by Lorilyn Roberts
How
do you determine what are the Best Search Keywords to use when you upload your
Kindle book to Kindle Direct Publishing? If you are like me, you will think
about what your book is about and start with that mindset. I chose “redemption”
as one of my Search Keywords for my book The
Donkey and the King. While it’s true my book is about redemption, is a
mother really going to enter that Search Keyword to look for a book for her
four-year-old son? As an author, I was describing what my book was about, Christian
redemption, but a parent or prospective buyer will be thinking in terms of his
son or daughter – entertainment, bedtime story, Bible story, or something along
those lines.
Another Search Keyword I had entered
was “fantasy.” While The Donkey and the
King is a fantasy book, there are also 50,396 other fantasy books on
Kindle. Before I changed my Search Keywords, my children’s picture book for
four to eight-year-olds had about as much chance of appearing on the first page
of a fantasy search as I have of being the next President of the United
States. Besides, is a father going to
enter the word “fantasy” on Amazon to search for a good Christian book for his
five-year-old daughter?
As
you can see, I wasn’t thinking like a buyer. I was thinking like an author.
When you choose which Search Keywords, think as if you are a buyer –who is your
audience? What do they read?
I eventually entered these Search
Keywords for The Donkey and the King:
Christian picture books, books for children, children's fantasy books,
children's story books, children's Bible stories, children's classics, favorite
children's books.
Note that it doesn’t have to be just
one word. You can enter several words as a phrase which counts as a single Search
Keyword.
A couple of days later, I did a
search with these words to see if my book came up in searches. In “favorite
children’s books,” The Donkey and the
King came up as number 25 of 151 books – on the second page, which is not
bad. Still, I have a bit of work to do. You along with thousands of other
authors are vying for the top spots, and there can only be fifteen on the first
page. This is just one peg in the broader scheme of Amazon marketing, but it’s
important to give detail to every step in the process. Focusing on the nuances
can make a difference when it comes to the bigger picture.
Where
does one go on Amazon to enter these magical Search Keywords when publishing
with Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP Select? As of January 2013, to publish
your ebook on Kindle, the first thing you must do is upload your manuscript to
the Kindle Direct Publishing Platform at https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/dashboard.
If you haven’t set up an account yet, you will need to do that first. Amazon
will prompt you.
Assuming you have set up your
account, you will be taken to the Dashboard page. At the top of the page, you
will see Bookshelf, Reports, Community, and KDP Select. Below that you will see
two options: Actions and Add New Title.
Let’s assume for this discussion, you have already added your book and
you want to check and see how you entered your seven Search Keywords.
Select the desired book, choose Actions
at the top, and click on the down arrow beside it. Then click on Edit Book Details.
Scroll down to number three. You will see Options, Add Categories, and
underneath that Search Keywords. Here is where you insert your seven Search Keywords
for your book. Remember, Search Keywords can also be a phrase—not just one
word.
Amazon will use these Search Keywords
to help people find your book when a potential buyer enters a Search Keyword from
the Amazon Home Page. I know this sounds rather elementary, but I was surprised
when I snooped around Amazon looking at search phrases and then compared them
with what Search Keywords I had used with my books. The disparity between what I thought were good Search Keywords and how
Amazon used them was rather embarrassing.
With another one of my books, Children of Dreams, when I originally uploaded
it on Amazon, the book was buried so deep in “adoption” as a Search Keyword on the
Amazon Home Page I could never pull it up. I later wished I had added a Subtitle
to help with search engine optimization; i.e., Two Adoption Stories In One. Less
time would have passed for my book about adoption to be found in searches. Two
years later, however, Children of Dreams
is coming up on page four, number 53 out of 2,311 books. The ranking varies
from day to day. I have seen Children of
Dreams higher recently, but even if you have made mistakes along the way,
all is not lost. Many other factors influence where a book appears in an Amazon
Search Keyword with buyers. However, if you aren’t particular about what words
you put in the Search Keyword box after uploading your Kindle book, your climb
out of the abyss of undiscoverability will take longer.
While
entering the Best Search Keywords won’t guarantee success in marketing your
book overnight, you can be assured that readers will stand a better chance of
finding your book out of the millions on Amazon, and small steps like this will
ensure hope for giant leaps in your overall marketing endeavors.
