Book Keyword Basics for Authors

Do you want to sell more books without spending more money on marketing? Of course you do. Make sure your book can be found by spending time doing keyword research for your book. If you want to make your book more discoverable by potential readers, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that grows your brand, builds your business and makes you money. Our superpower is caring more about you and your book than any other company as we support you to succeed. And the best part? You keep all rights and royalties and have full control book metadata. It's such an exciting subject. I know. Better fill up your no Boring Books mug and get caffeinated. But it's so important to your success as an author. I talked about bisect codes in this video, which I'll share again at the end. Bisect codes are part of your metadata along with key keywords. Keywords apply when you're publishing on Amazon or wide, but much of what I'm going to speak about today is specifically about Amazon because, well, let's face it, that's where most of your readers are probably going to find you if you are in North America. So first, why do you need keywords? You've already got a book title, a book description, a subtitle, the bisect code. Well, keywords are just another thing that help with discoverability. When a potential reader types in a search term, you want your book to be found. Amazon doesn't just look at the keywords. They're going to look at a bunch of sales, history, bestseller ranks, and of course, the description, and so on. Which is why it's so important to not game the system. When you use a gimmick to rank for Amazon Best Seller, you're going to screw up this algorithm for life. I've seen it multiple times. As JRR Tolkien shared in the Fellowship of the Ring, shortcuts make long delays. If you want to sell books, you have to work at it. So first of all, you need to know that at Book Launchers, we don't do keyword research manually. We're using tools, and our favorite being Publisher Rocket with a backup being KDP Spy. We also use Google's keyword search tool, especially when we're evaluating client titles. There's an art and a science to this, and I just really, really recommend you invest in a tool like Publisher Rocket because it's going to save you so much time. And yes, I'm affiliate So if you want to use the link below, we're going to get a few dollars for it. Literally a few dollars. I'm not telling you about it because I want to make money. I'm telling you about it because it's going to save you so much time and it's fantastic. But here's what you need to do. Number one, you want to think like a reader. So if you know your ideal reader well, then you should be able to do this a lot more easily. Think about what your reader is searching for. For example, I love playing poker. I've barely been able to play since I became a mom and launched book launchers. But if I was going to get back into it, which I will one day, one day soon. Before I do that, I might want to freshen up with a few books on the latest poker strategies. So I probably go to Amazon and maybe I would search Texas hold'. Em. Like I will show you here. I'm not a poker pro, not even close. But I've played way too many games to read a beginner book explaining what hand beats what hand and what a straddle is and what under the gun means. So I'm looking for probably a more strategic book than I got with that search. So I might change up my search to include the word strategy or even say advanced. So you have to think like a reader. When you're thinking about your keywords, what is your reader going to be searching for? Number two, use logic. Don't try to be tricky. Some people get really creative and think about this, like trying to grab those random searches. But your reader is not searching for Texas hold' Em Win. They might be searching for win poker tournaments or how to play poker. So don't randomly create a bunch of words together thinking that that might hit a search. And you don't know for sure what people are searching for until number three, you test out those words like you saw searching for Texas hold' Em got a lot of results, but there was even a novel that showed up. So I should probably be more specific, which is why beginner Texas hold' Em or Poker Strategies would probably be better search terms to put in my keyword. See what else comes up. When you test this, does it look like those results belong with your book, or does it look like your book belongs with those results? If not, you gotta keep trying until it does. Number four, research those words using a tool like Google Keywords Tool and Publisher Rocket. Make sure it's an actual term people are using. We search for phrases and singular keywords, then you want to look at the competition because you want a highly searched term that ideally isn't the most competitive term out there too. Number five It's a good idea to have keywords in your title, but then specific to Amazon, you don't then enter that keyword into your keyword list. In other words, no double dipping your keywords in the words of Amazon specifically should capture useful, relevant information that won't fit into your title and description. This includes setting, character, plot, theme, et cetera. So when we're talking about your self help or business book, you might want to use words like humorous, motivating, business, finance, or other kind of topical words that might not fit in to the other things you've already written. If it's set in a city, a state, or a country that specifically users might be looking for, or if your target reader is a divorced parent person, or a single mom or a veteran, those things all might be useful to put in there too. Bonus tip do all your searches in a private browser so your past search history isn't impacting what you're seeing when you're getting suggested search results now. Also a warning. Making any sort of a claim about your book like bestseller or award winning could cause a lot of problems with Amazon in particular. Even if it's true, if you try to use those words in your keywords or your description, it Amazon could remove your book. You can always dispute this if you are in fact a New York Times bestseller or a Pulitzer Prize winner and you want to put that in your description. But know that verifying a claim like Amazon bestseller is not going to be something Amazon's going to let you do. It seems even they don't put weight on their own bestseller tags, so steer clear of this. Don't try to sneak that sort of thing onto your cover either. By the way, other warnings straight from Amazon's KDP list of things to avoid time sensitive statements like new or on sale or available now. Don't put those in your keywords folks. Information common to most items in the category like book, don't put that in your keywords either. And spelling errors. Now once upon a time I think people would enter keywords that were spelling errors, so don't try to put common misspellings in there. Trying to catch all the possible searches. Here's what you can do and you should consider longer phrases because each of the seven word categories on Amazon has has 50 characters. So you can put in a longer phrase in there and all the words there will be considered keywords, for example Winning no Limit Poker Tournament Strategies. That has less than 50 characters and you could fit it on to one line and every single one of those words would be considered a keyword. And you still have six more to go. So use those 50 characters if you can. Subject to the above advice, don't be too tricky and certainly don't try to say Amazon, KDP or Free in there. All keywords must comply with the terms and conditions of Amazon. Two final tips Before I leave you from this video Numero uno you can and you should update your keywords and descriptions as often as you like. Periodically research what's relevant and use it Numero dos Keep your keywords and description consistent across formats. Don't put a different description or different keywords in your audiobook versus your ebook versus your print book keywords. That's a huge can of worms. So I'm curious, what are your best keyword tips? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbook swag like that mug I was drinking from in the beginning. Do you want to pay for future videos? If you do, go ahead and hit that thumbs down button right now. If you like getting them for free, smash that thumbs up button and make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn those notifications on so we can hang out when videos come out. Every Tuesday, Tuesday and Friday, except in the summer when we take a break. There are so many videos that you should check out after watching this one. But first, here's the one on bisect codes right here. This is a good one for you too. Metadata baby. Nothing like no boring books, but boring stuff that sell books. All right, go ahead, click one of these videos and I'll see you there.