Frequently Asked Questions

Short answers to the questions authors ask most about AuthorBear. For a step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots, see the Help page.

What is AuthorBear?

AuthorBear is a research toolkit for authors who sell on Amazon. Paste an ASIN, ISBN-13, or any Amazon product link and it shows you the book's full category tree with bestseller-list links and competition scores, the competing titles Amazon recommends alongside it, and Amazon's recommended ad keywords with suggested bids. You can also browse Amazon's whole book category tree without an ASIN, or generate a starter keyword list from your book's title alone. Searches are free and results export as CSV.

What is an ASIN, and what can I paste in?

An ASIN is the ten-character identifier Amazon assigns to every product (for example B0DHV4DGVJ) — it appears after /dp/ in a product URL. Every input field also accepts an ISBN-13 or a full Amazon product link; AuthorBear extracts the ASIN for you before it queries Amazon.

Why does a CompetitorLens run take 30–60 seconds?

The tool pages through Amazon's recommendations API until it has collected every recommendation for the ASIN (up to about 10,000 titles). That pagination is sequential by design, so the elapsed time reflects how much data there is rather than anything you can speed up. A progress indicator shows the running total while it works.

What does "Rate Limit Exceeded" mean?

To keep the API responsive for everyone, searches are limited to a small number of requests per minute per visitor. If you see the notice, wait about a minute and try again — it clears on its own.

Is there a cost?

No. Searches, competitor analyses, and keyword research are free, and every result set exports to CSV at no charge. AuthorBear is kept running by voluntary donations.

What happens to the data I enter?

The ASINs you search are sent to Amazon's advertising and recommendations APIs so they can be looked up; AuthorBear does not sell or share that data. See the Privacy Notice for the full picture, including how advertising cookies work on this site.

Which Amazon marketplaces are supported?

The search tabs (Book Category Search, CompetitorLens, Keyword Search) and the Category Explorer each have a Marketplace selector, defaulting to the United States. Which marketplaces are offered depends on the advertising accounts behind this site’s Amazon Ads credentials — currently the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Australia. Results, product counts, and bestseller links are scoped to the marketplace you pick, so a German search searches amazon.de’s catalog. Switching marketplaces clears the previous result, since results only apply to the marketplace they were fetched for.