BOOK MARKETING

How Keywords, Categories Can Make or Break Your Kids Book

Karen Ferreira, The KidLit Creator's Chronicle: One shelf needs 19 sales to hit number one. Another needs 1,073. Same book. Here's my full keyword and category research, numbers and all. One of the categories my book fits in needs 19 sales to hit number one. Another one needs 1,073!  I’ll walk you through the three checks from newsletter #61, done on Lilou's Lost Rainbow, step by step. Then I'll run a very successful self-published book through some of the same steps, so you can see what it looks like when it's all working.

I've done a lot of this kind of research over the years, helping authors publish. And one thing I’ve learned is that you can never guess keywords, because you simply don’t know how well each keyword will perform on Amazon without doing the research. And categories are always changing, so you need to check them out regularly to choose the best ones.

Your categories and your keywords are a big part of what decides whether your book gets found at all. Get them right, and readers who are browsing or searching can actually discover your book. Get them wrong, and nobody finds your book.

Categories on Amazon are the shelves your book sits on, the same way a physical bookshop has a shelf for picture books and another one for cookbooks. Obviously, you need to be on the right shelf to be discovered. No one looks for picture books on the adult horror shelf.

But Amazon’s shelves are huge, containing anything from about 500 to 100,000 books each. So you also need to be visible on your chosen shelves and not buried under other books. And if you rank number one in a category, you get that Amazon bestseller badge, which is wonderful social proof.

How to Define Your Book’s Target Audience in 6 Steps

Jim Foley, BookBaby: Defining and engaging your target market is crucial when it comes to promotion, and these six steps can help you build your reader personas.

Your Book’s Out. Now, How to Avoid 8 Marketing Errors

Aurielle Haughee, Florida Writers Association: More than once I’ve been asked a question like this: “My book comes out this week. What should I do to market it?” Unfortunately, by the time the author asks me that question, several important marketing opportunities have already passed. Book marketing should start at least six months before publication, if not longer. Does that mean everything is ruined if you published your book already and are now looking to market? Absolutely not! You can always market your book, but setting things up before publication day gives you more of a pathway toward success with sales. So let’s look at eight common marketing mistakes so you can plan ahead for this book or the next one.

How I sold 1,000 copies of my self-published memoir in five months. Jane Friedman.

Winning Readers Up Close at Your Author Table

Mary Flynn, Florida Writers Association: After a recent event at which authors were set up at tables to sell their books, one of the authors commented on how disappointed she was with the way the event had been planned, marketed, advertised, laid out, managed, and handled. No wonder she had sold only four books all day! She could only hope they would do a better job next year or she would never come back. I had noticed this author during the event. She’s someone I know and like. Her table looked pretty good and so did she. Her titles were appealing and her book covers attractive. What could have really gone wrong?

How to Get Book Reviews on Amazon

Scott McCormick, BookBaby: Looking to boost your book's profile on Amazon? We outline seven effective strategies to get Amazon book reviews.

What are Comp Titles? How are Comps Used in Pitching and Marketing?

Nikki Carrero, Literary Agent: Comp—or comparable/comparison—titles in publishing are books that have been recently published (ideally within the last five years) that are similar to your manuscript in one of three ways: the content, the style, or the intended sales trends are expected to be similar. When we say comparable in content, though, we’re not suggesting it should contain the same plot. It simply needs to be comparable in at least one element: genre, theme, twists, timeline sequence, etc. That said, be sure it’s in a way that is vital to that comparable title and not merely that it was also written in two points of view, as that doesn’t tell my why it is the best comp for your book. Comp titles are used in query letters and publishing proposals as a marketing tool. They’re meant to demonstrate an understanding of market trends, define the target audience, and guide marketing strategies by pinpointing what about this project has worked for others before.

Why KDP Marketing Fails (and How to Build Your Audience)

BookBaby: You’ve done the hard work. You’ve prepared and uploaded your book to KDP. You’ve seen your book go live and then… Crickets. There’s no avalanche of sales. No magical algorithm fairy coming down to bless your rank in the search results.

We need to rethink how we write our book descriptions. Traditionally, book descriptions have had one main job: getting the right readers excited enough about our books to buy them. In other words, we wrote them for humans.

