Useful Tidbits on Self-Publishing

photo; PIRO

Using fiverr for KDP keywords was a bust! Big time!

That's the last time I trust some stranger from Morocco with $32 ear-marked for keywords and strings. Dude was way off, so much so that I ended up doing it myself and ignoring his results. And that's the thing with fiverr, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. And I'm not putting down fiverr at all. I have had some good successes and some not so good.

So, how did I do my own keyword search without spending more money?

I will tell you.

As I mentioned in the last blog, there are a number of ways to complete this horrid task.

And I say horrid, because I don't know one creative person that enjoys this type of thing and anything under the banner of administration. Yuck!

However, if you are going to do it all yourself and on the cheap, you've got to suck it up!

One way to do it, is to buy or subscribe to some very expensive software like Publisher Rocket or Helium 10 and many others. Perhaps a $200 outlay in 2026 doesn't sound too dear and I guess it's not. But when you only use it maybe once a year, for an afternoon, then I think it's expensive. And let's not forget the learning curve, which according to many online opinions, is quite steep. So, the time needed to learn it, might also turn you off.

The second way and the one I used is free and will take you a day to complete.

Step One: Go on the internet, choose your browser and open an incognito session.

Why incognito? If you don't, then when you begin searching on amazon, the amazon software will tend to give you results related to the first thing you search for. We don't want this! We want to search anew without any bias from amazon each time.

Step Two: Pull up amazon.com Always use .com instead of your home country because this is their main site and all other sites are lesser beings.

Step Three: Start searching keywords that describe your book. For example, my book is a YA Fantasy so "fantasy" would be a good place to start. Now, you might think you should search under the books catagory. You would be wrong. It's too limiting for what we are trying to do and you might find clues in other categories that will help you find your keywords.

So, what are we trying to do?

We are trying to find a keyword or a string of keywords to help amazon sell our book by pushing it to the right people and potential buyers on the site. It's really a free way of advertising and getting the word out.

Confused? Don't worry - we'll get there.

Look what happens when we search too broadly...

Over 100,000 hits is not going to help us break into the fantasy genre. The keywords "fantasy books" is useless. Let's try and get more specific. In my book, the protagonist is a young girl "coming of age".

That's better. Imagine is my stroy was set in Mississippi! Alas, it's not. However, this is a promising keyword string and lets check out "coming of age fantasy books"

Getting closer but 20,000 is still massive and not what we want.

At this point, you must be feeling like I did; that this is counter-intuitive. Don't I want to be in the group of writers that everyone is searching for? Another, no! What we are looking for is a string of keywords that brings up 1000 hits of less so that we dominate that genre niche.

Wierd, huh?

If we can dominate a niche then amazon rubs it's greedy fingers together and says, "oh, goody!" They will then, after their gloating, push you in front of more and more readers because you are selling well.

Let's try some more focused searching...

My protagonist isn't really a witch, nor do I ever mention her in the book with that title. She is a shaman though and that keyword doesn't show up much. Therefore, you have to be creative. A witch, or a pagan, a magician or mage in the amazon world equate to the same basic character description. Interestingly enough, even a race can have several different names as well and you must find the one amazon searchers are looking for. In my book, for example, I use faeries and Fey. In amazon land, the best keywords are Fae for both.

Wierd, huh?

Okay, back to the search. Although 3000 is better than over 100,000, it's still not good enough. More focus...

Now that's a good keyword string? When you set up your book on KDP, you get 3 boxes to fill in the general category and 7 for keywords. I would definitely use this above string as one of my seven.

I don't know about you but to me this is also counter-intuitive as I would have thought individual words separated by a comma would be best. Wrong, again!

Amazon loves, loves, loves these long strings (250 characters max) and I repeated this process over and over again until I was satisfied with my 7 best.

So, that's the free way to do it. You do you and I'll do me.

One more thing before I go today.

This process doesn't end the day you publish. If you're being a good author and checking your sales reports and stats - you will see when your sales start to slow down or never get started. If this happens, it may be because of poor keyword strings. Don't fret! Try a different approach until the sales starts coming in once more or finally!!!

Don't get discouraged. I believe in you.

Until next time. Bye for now.