Episode 085 - Optimizing Your Keywords with Dave Chesson
June 29, 2021
Dave Chesson talks about the importance of thinking like a reader, not an author, when picking your keywords (actually, keyphrases), best practices for prioritizing your keywords, a newish feature on the Amazon product page that can help you identify phrases that will resonate with readers, and an exercise that KDP itself endorses that you can use to successfully expand beyond those words and phrases.
Dave Chesson is the guy behind Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching authors about book marketing. Recommended by Amazon KDP as the place where you can learn how to “optimize marketing for your books,” Kindlepreneur has grown to be one of the largest book marketing websites. Dave’s tactics help both fiction and nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers. Dave is also the creator of Publisher Rocket, a software that helps authors see what's really going on in the book market, and thus pick better keywords and categories to help them sell more books.
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Dave Chesson. Hey, Dave, how are you?
[00:00:05] Dave: Oh, not too bad. How about you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Dave Chesson is the guy behind kindlepreneur.com a website devoted to teaching authors about book marketing. Recommended by Amazon KDP as the place where you can go to learn how to optimize marketing for your books, Kindlepreneur has grown to be one of the largest book marketing websites. Dave's tactics help both fiction and nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers. Dave is also the creator of Publisher Rocket, a software that helps authors see what's really going on in the book market and thus pick better keywords and categories to help them sell more books.
[00:00:42] So not surprisingly, we are going to be talking today about optimizing keywords and I always joke with my listeners that oftentimes they can tell what I'm struggling with in my own author career based on the guests that I invite onto the podcast and keywords is definitely one of those things.
[00:00:59] So before we dive into the details of that, I also read in your bio that you served in the US Navy, you were a nuclear engineer, you served on submarines, you were a military diplomat, and whenever I read a bio like that, I have to ask, what lessons did you learn from those experiences that you carried forward into your current book marketing career?
[00:01:19] Dave: Well, my dad was in the military too, so I always learned about punctuality as well as being very particular about your schedule. Because as they say in the military, if you're early you're on time, if you're on time you're late, and if you're late it's unforgivable. So there is that component of it. But the truth of the matter is I think there were a lot of smaller things. I learned a lot about my learning style as well. In nuclear engineering, I found that much better and practical to actually apply than just sitting in the books. In diplomacy, I learned the importance of communication. But in general, I think a lot of it was just this desire to learn and this being very intentional with my time that probably translated the most to book marketing and what I do today.
[00:02:05] Matty: Sounds like a lesson that could translate to almost anything quite successfully.
[00:02:09] Dave: A bit, but it could also get you in trouble, too. I'm blessed to have a phenomenal wife who always keeps me rooted in what's most important because I can go down a path and just be like really tunnel vision on something and she's there to kind of be like, hey, hey, come on. It's five o'clock. Let's go.
[00:02:25] Matty: Yeah. I wanted to start out our topic of keywords about just what mental blocks do you see that keep people from choosing the right keywords. There are techniques and tools that we'll be talking about, but is there a mindset that you see people not bringing to the work that would help them with that effort?
[00:02:47] Dave: I guess the best way to answer is to of start with what it used to be like. Back in the day, people would just get to the part where they fill in their seven Kindle keyword blocks. When inside of KDP, when you go to publish, they asked for the seven Kindle keywords. Back then people would just sit down and just kind of guess and throw things in there. And when there weren't many books on Amazon, that would still be pretty fruitful. But as time went by and more books joined year in and year out, the art of looking at what keywords and choosing the right keywords have become more and more important for not just getting your book on the Amazon market but in front of the right customers. ...
[00:00:05] Dave: Oh, not too bad. How about you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Dave Chesson is the guy behind kindlepreneur.com a website devoted to teaching authors about book marketing. Recommended by Amazon KDP as the place where you can go to learn how to optimize marketing for your books, Kindlepreneur has grown to be one of the largest book marketing websites. Dave's tactics help both fiction and nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers. Dave is also the creator of Publisher Rocket, a software that helps authors see what's really going on in the book market and thus pick better keywords and categories to help them sell more books.
[00:00:42] So not surprisingly, we are going to be talking today about optimizing keywords and I always joke with my listeners that oftentimes they can tell what I'm struggling with in my own author career based on the guests that I invite onto the podcast and keywords is definitely one of those things.
[00:00:59] So before we dive into the details of that, I also read in your bio that you served in the US Navy, you were a nuclear engineer, you served on submarines, you were a military diplomat, and whenever I read a bio like that, I have to ask, what lessons did you learn from those experiences that you carried forward into your current book marketing career?
