Categories and Keywords – Kind Assistance

As with any indie writer, I’m always working on ways to make my work visible and discoverable. As mentioned in some previous posts, Let’s Get Visible and Write Publish Repeat had a great many good ideas for doing this. My goal is and was to implement those ideas that resonated with me.

Being a 3 x 5 index card junkie, as you can imagine, I have a pile of index card, and each and every index card has a terrific idea on it.

The idea on the top of the list was to “increase sales rankings.” This applies to all of my sales channels Kobo, Nook, Smashwords, CreateSpace, Ingram Spark, and, of course, Amazon. But while I had picked what I thought were good categories and keywords (historical! orphan! Charles Dickens!), my sales, as might be expected from these less than riveting terms, languished.

Recently, I’d gone on The Passive Guy’s blog to participate in a discussion on an entry the TPG had made, which encouraged folks to write a comment about how they quit their day jobs to go indie, or how being an indie changed their lives, and how it was working or not working for them.

In reply to a comment I had made, a lovely woman by the name of Anthea Lawson wrote me to give me some ideas about categories and keywords. But instead of just saying “hey, you should make better categories and keywords to increase your sales ranking” she actually went and showed me by example how to do it.

Now, I’m sure David Gaughran and Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant had this same advice in their books, but when Ms. Lawson helped me out, she really showed me the way. I’m a fully functioning, card carrying, mortgage paying adult, but it was a little like someone holding my hand, for just a moment, so I could pull myself out of a rut.

So this is what Ms. Lawson told me. She showed me a book similar to mine, and what the categories were. They were:

• Books > Literature & Fiction > British > Historical
• Books > Literature & Fiction > British > Humor & Satire
• Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Vampires
• Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Historical
• Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Paranormal
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Classics > British & Irish
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Classics > Humor
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Historical

This already has me confused, because as far as I knew, you could only enter two categories.

Mine was (on Amazon): Fiction > Historical. And there my book sat, languishing at a sales ranking of 885,563.

Ms. Lawson stated:

Clearly a couple of those won’t work for you, but you can and should add “coming of age” in your tag words and that will give you that category. The more categories you can get your book listed in on Amazon, the better visibility. Check out these pages:

Make Your Book More Discoverable With Keywords

and

Selecting Browse Categories

Okay, so this is nothing I’d not heard before, but since this author was kind enough to point me to these two pages, I took the time to read them. And then Ms. Lawson wrote the following:

This one in particular, go down the page a bit and check out the various categories and subcategories you can get your book into just by choosing the right keywords. And keywords are not limited to only 7. You could do the following: Coming of age Victorian London, (put 4-5 words between each comma) you get up to 7 commas.

So I’m like, say what? All of it suddenly came together in my head.

Your keywords should not duplicate anything in your description, your title, or your categories. So, if I’ve got a category of “Fiction > Historical” then I should not make one of my keywords either “fiction” or “historical.”

My keywords were: “Oliver Twist, sequel, historical fiction, Victorian London, Artful Dodger.”

But, these are words already reflected in my description and category, so the book just sat there, undiscoverable.

I realized that instead, I could make seven keywords, each of them being words or phrases, that someone would likely search on my book with. So I started with her suggestion: “coming of age 19th century London,” and went from there until I had the following string of keywords:

coming of age Victorian London, 19th century orphan and pickpocket, love and friendship, hurt comfort angst, workhouses, haberdashery, survival

And I changed my categories to:

• Fiction > Romance > Historical > Victorian
• Fiction > Historical

And all of a sudden, the categories that I fit into expand from “Fiction > Historical” to:

• Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary
• Books > Romance > Historical > Victorian
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Historical
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Romance
• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Romance > Historical Romance > Victorian

Also, yesterday, I had selected the category of  “Fiction > Gay” but that made the focus on the gay aspect of my book, rather than the historical aspect of it. So I took that out, and now the categories don’t even reflect the book having gay characters. So what I might do, is go in and make one of my keywords “gay” so that the category comes up naturally. I’ll test that. This is what it looked like on 8/22:

What’s more, what’s even more amazing, is that on 8/21, I had a sales ranking of 885,563. And today, 8/23, I have a sales ranking of 175,099.

Hello? Is that amazing or is that just me? Can anybody do math? Wait….I think I have the math right. That’s a 19.7% increase in rankings. And all because of I updated my categories and keywords. And all because of some kind words from Anthea Lawson, who is by the way, the 2014 RITA Nominated Author, and, who has an Amazon Author Rank of #8 in her category of ebooks > Romance > Historical Romance. I’m pretty sure she’s busy writing her next fabulous book, but she took time out of her day to help me, a new indie. Now, that’s what I call classy.