5 Ways to Use Publisher Rocket for Your Author Business

Sam.

Foreign, Thank you for joining today. Well, that countdown is really exciting. I got some, like, anticipation just watching that countdown come through. It's great to see everybody. I am Sarah Bean. I am marketing manager for Book Launchers. Obviously not Julie Broad, but part of her team. I just want to welcome everybody. Feel free to drop a comment about, you know, where you're from, where you're joining us from, any questions that you have that you'd love for me to get into. Today we are going to be talking about keywords, which is a major part of the book business in a way that it really had never been in the past up until, you know, digital selling became such a big thing. But as marketing manager, one of my roles is to ensure that the metadata for all of our authors is really on target and that book is discoverable. So I'm going to get into a little bit about keywords, how to research them, what you should be looking for, how to even get started, and then some of the tools that we use, namely Publisher Rocket, on how to use that to help leverage your book and get it up into that big discoverable space. So welcome everybody. I love this. Hi, Kevin. Good to see you. Nice to see you. Susan. Northwest Ohio, actually, probably not too far from me. I'm in South Michigan, very close to Ohio, only about 40 minutes from Toledo. So nice to see everybody. Please feel free to drop in the comments, any kind of questions you have about keyword research. Publisher Rocket, specifically, because that's the tool we'll be talking about the most today. What to consider when looking for your keywords or just this whole thing is completely new to you and you're just wanting to understand how it works. I'm going to dive in a little bit to that. We also have Angela Jo Jones from our team here today. She's kind of in the background, but she's going to be popping up chatting with everybody in the comments. We do have prizes. It wouldn't be a YouTube live without prizes. So those will be going on throughout my time here. Hi, Efren. Oh, it's nice to see Efren in the comments. So, yes, we're gonna go ahead and dive in. And the time that we do have together. So let's break it down a little bit before we dive into specifically to publish a rocket. I want to get into the discussion about keywords. Obviously, we all know that the categories your book goes in has a major effect on how your book sells. Okay. And so, you know, 25, 30 years ago, it was about what category it needed to go into. And then once digital online selling took over, most of how we sell books now, the keywords and how to make that book discoverable became paramount to your overall book strategy. But how do you know what keywords? What are people searching for? How can you learn? We're going to talk a little bit about some of those today. So when it comes to keywords, like everything else, our life is going to be driven by these algorithms that help show the buying audience what they potentially might want. So if someone goes to Amazon and they put in something like books on Lawn Care, there's a series of keywords that is teaching that algorithm what book to put in front of you. So when you're using these keywords strategically, when you're building things like your title, your book description, even things that you use on your own website, all of this is teaching online retailers how to put your book in front of that right buyer. So, right, that's the dream. We all want the book to be placed directly in front of that person who's going to benefit the most from it. And keywords are basically the way to make that happen. But there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of potential keywords that can be used at any one time. So how do you know which ones to use? So we're going to talk a little bit about the differences between keywords for metadata and then keywords that you'll use for things like your subtitle and your book description and then keywords that you use for Amazon ads. I'm going to be fully up front here. Amazon ads is not my forte. That's why we have Shane on our team, who is our online marketing specialist and is phenomenal at Amazon. But I will touch base on what I know about the how to build keyword lists for that. So starting off, let's talk a little bit about metadata. Metadata is what characterizes your book. On the back end, it's what tells retailers, libraries, stores how to classify your book and where to put it. So your metadata includes your title, it includes your publisher info, it includes your publication date. Metadata is going to be things like the trim size of your book, the page count, the pricing, the ISBN. These are all really important facts. But underneath all of that metadata is also the keywords that are tied to your book. Now, those keywords are things that you want your book to show up for. So if someone goes to Amazon and puts in Lawn Care, you want keywords within your metadata that's going to put your book on those first pages. Page results, those first pages on Amazon and. Or Google can make or break your book, can make or break any kind of product, really. So when you're searching for keywords to attach to your metadata, it's not enough to look at what your book is about. Keywords, your reverse engineering, buyer intent. Okay. And so when I talk about that, the best way I can explain this is a few years ago. We had an author who had a really phenomenal book on organizational culture and development, and her concepts were phenomenal, but the keywords that we pulled out of that book were not ones that buyers were searching for. So when we presented keywords that we had found for her, she was like, well, none of these relate to, to what I use within my book. But the thing is, is her book was for educators, it was for policymakers, it was for change makers, it was for people who are reimagining economic and educational policy. So we, even though she doesn't explicitly say that in the book, we had to use the keywords that those types of people would use to find her book. So when I talk about reverse engineering, your keywords are not so much about exactly what the book is about. It's about what a buyer will use to find your book. So keep. That's one big distinction to keep in mind when it comes to keywords, is you want to make sure that, yes, they are on target for what your book is. You don't want to misrepresent your content, but you are looking at it from a consumer perspective. What are the keywords that your target reader would potentially put into a search bar or into Google or into Amazon? And ideally, your book is going to show up as their solution. So just a little touch base just, you know, to get into as we start exploring some of these keywords and breaking it down, I wanted to just make sure that that's very clear of what we're talking about. And like I said, feel free to go ahead and put any questions in the chat. I see we have a coup already. But before we dive into how to create some of those keyword lists and start exploring and researching which ones are really the good ones for you, I thought Angela might want to hop in here and say hello and maybe we can do our first prize. Hey, everyone.

