Julie Broad (founder of Book Launchers) explains that the book title is the most important element for Amazon discoverability and sales, because Amazon treats title and subtitle as the primary search attributes. She summarizes Amazon’s restrictions for the title field (e.g., no generic repeating words, trademarks, promotional language, HTML tags, or misleading cover/meta mismatches), recommends using a subtitle for nonfiction to add searchable keywords, and stresses matching cover text and metadata to avoid automated rejections. She also describes contributor-name and identity verification issues and gives an example of resolving a bot rejection via human review.
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Want to know the single most important piece of book marketing you'll create for your book? It's your book title. Get it wrong and your book will never perform like you dream it will. Ask me how I know. Meet my under performer the new brand you but one of the reasons your book title doesn't do well is because it's not optimized for Amazon for some reason. And playing nice with Amazon and other booksellers, well, that's just smart business for an authority. So let's make sure you know what Amazon wants and doesn't want when it comes to your book title so you're not getting blocked, shadow banned, or bumped off search results for some reason. If you're working on a book and you want to make sure that you aren't falling in love with a bad title, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and four time author. One of those books topped Amazon for print books ahead of Dan Brown and Game of Thrones. So I know about selling books. Two of those books have been amazing moneymakers for Book Launchers. One is right there and one book in many ways I actually think it was one of the best books I've written collects dust due to a bad title and poor positioning. I've talked about that before and I'll link to the five reasons why that book didn't sell despite being an awesome book at the end. For now, let's get specifically into titles as they pertain to Amazon. In particular, Amazon has a lot of content on titles because in their words, titles are the most frequently used search attribute. The title field should contain only the actual title of your book as it appears on your book cover. Missing or erroneous title information may bury valid results among extraneous hits. Customers pay special attention to errors in titles and won't recognize the authenticity of your book if it has corrupted special characters, superfluous words, bad formatting, extra descriptive content, etc. In fact, we know from research much of that done by Dave Chessen and his team at Kindlepreneur. Thanks Dave. In fact, the title is the most important piece of SEO for your book's discoverability on Amazon. Amazon's algorithm places the greatest emphasis on your title and subtitle as far as what you get discovered for. So think carefully about the words you select for that title and subtitle because they will make your search life. Alright, so what is not allowed by Amazon in the title field? Well, first of all, repeating generic words like notebook, journal, GIFS Books Unauthorized reference to other titles or authors Unauthorized reference to a trademark term Reference to sales rank Example Bestseller Reference to advertisements or promotions only punctuation like exclamation, exclamation, exclamation, exclamation using only unknown or na or na na na blank none null not applicable. You're also not allowed to use HTML tags. So if you're publishing multiple stories as one book, ensure the contents of your book are accurately reflected both in the title field and on the COVID by including terms such as collection, compilation, or series. Stories that are part of a series must be in sequential order within a book, and collections of individual stories must have all stories listed in the metadata. For print books, your title must be listed on the COVID on the spine or front cover. It must also match the metadata you entered during the title setup. Title information doesn't need to appear in your manuscript, but it must match the metadata if it does. Note Ensure there's no language in your book title that implies your book is part of a bundled set or a box set. Now, I just want to flag something, because while these are rules, there's always exceptions where you may run into issues. So here's an example of where we've run into issues with these rules. Susan's book, right here, art journaling, was kicked back a few times by the Amazon bots, with minimal explanation as to why. But we figured it was this rule where you shouldn't have journal in the title, but the author's book wasn't breaking the rule. The use of journaling in the subtitle was important because it clarified what the book was about. It took us pushing back twice and finally getting a human review, and then it went through. Some authors will cheer that they fooled the bots when they get a book approved that violates one of these things. But then they might wonder why their ads aren't working, or they have an issue when they try to update their files, or a year later their account suddenly gets suspended or terminated. The thing is, Amazon isn't ever clear on why there's a problem. You get a generic notation of a problem and you have to play Sherlock Holmes and detect it out. It can take multiple runs at the situation to fix it, get a human to review it, or get it passed through. So why play that game? Unless your book has a good reason to use a word or a thing on that list, stay away from it, and it minimizes your chances of issues. Now that was title. Let's talk about subtitle, which is optional. Having a Subtitle is optional for a nonfiction book, but it's just smart marketing to have a great subtitle because that gives you more space for keywords to be searched and it helps sell your book to your ideal reader and even eliminate a reader that isn't ideal. Here's what Amazon says about subtitles A subtitle is a subordinate title that contains additional information about the content of your book. Your title and subtitle together must be fewer than 200 characters. The subtitle will appear on your book's detail page and must adhere to the same guidelines as your title. Now, it's not specific to title and subtitle, but I also want to mention that the Author and Contributors section that sits next to your title on the page are also potentially issue causing. You now have to verify your identity when you create a KDP account to sell your book. You can still use a pen name, but your real identity needs to be verified, which is fine. When you enter in your author name, you're using your name or your pen name. They recommend that if your name is similar to a popular author's name that you consider using a pen name or include an initial in your official name to distinguish between the two. When it comes to contributors, these are people involved in creating your book. You can use these fields to identify additional authors, editors, illustrators, translators, and any others you want to give credit to as long as they worked on that specific book. You can enter multiple contributors as needed. Now should you well, personally, I would only do it if you have to as part of your agreement. Or is there some other beneficial reason to do it, such as the contributor is a popular author themselves and your book will show up when someone searches for that person's name. You do not need to include your editor or illustrator or even ghostwriter here unless you have a contract that states you do. If you had your book translated and this is the translated version, I believe you do have to include your translator here, but verify that as it's not something we work on at Book Launchers. Now that you have that sorted and you're ready to upload your cover, it's important to double check it because the title, subtitle, author name, and series information on your cover should match the corresponding metadata fields. Covers that may be misleading because they closely resemble another book's layout, color scheme, fonts and images are not allowed. This can cause a mysterious kickback that you won't want, because figuring that out will take you many, many tries. Of course, there are a lot of other considerations when it comes to your book title and subtitle. But I have you covered on that right here in this video. And this is the video on the five reasons the new brand you didn't sell. Both are guaranteed good watching or your money back. So grab your coffee. I've got mine. I'll see you there.