[00:01:19] Dave: Well, my dad was in the military too, so I always learned about punctuality as well as being very particular about your schedule. Because as they say in the military, if you're early you're on time, if you're on time you're late, and if you're late it's unforgivable. So there is that component of it. But the truth of the matter is I think there were a lot of smaller things. I learned a lot about my learning style as well. In nuclear engineering, I found that much better and practical to actually apply than just sitting in the books. In diplomacy, I learned the importance of communication. But in general, I think a lot of it was just this desire to learn and this being very intentional with my time that probably translated the most to book marketing and what I do today.
[00:02:05] Matty: Sounds like a lesson that could translate to almost anything quite successfully.
[00:02:09] Dave: A bit, but it could also get you in trouble, too. I'm blessed to have a phenomenal wife who always keeps me rooted in what's most important because I can go down a path and just be like really tunnel vision on something and she's there to kind of be like, hey, hey, come on. It's five o'clock. Let's go.
[00:02:25] Matty: Yeah. I wanted to start out our topic of keywords about just what mental blocks do you see that keep people from choosing the right keywords. There are techniques and tools that we'll be talking about, but is there a mindset that you see people not bringing to the work that would help them with that effort?
[00:02:47] Dave: I guess the best way to answer is to of start with what it used to be like. Back in the day, people would just get to the part where they fill in their seven Kindle keyword blocks. When inside of KDP, when you go to publish, they asked for the seven Kindle keywords. Back then people would just sit down and just kind of guess and throw things in there. And when there weren't many books on Amazon, that would still be pretty fruitful. But as time went by and more books joined year in and year out, the art of looking at what keywords and choosing the right keywords have become more and more important for not just getting your book on the Amazon market but in front of the right customers. ...
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[00:03:26] Case in point, four or five years ago, if you wrote a mystery book, choosing the word "mystery" might've actually provided some kind of traffic to your book. People would type it in and there's a chance you might even show up for it. However, though, today it's not so much that you want to show up for "mystery." I would almost much rather rank for some very niche term that truly represents my book, like "cozy mystery noir." That phrase to me, if that truly embodies what my book is about, will probably generate me more money than if I actually showed up for "mystery."
[00:04:01] And people are like, wait a second, that doesn't make sense. Here's the thing. If I go to Amazon and I type in the word "mystery," do I actually know what I'm looking for? And when it comes to fiction, most readers really know what it is they want. They know the difference. They may start by just saying "mystery," but then when they see a whole bunch of these books show up that don't have the kind of mystery they want, they start adding more and more words until they get to the right definition that shows them the right kind of book.
[00:04:27] So you may start by saying "romance novel." And then you see a whole bunch of hot and steamy books showing up. You're like, whoa, I'm like wholesome Christian. So then you add "wholesome Christian" to the end of it. And now you're like, okay, great, but all I see is these weird time period pieces where there's a Western, a Victorian. You're like, all right, I want modern. So you put "modern." And so the key is that people just keep augmenting their search until they get to it.
[00:04:54] And once they really are, there's a lot of avid readers, they know what to type in. I'm a diehard lit RPG cultivation fan. So I will go to Google to see what's the latest out there. I will type in "lit RPG" along with the word "cultivation," because I love those kinds of books.
Matty: What does that mean?
Dave: Yeah. So lit RPG stands for literature role-playing game. Generally speaking, it's somewhat newish. I would say in the past four years, it's really come into its own and it's really taking off at this time period. Generally speaking, it's like when somebody gets trapped it, and so they're stuck in a game or they're in a game, mentally and physically in a game, and they have to, there's some adventure they have to do.
[00:05:36] Now the word cultivation, though, adds to it that it's not just a lit RPG game, a book about somebody in a game. But it's one of those games where when you fight somebody, you get more points and your points then you can use for attributes to build yourself up. So you cultivate points, which cultivates power. World of Warcraft is a game that cultivates points as you play.
[00:05:57] And so I love those because to me, I see the character and the characters they go from the real world to all of a sudden the game. Okay, and I battle this thing. Great. Now I have this new firebolt. I know that I just totally labeled myself as goofy, but the fact of the matter is it's just those two words together really gets me a lot closer to the exact kind of book I want. Not a "lit RPG," but a "lit RPG cultivation." And if I put in the word "dungeon" in there too, boy, every book shown is my kind of book. And that's exactly how keywords are working today.