Happy Tuesday. Yeah. This is such a treat to have Sarah on here. And, I mean, isn't she already. I mean, I put in the chat, like, that's a solid distinction that you just shared.

So there's some gold here, guys.

So I hope you're taking it.

You were gold for the win.

Okay, yeah. So let us give away some prizes. So I want to focus on books today. I have. If you guys were around for the holiday extravaganza and Sarah might remember this. I counted my entire like I categorized all of the swag that I have and I have so many books I could make like a table, I could make a bed. Like I have so many books here and I would love to share them with you guys. So I think that's going to be our prize of choice today. Unless you've already won all the things, then you and I can communicate via email. But we, I do have several different books that you guys can choose from. Four prizes. So let me tell you what the prizes are for today. We've got some of Julie's books. We have self Published and Succeed as well as self promote and Succeed. We also have a couple of Dale Roberts books. So we have the first two books of his series and these books are actually the hardback and they're kind of a special edition as far as the COVID goes. So they're a really nice cover. But one is for new authors and another one is for advanced authors or it's advanced self publishing. So I've got those. I also have a few copies of Nick Hutchison's book Rise of the Reader, which that's an excellent one as well. And I can, yeah, see Sarah giving a heads up there. So those are five different books that I have in stock and I've got plenty of all of those. Would love to share them with you. So let's do a giveaway for who has been commenting today. So let me share screen really quickly and if it'll let me. And I've got our giveaway tool pulled up so hopefully. Yes, there we go. Okay, so let us see who is going to be our first winner for today. Nice thing about, about the having books as prizes. Does that mean anyone can win? Whether you are Efren.

Yay.

How fun. Well, there are a couple books in there that you might. I know you've met with Nick, but if you don't have his book, let me know. Or if you want one of those.

He definitely has his book. Efren definitely does. Yeah.

Yeah. Or if you want Dale's book, let me know. But yeah, that's awesome. So let me see. What I was going to say was the nice thing about books is that these can go anywhere in the world. So even if you are outside of the U.S. the book can be shipped to you. So that'll be our first prize. For today, we do have some others as well. As for the people who commented on a video the day it was released, he doesn't know who to think first. Well, well done, everyone. Let me stop sharing it. I will let you, Sarah, get back to it.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so before I get into the tools that you need to research keywords, one of the things that you have to start with is your raw keywords. Okay. And when we talk about raw keywords, this is basically you generating a list of all the potential keywords that are associated with your book or with the target reader that could be a good choice for metadata. Now, keep in mind, when you were creating metadata for print books or for Kindle books, and this is specifically for Amazon, you get seven slots for different keyword phrases. And there's actually like a character count on how much you can use in there. I think it's up to 50 or something. But so you have. Out of the thousands of keyword options, you have to narrow it down to seven per format. Now, this is an interesting distinction because a lot of times I hear people go, well, why do I need different keywords for my Kindle versus my print? It's all the same stuff, but not true. People buy different types of books on ebook than they do in print book. So people will search for different things in print book than they will with ebook. Therefore, you need different keywords. Plus, if you have seven print and seven Kindle spaces for keyword phrases, that gives you 14 opportunities to potential bring in. To bring in your target reader. So, but still, that's only 14 out of the thousands and thousands of options. So where do you start? Well, the first thing that I do is I utilize ChatGPT AI. I use AI. We use a model that does not use any of the content that we load to it to teach the model. So we're not taking any of that. So we use AI and I. The first thing I will do is put in things like what the book's about, what the author is, who we think the target reader is. And I'll ask AI to start just coming up with keyword, A keyword phrases. The next thing I do is I'm going to put in the entire manuscript and I'll ask it things like keyword density, are there certain phrases or ideas that are used continuously throughout the book? And it'll give me, you know, sort of a long list, but from there you really have to refine it down. And this is where the team over at kindlepreneur has really cracked the Code on how to do this. Well, because they have, through so much testing and studying and trial and error, determined how some certain types of keywords perform compared to others. And they've been able to narrow it down into certain types of categories. So when you have these raw keywords that you have no idea if they're viable or not, you start to want to group these into certain categories because it's helpful to have a variety of keywords within that metadata. So the first things that we kind of take a look at are going to be things like what are the keywords that are specific for Amazon optimization? You know, something that a reader who's unfamiliar with the book would use to potentially find that book. Okay. And I'll ask, you know, chat some very, I'll give it some very specific prompts and ask for those. And then I'll also ask it for ones for Google SEO, because Google has a different format than Amazon. Then we want to get into the ones that are most relevant to the book. So we want ones that are going to align with the book's content, the message and the goals. And we start there with that sort of category number one point A, if you will, or one point B. Then I'm going to look at specifically for nonfiction books. Fiction books has a little bit of a different strategy, but this is strictly for nonfiction. Then I'm going to get into pain points. What are some keyword phrases that will align with my readers? Pain points? What are they dealing with? What problem do they have? It could be if we continue with the lawn care, you know, sort of example. It could be my grass is dying or how to save a lawn or how to use non toxic chemicals on a, on a lawn, whatever it might be. What is that problem that your reader's potentially trying to solve? Then the flip side of that is you want to get into some keywords that present the solution that your book addresses or provides solutions. So you know, if the pain point is my lawn is dying, the solution might be how to keep a lawn fresh. Okay, so there's, there's kind of some duality there, but either one of those could be viable keyword phrases. And when I talk about keyword phrases, we're usually looking at like two to three word phrases. Then you want to switch it and think as a reader and start to use what we call emotional amplifiers. These are words that are a little bit more descriptive and emotionally charged. So it might be frustrated about my lawn or oh gosh, what am I thinking? Black thumb or things that are a Little bit more emotional and not necessarily going to be, you know, very prescriptive, but thinking in terms of how your reader is putting searching for things. And then you also want to be able to get into the demographic. So who is your reader? What's your reader demographic? What describes them? Is it single women? Is it homeowners? Is it readers over the age of 40 is. You know, you want to stay away from biases and stereotypes, but you do want to get into the demographics that could describe your target reader. Because a really good keyword could be books for women over 40 or books for homeowner, first time homeowners. So you want to include some of those. You want to get into category keywords. This is, these are keywords that relate directly to the book's content and the ideal reader, but are going to help solidify it in that category. And it's a good idea to have maybe 15 to 20 in each of these columns, each of these, you know, buckets of pain points and emotional amplifiers demographics, so that you have a wide pool to start with. And this is where we're going to start to get into how to use tools like Publishers Rocket. Now you can definitely, you know, go to Amazon and just start typing in some of these keywords and seeing what shows up. Or if you're lucky, you can use a tool like Publishers Rocket, which I'm going to get into next. Before I do that, maybe we can get into a couple of the questions that I've seen pop up. Let's see. Angela, do you want to go ahead and present some of these questions?

