Publisher Merchandising

The first and most premium slot needed to work for multiple publishers simultaneously. Publishers at the same price tier were each paying for top placement. How do you give four different publishers equal access to the most visible position on the page?

Early on, I explored designs that gave multiple publishers space within the same module. Publishers pushed back immediately: they were not interested in sharing a frame with another publisher's books and creative. They had paid for a slot, not a shared shelf. That pushback clarified the actual constraint: whatever I designed needed to give each publisher a sense of full, undivided ownership of the position, even if multiple publishers were technically rotating through it.

The answer was rotation. But not in the way most carousels work. Rather than cycling through publishers in a fixed sequence, the slot randomizes per session. Each customer sees a different publisher in the front position on every page load. The result: each publisher occupies the top position approximately 25% of the time across the full customer base, without any single publisher appearing to dominate.

Visually, I moved away from the flat banner concept explored earlier in the project and toward something more dynamic: books bleeding outside the carousel frame, as if they were physically pushing beyond the boundary of the slot. One hero title in the foreground, supporting titles framing it, all of them breaking the container edge slightly.

To give publishers flexibility within this system, I designed four template layouts: one hero book, two hero books, three hero books, and a multi-title arrangement for catalogs with more titles to feature.

The color system was the detail I am most proud of. I wanted the carousel background to feel responsive to the book being featured. Not a static gray or neutral but a color that actually belonged to that title. Engineering's first response was that dynamically sampling pixel colors from book covers in real time would be a significant technical lift.

So I found another way. The Books org was building a new design system with an expanded color palette of 20 to 30 brand colors. I proposed a mapping system: sample the dominant color from each book cover, find its closest match in our existing brand palette, and use that brand color as the carousel background. The lift became manageable. The result was a carousel that felt alive.

The second slot sat below the fold, a harder position to earn attention. A static image here, however well designed, would struggle to compete. So I designed something that had never been built in the Books org before: a parallax scroll experience.

As a customer scrolled into this section, books appeared on a shelf. The first book lifted off the shelf, opened to reveal its synopsis, then settled back. A second book followed the same sequence. After both books had been featured, the full shelf of titles lined up, the complete publisher catalog visible at once. Scrolling back reversed the sequence. Nobody in the Books org had built this before, which meant there was no internal playbook to follow. I worked with a motion designer on the team to define the scroll trigger points and the timing of each animation beat, down to the exact seconds each book stayed lifted before returning. But that only solved part of the problem. I also reached out to designers on other Amazon teams who had done parallax work before, found them myself, set up the conversations, and extracted everything I could about what worked and what did not. Alongside that, I worked directly with engineers who had implemented parallax features elsewhere to understand the technical requirements before I finalized the design.

None of that expertise existed in one place. Getting this built meant tracking it down across the company and bringing it back into the room. Accessibility was a major consideration. For users with motion reduction settings enabled, the parallax experience simply would not activate. They would see a static image instead. No information lost, no experience degraded.

The third slot was the most straightforward: a horizontal shoveler of books from a single publisher's catalog. I applied the same color mapping logic from the carousel, with the background adapting to match the dominant hue of the featured book. It was a smaller canvas, but it carried the same visual coherence as the rest of the system.

Individually, each slot solved a different problem. Together, they worked as one system: the same color logic responding to whatever book was in frame, whether it was rotating above the fold, unfolding into a shelf, or moving through a shoveler further down the page.

Alongside the slot designs I built a creative guidelines system for publishers, the first time I had done anything like that in my career. The guidelines specified everything a publisher needed to know to populate the templates correctly: acceptable image formats and dimensions, the angles and compositions that read well in each slot, how many titles could appear in each template, what content was and was not permitted.

The goal was to give publishers genuine creative freedom while maintaining the visual quality and aesthetic consistency of the pages they would be featured on. Getting that balance right mattered both for the publisher experience and for Amazon's design standards.

Alongside the slot designs, I had built a creative guidelines system for publishers: what image formats worked, what angles read well, how many books could appear in a slot, what content was and was not permitted. The goal was to give publishers real creative freedom within a system that still protected the quality and consistency of the page.

At one point, product managers from European marketplaces pushed to give US publishers that same freedom European publishers already had: the ability to upload custom artwork into the slots without the guardrails I had designed.

Before I responded, I went through a range of past creative that European publishers had actually submitted and used. Some of it was well done. But some of it relied on imagery or cultural references that read very differently depending on the market, things that could pass without controversy in a European context but would likely draw real backlash in the US, sometimes for reasons tied to race, culture, or sensitivity that simply do not translate the same way across regions.

I pushed back. I understood the appeal of creative freedom, but the guardrails existed for a reason: to protect both page quality and Amazon's legal and policy standards. I held that position. The guidelines stayed.