[00:06:32] So to recap on what I said, back in the day, we could have gone for something broad and that was probably good enough. But now because of the competition, it's more important for authors to really nail down the phrase or three or four words that truly embody your book, because that's where your people are going to find you. And that's where you're going to have higher conversions and you're going to benefit from it.
[00:06:54] Matty: So when people are picking these seven things, key "words" is a little misleading, right? Because you don't just put a single word into one of those slots. It's key "phrases," correct? So you might put "Lit RPG cultivation" as one of your keywords.
[00:07:09] Dave: That's right. So when you go to Amazon and you're in your KDP and you're going to publish, they have those seven boxes, right? In each box, they allow you 50 characters, and a character is a space, a letter, or a symbol. That is a character. So if you typed in a word that happened to have 50 letters in it, then you could only have the one word. If you had two words plus a space and it came up to 50, that would fill the box and that's it. The thing is that I would definitely not recommend putting one word in there. Instead, you should be looking at really good phrases.
[00:07:43] Now I did an experiment a year and a half ago. We built this crawler to try to figure out what's the best way to handle those boxes. Should you put as many words as possible into each box, just random words, or should you be very particular about what you put in there?
[00:08:00] And what we found was there's a pro and a con to both. If there's a phrase, like for example, I said, "lit RPG cultivation" and "dungeon," say that phrase, that exact phrase, is a really good one. You use something like Publisher Rocket and you found that, yes, people are typing that in and, yes, it fits your book. I would put that exact phrase in one box and I wouldn't stuff anymore words in there because it's such an important phrase to me. My recommendation is you do that for three or four of those boxes. And then for the rest of them, you shove all the words you can in there that still describe your book.
[00:08:34] And the reason why having the more words in there is because it gives Amazon more of an understanding of what exact kind of book it is. Say you wrote a fantasy book. And all you put on there is "fantasy," "epic fantasy," the title, "swords," "war," all you've given Amazon is because of your category selection, they know, okay, it's a fantasy book. I think I have nothing else to go off of. There's no way they can help to get your book in front of the right kind of fantasy shopper. And that sucks for them, which means your book's not going to show up anywhere. They will not decide to just show you for fantasy to anybody who shows up, unless it's like the greatest fantasy book ever, then maybe it will help, but it's not.
[00:09:19] Instead we need to kind of help Amazon to say, look, this is an epic battlemage, there's magic in this fantasy. There's elves and goblins. There's middle earth, that kind of style of fantasy. This isn't some modern fairies in New York fantasy. Again, there's so many flavors of it, right?
[00:09:40] So when I've nailed it down and I help Amazon to know, oh, it's one of those books. Then they know to show the book and they know where to show the book. Amazon does not want to show the wrong kind of book to the wrong shopper. So that's where choosing these keywords really helps them to understand what your book is. And so by putting those extra words there in the bottom helps them to do that.
[00:10:04] So to recap on what we covered, you have the seven boxes. I recommend that if you find an exact phrase that you really love, put it in one box, do that three to four times. And then for the rest of the boxes, use all the different words that you truly believe that represent your book or help to describe your book and put as many of them into those remaining boxes as possible.
[00:10:25] Matty: Is there any pro or con to repeating a word, like if you've put "supernatural suspense" as one of your entries, should you put "supernatural thriller," or once you've got "supernatural" in there, then Amazon knows and you don't have to spend characters covering that again?
[00:10:42] Dave: Technically, and Amazon even says this publicly, hey, repeating words, doesn't do anything. Technically true. But from what we found in the data, let me answer it this way. If I've got a phrase and it has one word, and then I found another phrase and it has that same word, I'm not taking it out. I'll leave it. I find that it's still beneficial for Amazon to see those words together.
[00:11:07] It doesn't hurt you to have it in there and I really don't want to overthink it to the point where I'm like, oh, I said that word in my title. I better also take it out of here. No, I just go with it. That's my personal recommendation.
[00:11:19] Matty: I realized that I have repeated words because I was thinking in terms of Amazon trying to match phrases so that if somebody typed in "supernatural thriller," then they might see my book if I had entered "supernatural thriller," but not "supernatural suspense" because they were looking for that phrase as a whole in the user search.
[00:11:38] Dave: Exactly. I won't waste the minutes or seconds of trying to cull out words just because it was said somewhere else. It doesn't hurt you, and I have reason to believe it actually helps to be there to an extent. That being said, nobody listening to this should go in there and put the same word in all seven boxes, just because they think it's going to help. My point is that it helps to have it. If it's in there a couple of times. It's definitely not going to hurt. So my recommendation is don't waste your time and trying to pull it out.