Yeah, yeah. So we've had. I'll go to the first question, which was from Susan.

Okay.

I'd love to learn more about the ghost categories that we shouldn't pick.

Oh yes, we'll definitely get into the ghost categories when I get into Publishers Rocket. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about what that is.

Okay. How do you, I don't know if this is one you want to address now, but how do you know if my, if my book has a market and how does that affect the keywords I use for my audience to choose from?

That's actually a great question. And using something like Publisher Rocket is actually really going to help you decide if you, if your book has a market. Because when you start to enter in certain keywords, especially as they're very directly tied to your book's content, you'll be able to see within that tool how highly searched is that term, what volume is it getting, what's it competing against and those are all good indicators to tell you whether or not your book has a market. So if you put in a keyword phrase that has very low search volume, very low money being made off of it in a category that is declining, then you can pretty much guess maybe my book doesn't have a market here and maybe I need to shift some of the content into something that's a little bit more competitive and sought after. And I'll get into that as we get into Publisher Rocket a little bit further.

Awesome. Yeah. And we do actually have a Publisher Rocket link, so I will put that into please be into the chat so you guys can can go to it from there. But I think we have another one about the AI model. Sarah, but you did mention Chat GPT. I didn't know if you want to explore that more, but those are the three questions we have right now.

Yeah, I primarily use chat GPT 4.0 right now for AI, although Claude is also very good. Claude is a little bit better about reading those like big manuscripts and being able to discern ideas. But I have noticed a significant improvement in how chat GPT4 does this as well. So lately I've been using primarily Chat GPT. I think it's trial and error. I think you try either one of them, see which one's giving you better, more aligned results for what you're looking for.

Awesome, thanks.

Well, I'm going to go back in the corner.

I will post the link in the chat you guys for Publisher Rocket. So check, check.

