Build your list from real search behaviour. Type the beginning of a phrase into the Amazon search bar and read the autocomplete suggestions. Those come from actual queries. Do it for the also-boughts of the five books closest to yours.

Favour phrases of three to five words that describe the reading experience: 'slow burn enemies to lovers', 'cozy mystery small town bakery', 'bookkeeping for small business owners'. These convert far better than broad single words.

Use each fifty-character field as a phrase, not a comma-separated list. Amazon parses the field as a string and combines words across fields, so a natural phrase indexes more cleanly than a keyword dump.

Validate before you commit. Search each candidate phrase in the Kindle store. If the first page is books unlike yours, the phrase describes something else. If the first page has forty thousand competing results, you will not surface — narrow it.

Then revisit quarterly. Keywords are editable at any time and cost nothing to change. Reviewing them against actual sales and ad-search-term data is one of the few free levers in self-publishing that compounds over time.

Manucheck's metadata review compares your keywords and categories against your manuscript's actual content and flags slots that duplicate indexed fields or miss the book's real subject.