Pick the most specific codes that honestly describe your book, chosen by looking at where comparable titles actually sit. Specificity beats breadth: a narrow category with fewer competing titles gives you visibility and a realistic shot at a bestseller badge, while a broad one buries you. Never choose a category your book doesn't genuinely belong in — it converts badly and generates returns and poor reviews.
BISAC stands for Book Industry Standards and Communications. The BISAC Subject Headings List is the subject classification maintained by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and used across the North American book trade: distributors, wholesalers and retailers use it to decide where a book is shelved and browsed.
Every code has the same shape — a three-letter prefix, then six digits — with a plain-language heading beside it:
FIC027220 FICTION / Romance / Romantic Comedy
The prefix names the top-level section, and the heading reads from general to specific.
Most sections start with a "General" code (HISTORY / General) — the fallback when nothing
narrower fits, and rarely the best choice.
Retailers map their own browse structures onto BISAC, which is why the code you choose affects where readers find you.
A handful of prefixes cover most indie books:
| Prefix | Section |
|---|---|
FIC | Fiction |
JUV | Juvenile Fiction (children's) |
JNF | Juvenile Nonfiction |
YAF | Young Adult Fiction |
YAN | Young Adult Nonfiction |
BIO | Biography & Autobiography |
BUS | Business & Economics |
SEL | Self-Help |
HIS | History |
TRU | True Crime |
POE | Poetry |
Children's and teen books have their own sections. A middle-grade fantasy goes under JUV,
not FIC — one of the most common miscategorisations.
BISG publishes the complete Subject Headings List on its website, free to look up one code at a time. There is no fee and no permission needed to use a code on your own book. A licensed download of the whole list is for organisations building it into a database, not for authors choosing codes.
Use the current list. BISG revises it every year, usually late in the year, and codes are added, renamed and retired.
1. Find your comparable titles. Five to ten books that a reader of yours would also buy — similar tone, length, audience, published in the last two or three years.
2. Look at where they're actually categorized. On a retailer page, the "Best Sellers Rank" section lists the categories a book sits in. This is real data about what works in your genre, and it's free.
3. Go as specific as you can honestly go. FICTION / Fantasy contains hundreds of
thousands of titles. FICTION / Fantasy / Romantic is a real place a reader browses. The
narrower category is easier to rank in, and readers who browse it are closer to buying.
4. Choose codes that don't overlap. Three near-identical categories waste two slots. Pick a primary that's the truest fit, then use the others to reach an adjacent audience you legitimately serve.
5. Check whether the category has a live audience. A category so obscure that its #1 book has a poor sales rank isn't a win — being top of an empty shelf sells nothing.
It's tempting to select a low-competition category your book only loosely fits, in order to grab a badge. Two reasons not to:
Non-fiction categorization is generally more consequential than fiction, because buyers
browse by problem. Pick the code matching the reader's problem, not your professional
discipline. A book on team communication might belong in
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Management rather than PSYCHOLOGY / Social Psychology, depending
entirely on who you want to reach.
They're related but not the same, and this trips people up:
So a wide-distributed book may need BISAC codes for Ingram and Amazon categories for KDP, and they won't be identically named. IngramSpark asks for BISAC codes directly and advises making the first one the most specific and accurate — the same rule as above.
Not primarily. Most libraries classify by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress, which are far more granular. BISAC is a bookselling scheme. Some US public libraries — Maricopa County Library District in Arizona was among the first — have replaced Dewey with BISAC-based "bookstore" shelving so patrons can browse by subject, but they remain the exception. For an indie author, BISAC matters for how your distributor and retailers file the book; library cataloguing is done by the library.
Verified 9 August 2026.
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