And just so I have any kind of knowledge, you know, feel free to drop in the chat your experience with Publisher Rocket if you've never heard of it, if you've used it occasionally, if you're a pro. If you're a pro, maybe I'll bring you on here. But if you've never used it or you've heard of it and don't, you know, know much about it, it's helpful for me to understand. So feel free to drop that in the chat. So Publisher Rocket is essentially a product from kindlepreneur.com where they have essentially made this whole process of determining whether or not your keywords are viable much, much simpler. Now there's a way you can go to Amazon and you can start to type in things just like you can at Google where you can put in maybe lawn care. And it's Google's going to automatically fill in the rest of what that phrase may be based on popularity and search volume. So it could be lawn care for homeowners lawn care in dry markets, lawn care after a storm, you know, whatever those terms might be. Amazon will auto populate based on search, but it can take a really long time. And all you're getting is essentially ideas. You're not getting any of the data that's behind it. And so what I am going to do is show you the tool that we use to find this most often. Hold on one second. It had just closed out. Okay, let me present. Share my screen. Oh, now it's telling me. It's telling me I should have two screens. Well, I only have one. Okay. So I want to make sure. Is everybody able to see that? Okay, great. So this is the home screen of Publisher Rocket. And basically when you open, it's a very simple program to use when you open it for the first time. This is kind of what you're going to look. And this first one here is keyword search. This is where you're going to do the bulk of your work when you are searching for keywords. I am going to get into some of these other ones like Competition Analyzer, which does exactly what it says. It's going to give you information on your competition category. Search is where you were looking for all of the potential categories that your book can go into and what the potential in that category is. And we are going to talk about ghost categories as the question asked earlier. This section here on Amazon Ads I'm not going to touch too much on because I don't use this specifically, another person from our team does. But you can use Publisher Rocket when generating keyword lists for Amazon ads. And then this is one of their newer features that I really love, which is the reverse ASIN lookup, which means you can put in an ASIN from Amazon and it'll bring up all of the information about that book, including keywords that it ranks for and what the competition is. So to start off, I would really love it. Let's just go with this, this continued idea around lawn care. Let's say you're writing a book on lawn care. Well, you can go up here to, you know, either keyword search or you can click right here and the first thing it's going to do is type in a general idea or phrase. Okay. So keywords are tricky because if it's too niche, you're not going to have enough people looking for it. But if it's too broad, it's going to have too big of a, too big of a market to be able to make any kind of crack. So you really want to Goldilocks it and get it right in the middle of niche enough that it's going to attract your target reader, but not so niche that you're turning away hundreds of others. Now, the great thing here is you can search by format because as I mentioned earlier, you're going to have different keywords depending on your format. So you can choose Kindle, you can choose Audible, and we'll do books. So I'm just going to start real basic here with lawn care. And now you can see here, it's going to show you all of the keywords that potentially rank on Amazon. These are all keywords that people are legitimately searching for. Okay? Now one of the things about key, about Publisher Rocket is it's going to give you ideally it's mainly focused on the books, but you can notice things here like lawn care banners, decals, glasses for men, journals, knives. So it's, it is going to give you some of those other types of some of those other types of things that people search for on Amazon. Now, let's say my lawn care book is not just about how to take care of your lawn, but it's how to, how to use certain tools and oh, how to care, how to launch your lawn care business, how to start a lawn care business. If you go over here to this little magnifying glass, it's going to give you all this really information. What's the average page count of a book on how to start a lawn care business? How many competitors would it have in its category? What's the average price of that book? Now, one of my favorites, how much average monthly earnings do books about how to start a lawn care business earn? Now we get into these other sections right here where it's going to show you the estimated Amazon search volume. This is telling me that under 100 searches per month are how to start a lawn care business or searching for books on how to start a lawn care business. That is not necessarily a bad thing. If that under a hundred could be 20 people or it could be 50 or 80 people, those 80 people could be buying your book depending on your category. So sometimes that's not that bad of a thing. If you were building your audience and you're just starting to, to grow. And this last one is how competitive is this keyword? This Right here is 9 is telling me it is not, it is not a very competitive field, which tells me that a book in this on this could potentially do well. Now the great thing about Publisher Rocket is it's going to tell you if this is a good keyword if it is a medium keyword with a lot of competition or if it's very, very high competition. And so I'm actually going to take you through one of the strategies that I do when I'm looking for metadata. So one of the things that I'll do, let's say we are working on a lawn care book. I'm going to go through and I'm just going to pull all things that are potentially relevant. Lawn care, how to lawn care journal, lawn care, power equipment, let's see, lawn care book, lawn care tools, lawn care books. You can see sort of a trend here that there are. It's going to give you a lot of different types of anything related to lawn care. But I will say it's not going to give you like word cloud, as in all of the keywords associated with it. It is going to stick with that root keyword you put in, which in this case is lawn care, lawn care, logbook, maintenance, book, guide, businesses. I'll just pick a couple of other ones here. I like to have as much information as possible. So I pull a lot of keywords and then I'm going to use certain types of, you know, just different decision making to start to determine which ones are going to be the best one for me. So I have a list here, you know, about 15. Now, the first thing I want to know, how is that keyword going to make me money? So you can start to look. You can, you can sort each of these columns by, okay, let's do it by average page count, number of competitors, average price of these books. I like to judge it and put it in order of how much the monthly earnings for that particular keyword and then look for the higher ones. Okay, so some of these higher ones, a couple hundred bucks, seven hundred. Now, depending on the book. Generally I'm looking for keywords that are going to rank in the thousands, but considering this is a relatively small category, sometimes these ones might work. Now let's take this first one here. Okay, so lawn care. Average monthly earnings of $740. Low searches, under 100, but high competition. This is a pretty competitive keyword. I might be better off with something like this keyword, lawn, car, lawn care book, because it's still got 600 for average monthly earnings. Higher search, lower competition. So now the great thing you can do as well is this button, right? If you hit this green button right here, what it's going to do is it's going to take you to the books that rank for lawn care Book. Now, what I'm looking for here is not so much how does my book compete to these? But I'm going to look, does my book belong next to these? If