Now, it’s not just humans reading them; it’s also bots (at the service of humans). And bots read very differently from humans. For one, they don’t have emotions (famous last words before they take over the planet…). They can infer genre, tone, themes, and tropes from a blurb—but inference isn’t the same as verification. When they’re trying to match a book to a specific prompt, clear, explicit information gives them much stronger evidence to work with.

Amazon Changes Rules Again to Sift Reviews Based on Reader Behavior

Laurence O'Bryan, Publishing Reinvented: Few things are as demoralizing as watching a hard-earned book review simply vanish. You have spent months crafting your manuscript and weeks coordinating a launch team, only to see reviews delayed, rejected, or stripped away by an invisible hand. If you feel like you are doing everything “by the book” and still facing algorithmic suppression, you aren’t imagining it.

The rules of the game have changed. To combat the rising tide of sophisticated scammers, Amazon has deployed aggressive new automated detection systems. While these are designed to protect marketplace integrity, they are currently casting a wide net that captures legitimate authors in the crossfire. Kpow…there goes that great review you loved! To navigate this new landscape, you must understand that Amazon is no longer just scanning your reviews, it is auditing your readers’ behavior.

Didn’t Like a Book? Is It OK to Say ‘DNF’ on Goodreads?

Melissa Kirsch, New York Times: The book-tracking app Goodreads added a “Did Not Finish” (DNF) designation this spring so that readers can log books that they’ve put down or abandoned. The change, Erik Piepenburg reported in The Times, provoked an online debate: Is it a cop-out to DNF? As a reader who has been known to graze on books as if at a grand buffet, tasting a little bit of everything, I enter this discourse bashfully. I feel strongly that life’s too short to spend time on books one doesn’t like. But sometimes I wonder if the problem isn’t with the books but with me: impatient, seduced by novelty, impossible to satisfy.

The Indie Authors Guide to Marketing to Bookstores, Libraries and the Industry. 36-page PDF by multi-book author M.J. Etkind.

How Should Debut Novelists Measure Success?

K.E. Semmel, The Millions: Earlier this May, an Esquire article by Kate Dwyer called “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” channeled the fear of debut novelists everywhere: What happens if no one buys my book? Book sales are an important way for editors and agents to gauge whether to invest in an author. If her first novel doesn’t sell, the debut novelist fears, will she get a crack at a second? Gone are the days when publishers were willing to take a long view on an emerging novelist in whom they believed, as Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, pointed out in a New York Times essay on Cormac McCarthy, whose “first five novels, published over two decades, earned him considerable critical respect but were commercial failures.” In today’s literary marketplace, agents and editors can’t afford to give an author the benefit of two decades to allow her career to flower, no matter how good her work is.

Going Indie and the Challenges of Book Marketing with John Bond

The Creative Penn: How can you tell where the real innovation in publishing is happening right now, and why is it emerging from the indie side first? How do you market your own book when you've spent 35 years marketing everyone else's? John Bond talks about Going Indie and what he's learned about authors who last. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

Why 2012 was a watershed moment for publishing in the UK

Whether the snobbery around self-publishing has finally gone

How to co-write a book with someone, and why there's no formula

The pride swallowing involved in getting endorsement quotes for your own book

The shadow economy of indie sales that no industry chart measures

The hallmarks of writers who build a long-term career.

You can find John at wearewhitefox.com.

Authors: Maximize Your Amazon Author Page to Convert Browsers to Buyers

Mark Mathes: Two of my latest authors on the runway to publish are wrestling with a couple details to complete their Amazon Author Pages. This is important real estate that the Amazon author controls but does not own. Many authors stop short of maximizing the features on the Author Pages that will help convert book browsers into book buyers.

Here is a handy two-page checklist from Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur.

Before you complete your Author Page, assemble the many details on my Pre-publication Checklist  of everything you’ll need.

How to Set up Your Amazon Author Central Account & Page

Part 1: Create Your Author Central Account

1.Go to https://authorcentral.amazon.com/ and click “Join for free”.

2.Sign in with your regular Amazon username and password. If you don't have

an account, select I am a new customer. You'll need to give a little moreinformation.

3.Read the Terms and Conditions then click Accept.

4.Enter the name your books are written under. A list of possible booksappears.

5.Select any one of your books to create the account.

If your book is not in the list, you can search for it by title or ISBN. *Your book must be available for purchase on Amazon in order to setup an Author Central Amazon Account. [More on checklist.]