discoverability

How Indie Authors Can Make Two Categories Count On Amazon

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This post by Cate Baum originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 5/20/15.

Amazon made a decision sometime in the last two months or so to cut off new indie books to the five plus two categories allowed to all indie/self-published authors who had both paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon. Why could this decision have been made, and how can authors make the most of the measly two categories now allowed when publishing on Kindle?

Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us

What happened? Maybe the mounting problems for authors who had trad-published, or had genre books in the last couple of years with categories forced a change. Publishing companies and indie authors on imprints and small presses with money riding on book campaigns were being drowned in self-publishers categorizing their books too loosely in ways to get seen – especially in the erotica genre. I talked about this as being a problem I foresaw Amazon reacting to, and was only two pitchforks from being burned at the stake for mentioning anything that could cause a vibration through the “freedom for writers everywhere” faction.

But hey, it happened as predicted, and very quietly, too.

While some authors were releasing up to eight books of erotica at the same time to flood book charts with their ‘brand,’ and categorized them as “Westerns” when their lover boy rode a horse, or “Crime Fiction” when the book featured a gangster type doing the bedding, Amazon was flooded with books that used to stay in their own little (adult) area – it became nigh impossible to even enter the YA Sci-Fi section of Amazon without a bevvy of bare chests and chiffoned thighs gracing the listing pages.

So the greedy few seemed to have spoiled it for the rest of us. Well done, kids!

 

Finding “The Two”

 

Read the full post on Self-Publishing Review.

 

Smashwords Introduces New Metadata Option for Box Sets

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 5/11/15.

Smashwords today released an enhanced metadata option for box sets. The new option will pave the way for us to make box sets more discoverable in the Smashwords store, and longer term (and more importantly), it will enable better merchandising at our retailers.

But one step at a time. First we need to collect the metadata, and that’s where you come in.

Smashwords authors and publishers are already well-versed in metadata. Metadata is data about your book. Metadata is comprised of things like book category, book title, author name, book description and price. Metadata makes it easier for readers to discover your book by screaming, “Look here! I’m what you’re looking for!”

Ebook box sets are a relatively new phenomena, and indie authors are leading the charge. Until now, metadata for box sets has been lacking. Most obviously, a box set is treated like an ordinary ebook, when in fact it’s a bundle of books either from a single author or multiple authors. Retailers have shown increased interest in box sets over the last two years, but the process of identifying them is still manual. Retailers who want to promote them, and customers who want to read them, must perform manual searches on the phrase “box set” and hope the author placed the words in their title or book description. That’s kludgey. There should be a special designation for box sets so retailers have the option to create custom virtual shelves to promote them, and so customers can easily find them.
 

Read the full post on the Smashwords blog.

 

How Keywords, Machine Learning Unlock Book Discovery

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This post by Jim Bryant originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 5/4/15.

Jim Bryant of Trajectory.com argues that advancements natural language machine processing leading to keywords may unlock a revolution in book discovery.

Leading publishing industry analysts started highlighting the increasing urgency of developing better “book discovery” practices more than ten years ago. Several years ago, this issue was highlighted as one of the biggest challenges facing the future of the publishing industry. Today, no one in the publishing world is seriously debating the relevancy of “book discovery.”

The challenge of “book discovery” is highlighted by the well-accepted facts surrounding the notion that never before in history have so many books been available to so many readers.

– Hundreds of thousands of backlist titles are being released by publishers.

– Hundreds of thousands of self-published books are being offered by ebook retailers and self-publishing platforms.

– Hundreds of thousands of titles from foreign publishers are making their way into domestic supply chains.

 

Read the full post, which includes informative charts and graphics, on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Your Book’s Genre and Classification Matter

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This post by Bob Hughes originally appeared on Beneath the Cover on 3/5/15.

For many novelists, the genre of their work matters a great deal. Even if there’s an element of fantasy in their work, they dread that it be labeled as something less than their ideal, as you can see from a New York Times interview with the acclaimed British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”), concerning his new novel, “The Buried Giant.”

He asks the Times reporter Alexandra Alter, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

A fantasy novel from a serious novelist! Oh, no. It shouldn’t matter for a writer as acclaimed as Ishiguro. But it does. Even though so-called literary novelists as celebrated as David Mitchell have explored fantasy in their work (such as Mitchell’s latest, “The Bone Clocks”), critics of literary fiction tend to look down on fantasy as a serious art form, despite the literary success of J.R.R. Tolkien or George R. R. Martin.

 

Read the full post on Beneath the Cover.

 

What Makes People Buy Self-Published Books?

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This post by Tara Sparling originally appeared on her site on 7/31/14.

In this post, I discussed the findings of a scientifically incontrovertible study (of myself) on the factors which influenced me when buying a self-published book.

The findings surprised me (which surprised me, because I was surveying myself). I found that I knew what made me buy a self-published book when it was in front of me, but not what put that book in front of me, unless I was browsing by genre (e.g. today I feel like reading a romance set in Ulaanbaatar: therefore I will now search specifically for such a story).

It was still hard to know what put those books in front of my eyes in order to buy them; to quote one of the commenters on that post – this is the thorny issue of “discoverability”. How will we find these books in the first place?

So I did the unthinkable, and asked some other people. I surveyed readers and writers alike, in online groups for different fiction genres of crime, fantasy and general fiction, and more than a few other people who just like to talk to other people about reading and writing. I asked them what factors influenced them most when buying books – particularly self-published books and any other books which aren’t pushed by the major houses.

 

Click here to read the full post on Tara Sparling’s site.

 

Attract National Media And TV By Using Keywords In Your Non-Fiction Book Title

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 1/20/14.

Most marketing activities are (unfortunately) not directly measurable.

It’s widely agreed that the very best marketing is write a quality book, then write some more of them, and each of those books finding an audience will help market the other. I agree with that, but it generally takes a while!

You can buy advertising, which is measurable, or do other specific promotions. But for non-fiction in particular, there is one thing that makes a huge difference to sales, whether you have a platform or not.

Optimize your non-fiction book title for keywords people are actually searching for.

I’ve blogged before about the importance of keywords for metadata and discoverability, and that post contains the details of how to do the research and choose the right words.

I explained how I changed my book title from ‘How To Enjoy Your Job’ to ‘Career Change: How to stop hating your job, discover what you really want to do with your life and start doing it!‘ In this post, I’m going to outline some of the results of that book title change.

I can attribute pretty much everything to the book title alone, because this blog is not a platform for the topic of career change, I don’t tweet about it, or speak about it, or in fact, do anything at all to market that book other than have it in my blog header (which subscribers don’t even see). But the audience of this blog aren’t the target market for the book, so I would say that 90% of sales are due to the title alone.

Here’s how it works.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

Amazon Cracks Down on Bogus Keywords

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This post by Mercy Pilkington originally appeared on Good E Reader on 11/27/13.

A growing number of self-published authors are receiving ominous emails from ebook distributor Amazon, warning them that their books are about to be removed from the website if action isn’t taken immediately. The warning–which some authors claim they did not actually receive before their titles were removed from sale–pertains to authors who’ve used titles of other books in the keyword searches for their titles.

Authors who have attempted to garner more searchability for their books have resorted to including titles like “Fifty Shades of Grey” or “Gone Girl” in the keywords for their books, hoping that potential readers stumble across their book listings. This practice is also in place by the traditional publishing industry, and apparently the ruling applies to those titles as well. Warnings to traditionally published authors have even been posted on message boards, encouraging them to contact their publishers as these authors do not upload their own titles or establish their keywords.

 

Click here to read the full article on Good E Reader.