I'm using that as my keyword, does my book belong next to the Lawn Bible or the Landscaper's Handbook or the Lawn Care Manual? Does it make sense there? Now, if you want to get into the competition, you definitely can. Now, some of the things that this competition analyzer is showing us is what the book is. And you can go to their categories, who the author is, how long that book has been on Amazon for sale. Keeping in mind the publisher, Rocket is really just helping you with Amazon keywords. How long has that book been for sale? What's the average bestseller rank of these books? Now, these are all very high. Average bestseller. These are up in the millions or hundreds of thousands. This one's in the millions. Okay, so that's telling me that a lot of the books that are here are not ranking very high in overall book sales. The number of pages those books. Now, this one right here, kwt, that means does. This is the keyword that we're using, that keyword phrase of lawn care book. Is that in the title? Now, you can see on all of these. No, it is not in the title. Lawn care is, but not lawn care book. So it's not using that within the title. That can be to your advantage or not. It could be to your advantage to use that particular keyword within the title. But then we get into a whole bunch of strategy. You don't necessarily need to have your metadata keywords in your title or subtitle. You're just basically doubling up on keywords at that point. You kind of want your title and your metadata phrases to be two different things. It gets into the pricing. This is the daily estimated sales. You know, how much are these books making per day and then how much are they making per month? So something like this, this Scott's Lawn Care one, You know, Scott's Lawn Care being a big brand, they're not making very much off this book on a regular basis. Not as much as, say, let's go back up here to Lawn Care for Dummies, where they're making quite a bit more per month. Now, the great thing about publisher Rocket is it will also take you. Oh, and I don't know if you can still see that if you click on that. I don't think it is. Hold on. Where did I go? There we go. So you guys can't see, but it does pop out into an Amazon product page. It'll take you directly to the product page for that competition. So it's really helpful to be able to go and look and see what they're doing. Now the other thing that is really helpful here is if you are struggling on where to put your book and how to place it within categories. If you hit this, unleash the categories. Can you guys see that? Yep, you can. Okay, great. It's going to show you different types of categories that this book could fit into. Okay. So it can go into entrepreneurship, home based business. If you're writing a book on how to launch a lawn care business, it can get into gardening and landscape technique, organic garden design. So it's going to shift show you where all the potential categories for this book could fall. So that is just one small little piece. Now if I wanted to go to any of these other keywords, let's say we want to really drill down starting a lawn care business. Low competition, not a, not, not a lot of searches, but okay, decent earnings. If I'm going to go check out the competition here, I want to see what other books there are on lawn how to start a lawn care business. And as you can see, there are quite a few. There's a lot here. And look, they have higher monthly sales. Some of these do. Not all of them. Some of these are. Yeah, but basically you're able to then reverse engineer which I call it again, you're reverse engineering how people are going to discover your book by looking at how other people have done it within using a tool like publisher Rocket. Are there any questions on the keyword process? Because I'm going to start diving into the categories and I want to make sure that I touch base on it and yeah, marketing launchpad, marketing nerd. So these types of numbers and info makes me happy. Absolutely, absolutely. Data helps you make decisions. It makes it so that you're not shooting blind into the dark with just a hope that your book is marketable, it's helping you decide, discover exactly how marketable it might be. And so for the question that we had earlier on, how do I know if there's a market for my book that's specifically what you want to be looking at is how many people are searching for it, how competitive is it? I'm going to try a really broad term, let's get away from the idea of lawn care and I'm going to get into a really broad category like see personal, personal growth. Okay. A lot of self help books out there. A lot of books on how to improve yourself, how to, you know, so that is a very broad term. Now looking up here, if I start to search some of these categories, oh my gosh, look at these numbers. Holy cow, this is a really good. There is a very, very high amount of people that are buying personal growth books. Now I will get into one point here. So you can see here tons of searches, but also much higher competition, moderately competitive. I would probably say it's more than moderately competitive, but if I use personal growth as a keyword, I'm going to look. Okay, here are the top best sellers. Average monthly sales for Mel Robbins, $1.1 million a month on that book. Okay, these are some of the highest within its category, which means you're going to want to go back and think, is personal growth the right keyword or am I going to get lost among the Mel Robbins and the James Clears and the, you know, in the four agreements? Like you need to be looking at keywords that are going to help you make a great crack within your genre. I personally, when you're looking at numbers like, I'm sorry, I'm navigating between screens here, if we're talking monthly earnings of, you know, 200,000, 160,000, 90,000, as a first time or relatively small nonfiction author, it is going to be a lot harder to compete against those. But if you look at personal growth and then start to drill it down, maybe it's personal growth for men, maybe it's personal personal growth book. All concepts, let's see, personal growth and Christianity. Now you're start. Now we're talking. Now we're starting to get into more of a niche personal growth for women. Christianity, personal growth, self help, personal growth. I mean I was very broad here, way broader than I normally would when I'm doing this kind of research. So you can see these high ones, but right in here, Christianity, personal growth, low competition, decent number of searches and really good monthly earnings. So if you are writing in the personal development self help and you have a religious or a Christian, you know, angle on it right here you're getting the data on how marketable that is. So hopefully that helps a little bit there. Okay, Angela, before I dive into category. Oh, sorry. I'm going to actually make one quick point before I move on to categories and we will do one more prize before I move on to those categories. But I want to show you one thing here. You see these, these keywords here? Top personal growth, best personal growth, personal growth, bestsellers, books, bestsellers, Kindlepreneur and publisher Rocket is going to show you those because those are the ones that people are searching for. However, it is against Amazon's terms and conditions to use terms like bestseller, free, best of the year, anything like that. That is labeling your book as opposed to what is actually the content. It is against the terms and conditions. It's also against the terms and conditions to use metadata, like competing titles, other author names. But publisher Rocket will show you those because it wants to show you what people are looking for. But I want you to make sure you are not including within your keywords, best, bestseller. You know, I would never put atomic habits into my metadata. It's going to. It can cause them to shut down, you know, KDP accounts and all sorts of things. So make sure you are staying away from those. All right, I'm gonna take a quick break on that. And Angela, why don't you hop in? Sorry, I'm trying to unshare. There we go. Why don't you show me? Let's do one more. One more prize.

