Publisher Rocket

Keyword Blues

For online book sales, keywords can make or break you.

The number of books for sale on online platforms is mind-boggling. Amazon alone has millions (I remember when it was a million, but that was a long time ago). With those numbers, you have to make it easy for readers to find your book. If they can’t find your book, you don’t make money.

That’s where keywords come in. Readers type a few words in the search bar, and Amazon shows you all the books that match the readers’ keywords. Here’s the trick. The author has to put in the right keywords in the book’s metadata so it’ll show up on the sales page. How does an author know she has the right keywords? That’s the second trick. She doesn’t.

So now what?

Lucky for the author, there are apps that’ll help her find the right keywords. I bought an app called Publisher Rocket, which helps me find the keywords–a single word or a phrase–to make it easier for readers to find my books. I plug a few words in the search bar, and the app shows me 1) whether my keywords are useful, 2) my competition (how many other authors use those keywords and the top 10 sellers) and the average daily and monthly income for each author, 3) helps me find the category that best matches my books, and 4) how often the keyword or keywords show up in Amazon searches.

It’s wonderful. For The Underground, I… Continue reading