KDP & Metadata
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is the dominant platform for indie fiction. It’s also the platform with the most specific, finicky metadata requirements of anywhere a book can get listed. You get a title. You get a subtitle. You get a series name and number. You get two category slots. You get seven keyword slots, and each slot is a phrase, not a word, and some phrases count as multiple hidden categories if you know the right terms. You get an A+ Content block with its own constraints. Every one of these fields affects discoverability, and every one of them has its own conventions that the platform doesn’t document anywhere useful. Most authors learn the rules by reading third-party blog posts, copying what other successful books in their genre seem to be doing, and hoping. The KDP subtab exists to put the fields, the conventions, and the tooling in one place so you’re not copy-pasting metadata from a Google Doc every launch.
The subtab isn’t a KDP automation tool. It doesn’t publish for you. It doesn’t update your existing listing through the Amazon API (Amazon doesn’t give that API to authors). What it does is maintain a structured record of your book’s KDP metadata in Ishvana, alongside your manuscript and your marketing copy, so that when you go to actually fill in the KDP dashboard you’re copying from your own authoritative record instead of reinventing the fields every time.
The fields it tracks
Section titled “The fields it tracks”Every book tracked in the subtab has the full set of KDP metadata fields as structured records:
Title and subtitle
Section titled “Title and subtitle”The book’s title and optional subtitle. The title is easy — you wrote the book. The subtitle is where most authors either leave it blank (and miss discoverability) or jam keywords into it in a way that looks desperate. The subtab has a separate field for subtitle so you can draft variants and check them against your positioning before committing.
Series information
Section titled “Series information”If the book is part of a series, Amazon lets you set a series name, a series number, and optionally a series tagline. The series info is what puts books on the same series page on Amazon, and getting it consistent across books in the same series is more important than most authors realize — inconsistent series names mean your readers can’t find book two even if they loved book one.
The subtab stores the series info at the project level, so if you’re writing a trilogy, all three books share the same series name and can’t drift.
Categories (two slots)
Section titled “Categories (two slots)”Amazon gives you two category slots at publication. You can request up to eight more through Amazon Support if you know the secret. The categories matter because they determine which best-seller lists your book can appear on, and picking a category where you can realistically hit top 100 is more valuable than picking a prestigious-sounding category you’ll never rank in.
The subtab has a category picker that walks the KDP category tree and shows estimated competition levels for each leaf category (based on data from Market Intel). You pick two for launch, optionally flag additional categories to request from Amazon Support later, and the subtab stores the whole list.
Keywords (seven slots)
Section titled “Keywords (seven slots)”Seven slots. Each slot is a phrase, not a word. Each phrase can be up to 50 characters. The phrases feed Amazon’s search indexing and also the hidden category routing — certain specific keyword phrases will add your book to hidden categories that don’t appear in the main category tree.
The subtab’s keyword editor shows:
- The seven slots with character counts.
- A suggested keyword list based on your book’s genre, comps, and the Market Intel cache.
- A hidden category lookup — type a phrase and see if it maps to any known hidden categories.
- Competition estimates per phrase.
The seven keywords are the thing most authors get wrong. They use single words. They duplicate what’s already in the title. They pick phrases nobody searches for. The subtab’s suggestions come from genre-specific conversion data and tend to be better than what an author will come up with on their own — but they’re still suggestions, not mandates, and you can override any of them.
A+ Content brief
Section titled “A+ Content brief”Amazon’s A+ Content is the rich product page below the main listing — the images, banners, comparison charts, and marketing copy that replace the plain text description for readers who scroll. A+ Content is optional and most authors don’t bother, which is a mistake because it significantly improves conversion.
The subtab has an A+ Content brief — not the actual A+ Content itself (that’s built in Amazon’s Content Manager), but the brief for it. Which images you want to use, which copy blocks, which comparison to comp titles, which hook you’re leading with. You build the brief here, then use it as your reference when you actually assemble the A+ Content in Amazon’s tool. Keeping the brief in Ishvana means your A+ Content decisions stay consistent with your Copywriting and Market Intel.
Author name and author bio
Section titled “Author name and author bio”Author name is simple. Author bio is trickier — Amazon lets you have one author bio per author account, shared across all your books, and most authors write it once and never update it. The subtab gives you a place to draft and iterate on the bio, and stores revisions so you can see how it’s evolved.
Launch price and royalty tier
Section titled “Launch price and royalty tier”Your target launch price and whether you’re using the 35% or 70% royalty tier. The 70% tier has price range restrictions ($2.99-$9.99 for ebooks), and the subtab checks your price against the tier rules when you set it. Gets you out of the common trap of picking a price that’s technically valid but disqualifies you from the 70% tier.
KENP preferences
Section titled “KENP preferences”If you’re enrolling in KDP Select, you’re opting into Kindle Unlimited reads which pay out via KENP. The subtab lets you record your enrollment decision and any KENP-specific notes. This is more of a diary field than a functional field — Amazon manages the actual enrollment status — but having it next to the rest of the metadata helps you remember what you chose.
How the subtab helps at launch
Section titled “How the subtab helps at launch”When you’re actually ready to launch, the workflow is roughly:
- Review the KDP subtab. Make sure every field is filled in, matches your current Copywriting and Market Intel, and hasn’t drifted from earlier drafts.
- Generate a pre-launch checklist. The subtab has a generate-checklist button that produces a Markdown list of every KDP field you need to fill in, with your current values pre-filled. You copy the list into your launch doc or print it.
- Use it as your reference while filling in the KDP dashboard. Tab over to Amazon, open KDP, and fill in each field by reading from Ishvana. Copy-paste the title, copy-paste the description, copy-paste each keyword, pick the categories. No retyping from memory, no hunting through your notes.
- Mark the book as published in the subtab. This flips the book’s status and moves the metadata from “pre-launch editable” to “published reference.” You can still edit later, but the subtab tracks that the book is live and starts collecting data for Sales Tracking.
The whole thing takes maybe 20 minutes from “open KDP” to “click publish.” Most of the time is Amazon’s dashboard being slow, not Ishvana.
What the subtab doesn’t do
Section titled “What the subtab doesn’t do”- It doesn’t publish for you. Amazon doesn’t give authors an API for publication. Every launch is manual through the KDP dashboard. The subtab gives you the data to paste; Amazon handles the rest.
- It doesn’t track metadata drift after publication. If you edit your book’s metadata directly in the KDP dashboard without updating Ishvana, the two will get out of sync. The subtab is authoritative for what you want the metadata to be, but Amazon is authoritative for what your listing actually shows. Keeping the two in sync is a manual habit.
- It doesn’t work for other retailers. This subtab is specifically for Amazon KDP fields. If you’re also publishing to Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo, Draft2Digital, or others, each of those has its own metadata schema, and they’re not covered here. A future retailer-agnostic metadata pass may come later; right now, KDP is the one that’s covered.
- It doesn’t optimize category selection. The category picker shows competition estimates but it doesn’t tell you which categories to pick — that’s still your judgment call. The estimates are a guide, not a recommendation engine.