Yeah, absolutely. So this prize is going to be for people who commented on a video the day it was released. Your videos come out on Tuesdays and Fridays. So let me get this screen sharing over here. Okay.

Okay.

And I have this pulled up in the chat GPT. It's got all these people's handles here. So I've just told it to randomly choose one of the following. Let's see what it says. Oh, that was so quick. That's the joy of AI. So at technically, Missy, you are our winner. So we are featuring books today. So at technically, Missy, if you are watching live or when you watch the replay, please send me an email@teamooklaunchers.com let me know if you would like a copy of Self Publish and Succeed, Self Promote and Succeed or one of Dale Roberts books, one for new self publishing authors or an advanced one for self publishing authors. And then the fifth one would be Rise of the Reader by Nick Hutchison. So let me know. And again, if I didn't mention it, I do need your mailing address as well. So there you go. Yay. Thanks for all the people who commented.

Awesome. Do we want to get to. I think we had a couple questions came up during that. Or maybe just one or two. You want to hop on those real quick?

Yeah, yeah. Let me see. Let me just make sure. So we had. We did have the one. So you're going to go over categories next. So we'll say Susan. So this was one that I wanted to bring up because this Sparked a little bit of discussion in the chat. So, Paula Johnson, I think you're in New Zealand, is that right? Somewhere. Or maybe somewhere in Australia. But yeah. So for publisher Rocket, yes, there is ap. It is a lifetime fee though, so I don't remember how much it is.

But it is a one time. Yeah, it's a one time fee.

Yeah. It's just that one purchase for the license.

Yeah.

But someone else who is also in Australia commented that they actually will use this for multiple categories or multiple markets. And so I didn't know if you wanted to touch on that at all, Sarah.

Yeah, I mean, primarily when we're using it, we're using it for the US market because that's where we do the bulk of our marketing. If you are down under, I would probably encourage you to go through the UK and use it for the UK because the UK and Australia and New Zealand markets tend to mirror each other, at least when it comes to traditional publishing. Most things you can get in the UK are also exported out to Australia and all of the other Commonwealths. So I would assume that the strategy would be the same and that's just based on my knowledge of traditional publishing. It's a little bit different for self publishing, but I would think that this is still going to be a useful tool. It it only covers the us, UK and Germany. But where is your target reader going back to the fact that your keywords need to be based on buyer intent, not necessarily, you know, your market. So if your audience is, is, you know, potentially US based or UK based, this can still be an incredibly valuable tool for you.

And that's why Sarah's our marketing manager, because bringing it back to the reader. Okay, so Efren posed a question. This is, would fiction be searched or approached by genre or titles with a similar strategy as what you.

That's a great question. Yeah, I went in specifically to nonfiction strategy, but fiction has a slightly different strategy, but some of the same thoughts. You're still going to come up with raw keywords based on the book's content. So what your book is about, right, you are going to want to put in things like genre, but you're going to want to niche it down a little bit further. So for example, one of the most. You know, and I can actually just bring this up right here. Let's see. Let's say your book is a mystery.

Okay.

Well, mystery books is going to have huge competition, a lot of monthly earnings. Now let's drill that down even further. Cozy mystery. Okay. Your competition drops, but still A decent number of searches, decent number of monthly earnings. Mystery books for, let's say you do cozy mysteries for children. Okay. Oh, look, you can see kind of high it is. Now what you want to basically get into is going to be the different tropes within it.

So.

So the best way I can put this is romance. You know, the romance genre has so many different tropes. You know, so romance in itself, super competitive mafia romance. Let's get into some of the other ones. Fantasy, romance, comedy comics themselves, you know, enemies to lovers, which is a specific trope within romance. You would want to start to drill that down into more about what the book is about and what the, what that reader might be looking for. So I mean, some of the best examples is, you know, it wouldn't be enough to just put, okay, romance book as your keyword. You might want to put pirate romance or enemies to lovers romance or oh, gosh, I don't know, there's like a zillion of those options. But you do still want to relate it to the content. I hope that's helpful. I don't there. If you go to kindlepreneur.com Dave Chastlin has a ton of great info specifically on how to do fiction versus non fiction searches.

Okay, so do we have a Kindlepreneur link? I don't know that we do.

It's just kindlepreneur.com I mean, we don't have it like. Oh yeah, no, it's just basically an education website. So there's a lot. A ton of great info there.

