Thursday, January 16, 2014

Want to Sell Books? It's all in the Keywords, Baby!


This is what your book looks like on Amazon without keywords!  Okay, maybe not just like that because you (hopefully) have an enticing cover.  But how in the world can people find your incredible book with the million books begging for attention? Fine, don't get agitated, I'll tell you!  Keywords! You know, the same thing you type into your search browser when you're looking up a topic.

Makes sense, doesn't it?  Now of course there are other factors in play, like the categories we discussed yesterday, but keywords are a huge help to books that aren't getting the traction they need to sell!  Once again a disclaimer, I'm a romance author so if your books don't fall under this category I can only assume it works the same.

Humor me here for a minute!  Open up a new tab and visit www.amazon.com . Click on the search button and scroll down to Kindle Books.  Press that, hit enter with nothing in the search box.  Once you get a new page type in Romance without clicking anything else, you'll see these words underneath what you typed:  free romance books for kindle, romance novels, Romance and sex,  romance books, romance series, and blah blah blah.  Know what those words mean?  They are what people search for the most under that category. So you're thinking, okay crazy lady, why should I give a crap?

I knew you were thinking that, so I'll tell you!  If you can get your book to show up under those keywords then your book gets more visibility.  More visibility, means the better chance to sell.  So how do you get those keywords to associate with your book?  You visit your shelf on https://kdp.amazon.com/ and pull up the book you want to add them to and scroll down until you see "Target your book to customers".  You get seven keywords to entice readers about your story.  Seven, baby, count them and make them awesome.

Let's say for generic reasons you wrote a book about an alpha male and virgin in the romance category.  To make this work as a promotional tool, you want to go back to Amazon Kindle and pull up the search button again.  Type in alpha male romance and look at the keywords that pop up below what you typed.  Getting the idea?  Now I've got a keyword for my book that people are already searching for.  The customers are telling you what they want, so why not give it to them?  You can do the same thing with any popular theme of your book.  So I pull a keyword from Alpha Male Romance then I want to see what people look for with Virgin Romance.  What shows up is Virgin Romance Sex and a few other words I could use.

My suggestion is to come up with seven topics your book can be about and type in one at a time those topics under the Amazon Kindle search, then choose one each.  It's really not difficult and you get a better chance of showing up in the search engines when people look for a book that interests them.  Is this going to make you a bestseller?  Only the powers that be can answer that question, but it darn sure won't hurt!  The way I see things with promotion, is you give your book the best shot it can get and then hope for the best.  There's no full proof way (that I know of) to guarantee a book will sell!

I'll keep racking my brain for ideas to help! If you have any questions leave a comment or send an email!  I wish you nothing but the best on your book journey!  By the way if you don't have an awesome cover, visit my friends over at http://www.shoutlinesdesign.com/  they'll help you fix that issue!

New Adult college romance

No comments :

Post a Comment

Blogger Wordpress Gadgets
Animated Social Gadget - Blogger And Wordpress Tips