Okay, well, I'll post their, their website. Yeah, chat as well.

Yep, exactly. They have a ton of great info on it.

Oh, do you want to go ahead?

Yeah, I'm going to dive into categories and then some of the other features within Publisher Rocket in the time that we have left. Because I thought I would be talking for like 20 minutes and here it is almost an hour. So I want to get and make sure I hit these important ones. So getting into category search, basically one of the most important factors and whether or not like how your book is discovered is what category it's in. And a lot of people just be like, oh, it's gonna fit under health and wellness or business and money. But there are so many job, excuse me, sub categories within each of those. So let's go back to, let's just do business and money now. The great thing about Publisher Rocket is it's going to list all of the different categories and subcategories that are up on Amazon. So to any one time, yes, there's a business and money, but then you're going to go even further underneath each one of these. So, for example, accounting, and then accounting, it's auditing, and then accounting, bookkeeping, accounting, cpa, accounting, financials. And what we tend to find is the more you drill down in your categories, the better your book will perform. You do not want your book just hanging out in the overall business and money. You want to drill down into some of those really, really good subcategories. And that's how you claim number one bestseller. That's how you claim number one new release. Like Susan, Congratulations. Number one new release for your category. That's great. So it had, it had been asked earlier about ghost categories. Now, this is like one of those tricky little things that I don't know why Amazon does this, but if we are looking right here, what publisher Rocket does is they show you if a category is selectable, meaning that you can put your book directly into that category through KDP or if it's a duplicate with another category. So, for example, Business, money, accounting and bookkeeping is the same category. Whoops, come back over here. As Books, Business, Money Skills and Bookkeeping. You can still put your book there, but it'll straddle both categories. Now, the one trick, which I don't know why Amazon does this, but there are what's called ghost categories. You can't act, you can select it, but your book can't rank there. It can't become a best seller within it. It basically is just this category you want to avoid. It rolls up into the parent category and doesn't help your book get discovered. So basically you would never want to choose. What I tend to see this most with the ghost categories is with the general, right? So business, money, accounting, and you select general. That's a ghost category. It's just going to put you under business and money and accounting. It's, it's basically a dead zone. Your book is not going to be discoverable and it's not going to climb any kind of bestseller rankings doing that. So what publisher Rocket can do is show you which ones are the ghost categories. Now you notice again, business, culture, general ghost categories, general. This one I'm surprised at Legal Guides. It's possible that this is a selectable category, but is a ghost category, because Legal guides also falls under the category of law books. I don't know about mail order. That's, that's a new one. So I don't know about that one. Oh, what it's telling you right here, this great little dialog box that's popping up is giving you. There we go. That if you select Business Development and Entrepreneurship mail order, it's going to roll you up into the parent category of business and money, Business development and entrepreneurship, which is a massive category where you will get lost. So when you are selecting your categories, using a tool like Publisher Rocket is going to help you avoid those places where your book is not going to be discoverable. Now, we tend to not find too many ghost categories and I always do second. I always get a second opinion, which means I don't trust just Publisher Rocket to tell me the categories. I will actually go, I'll look at Publisher Rocket to get ideas on the categories and then I will go to Amazon itself and ensure that those categories still do exist. Because like a software, it has to get updated like anything else. It may not always be 100% accurate, but they do updates very often. But I like to double check my work, just how I am as a perfectionist. So I always go and double check these. Now let's say you were going to, you know, let's say you're going to do an accounting book. We start to look at. You can rank these by how many sales do you have to have in the business and money category to be able to rank number one? 2,500. This is, I think a day. Yes, it's per day. 2,570 books in one day. To rank, to get into the top 10, you need to sell 87 books in a day. Now what Publisher Rocket is also telling you is the number of books within that category that are either from a publisher or are self published. And if you look, let's switch it back this way. There we go. Yeah, you can see 94% of these are going to be from a traditional publisher. Now, some of the the things that I like to look at when it comes to this are these insights in these keywords. The keywords, if you see this pop up, these are gold. We use these keywords. What we'll do is we'll look within a books category and pull these keywords. And these keywords are perfect to use not for necessarily your metadata, but for your title, your subtitle and your book description. These are the keywords that are going to teach Amazon where your book needs to be placed. Because Amazon has this tendency to shift your book from category to category based on the buyers. This will help Amazon keep your book in the right category. So what I love to do is Grab these lists of keywords from all the different categories and then use those when I'm creating book desc descriptions. Now, the other thing to really take a look at here, and I'm going to pull up Business Life is the insights. This is also information that you will not get by doing this. These search this research on your own. This is information that Kindle, excuse me, publisher Rocket, has been able to pull about the viability of this category. Is this a good category for your book to be in? It's going to tell you how many sales to get to the top 10 or top number one, how many books are within Kindle Unlimited, which is, you know, Kindle select program, how many are by publisher, average number of ratings per book, average days those books have been on the market, what their price is. So you can see right here we have a difference in the indie price versus the publisher price. But what it's also going to show you is the number of sales per month and whether that category is growing or not. So you can see here that this category dropped and then shot up in January. It's also going to give you really interesting insights. Older books are still on the bestseller list, which may mean that newer books have a hard time knocking the old ones out of the bestseller spots. Higher number of ratings means books are well read, potentially more competitive, abnormally high review score. So the expectation is that the quality of new books in this has to be very, very high. So this category overview is really valuable because it's going to help you prepare. If you're going to go into the business and life category, you're going to have high competition but high profit, and it's got a high number of variation. Only a few bestsellers might be driving the growth. So all of this, when we go back to that question on how do I know if my book has a market? This information is what's going to tell you that. Okay, so in a couple of minutes, gosh, wow, this really flew by. In a couple minutes that we have left, I am going to dive into one of my favorite new features from publisher Rocket and is this idea of reverse asin. ASIN is that number that Amazon assigns your book, similar to an ISBN and it's how they identify it. And so what I'm going to do here, I actually pull split Julie's Asin, which you can get right off your Amazon product page. I pulled Julie's Asin and you can just enter right here. You can also enter an ISBN 10, although ISBN 10s are being phased out to My knowledge, I think it's all ISBN 13s now, but that I could be wrong there. But I'm 99% sure that ISBN 10s are being phased out. Now what this is going to do is it's going to bring up all of the information about that particular asin. How this comes, excuse me, comes in very handy is if you are looking at competitors within your genre and you want to know what keywords they rank for how that book performs, the reverse ASIN gives you that. So the reverse ASIN right here for Julie's book is showing us. Okay, these are the keywords that are ranked for Julie Broad. Self publish and succeed, which was the other book succeed. Book succeed. Now I don't know why succeed for horses. I mean sometimes Amazon just does some really interesting things, but it's getting into the authorship guide promoting nonfiction. Now if you wanted to rank for some of these, I would start to pull some of these. If you wrote a book on how to market your self published book, I would start to pull some of these to see how I could potentially compete against self promote and succeed. Ways to promote your book promoting books publishing your own book Market your book how to promote a book on Amazon Self publishing self publishing books. And so I'm going to start to pull some of that info and do it just like I do within the the keyword search. I'm going to look, okay, what kind of sales are we getting? What's the competition? How many people are searching for that per book? Okay, so this is a fairly high number. Not bad competition. Publishing your own book could be keyword that I use to compete against self, promote and succeed. So it's a really cool format. Now it gave me specifically ebook. I'm not exactly sure why it only gave me ebook and not the print book, but because I did mention earlier that ebooks and print books have different keywords because people search for different things. That's probably why. And Angela, you made a very good point about the horse. I didn't even think about that. That's actually a really good point. So this reverse asin, if you want to know what other books within your category are selling and what keywords they're ranking for, this is a fantastic tool for that. So I feel like a crash course. Sit there at the end there. Publisher rocket does give you lots of tickets, tutorials and like I said, that does have a whole Amazon ads thing which because I don't use that one a whole lot, I'm not going to dive into that one. But yeah, there Is your. There is your. Your publisher Rocket tutorial. I hope that was helpful for everybody. Any last questions or last prizes that we have before we wrap up today?

Yeah, we can do definitely one more price because we've had a few people. Extra people commenting on here. I did want to note that the ASINs are different for the different formats, so.

Oh, thank you. Yes, yes, of course.

So that's why you would just see it for. For the one. So if you have an audiobook hardcover, all of those are going to have their own ASINs. You could find that for each specific one.

Those have ISBNs. Actually, I misspoke earlier. ASINs are for ebook. The ISBNs will be different for every format. So I could have gone and pulled the ISBN 10 and gotten the print book information.

Okay, let me pull up the. I thought I still had it open. Here we go. Yes. So let me pull up the random name picker again. Let me share my screen one last time because we are right at the top of the hour. How crazy is that? Okay, so Efren was our winner earlier and he so kindly gave it to Christy, I believe. So let's see who is our technically our third winner for today. Let us find out. Kevin Hall.

Yay, Kevin.

Very cool. You might have everything, but if not, let me know. You're welcome to any of the books that I had mentioned today. So yay, Kevin. Let me know via teamoklaunchers.com which one you would like and then just confirm your mailing address for me. But that is it, folks.

Now, if you want another person.

He's so sweet. He wants to give it to another person. You and. And Efren. So kind. All right, let's do this last draw, see who is the runner up. And Kevin's price wonder of choice. Alex. Ow. Very cool. I don't know that you've won before, so we have those five books that you can choose from, so please let me know which one you would like as well as your mailing address. Just send those to me in an email atteambook launchers.com thanks for tuning in today.

Yeah, absolutely. So I want to thank everybody for coming today. Thanks for my present, you know, for sitting through my presentation. I hope it was useful. I hope you got something out of it, something you can use in your own strategy. I did drop the link to Publisher Rocket there again. So if you're interested in checking out Publisher Rocket, I cannot recommend it enough when you're doing your keywords research is going to save you so much time and energy. To be able to make the right decisions when it comes to your books. So highly recommend.

But yeah.

Thank you, everybody, for joining. Hope to see you on the next one.

Okay, bye, everyone.

Thank you.