[00:12:05] Another thing to bring up too is that what we did find out was if the word or phrases in your title or subtitle, that's actually more powerful than if it's one of your seven Kindle keywords, one of those boxes. This is because it's weighted. If I type in the title of a book, Amazon wants to find them. Now that doesn't mean that you get a trump card and you always win that keyword because that is the title of your book. There's some people who will search the title of their book and they still can't find their book.
[00:12:31] That being said, if you chose some really unique name, you're going to come up for sure. If you chose some really unique wording you put in one of your seven Kindle keywords, you won't show up. Some people have done this test where they'll make up a word. Just some random word, "habazaba," I don't know, just came up with it, and they put as one of their Kindle keywords and then they'll go to Amazon after they publish and they type in "habazaba," and it doesn't show up. They're like, what's going on here?
[00:12:55] Well, if the title of your book was HABAZABA, you'd show up, but Amazon also knows those that what keyword phrases are supposed to be is not what you come up with. It's what the customers come up with. And that's what's really important. Keywords are the words your customers use in describing the book they're looking for. That's why you making up some random name is not going to help index you, which is a word for making your book show up on their search result for that phrase. It just doesn't work that way. It's using key particular words to help them figure out where to put you. And if I "habazaba" doesn't exist, then it's useless to them. They don't make something up for you. So I think this is one of those ways to understand the power of a title and subtitle compared to those seven Kindle keywords.
[00:13:38] If anybody wants to actually see this visually, there's this really cool new feature that Amazon added, and I say new feature, but it's about six months ago, but either way, it's still new to me, is that if you go to an Amazon books sales page and you scroll down to where the reviews are, you're going to notice that right above where the reviews start on an Amazon book sales page, you'll see these boxes that have words in them. What those boxes are, they're kind of like a good way to call it is word cloud density. Amazon analyzes all the words and all the reviews for this book. And it found these common reoccurring threads. These words that they saw used throughout the reviews. And what's really neat is if you click on one of those boxes, they'll only show you the reviews that said this.
[00:14:22] But this is a really good visual of what it's like with keywords, because first off the word "the," "is," "he will," they're not in there. There's only three types of boxes in that little review section. The first is review related terms, like any term that Amazon's algorithm has figured is related to how a reviewer describes the book. So "fast paced." Also, one thing that always happens is that if you have given an advance review copy and somebody announces that, hey, I got an advanced review copy, here's my review. You'll actually see ARC as one of the boxes. So you can read only the ARC people. But they figured this out.
[00:15:03] The second is book information, title, author, name, character, you know, these kinds of things that are about the book that they see. They pick that up. And the third is actually keyword related, which is cool. You can go down there and see some of the words that Amazon, and by the way, it's not like if I wrote a romance and somebody kept saying fantasy in the review, Amazon's not going to show the word "fantasy" because they know better. They know what kind of book this is. Instead though, they look like, oh, "intergalactic," "epic space war," "star cruiser," "battle cruiser," because they know it's a sci-fi military book, so they pull out those.
[00:15:34] And now you can see the reviews of people who use the word "battle cruiser." And I think that this is a great visual on how they do with keywords is that they look at these keyword phrases and they know what your book is about thanks to your category selection and a lot of other input. And now they're saying, okay, great, where does it fit in there? And if they see phrases that don't exist or don't fit the mold of what they're expecting, they're just like, eh, not going to use it.
[00:16:01] Matty: I didn't realize that was available. One of the things that I really like about that is that I write supernatural suspense. So there are all sorts of ways you could reference supernatural, "spirits," "ghosts," all these different phrases, and I was always debating about which of those terms should I be using in my keywords? And I like the idea that Amazon may already know what phrase my reviewers are using most frequently in that context, and one assumes that appeals to the readers of that kind of book.
[00:16:30] Dave: Exactly. Yeah, that's a really good example about just trying to figure out the kind of ghost. I'm not as knowledge on supernatural books, but I can say a good example, as you can tell, I'm a fantasy nerd, how do I describe men who have magic? And I mean that because wizard and mage and all that, there's so many different ways to say it. You could say necromancer, wizard, mage, magician, sorcerer ... boy, my fantasy buddies are going to make fun of me, I can't remember the rest. But the point is I've already named five different ways to say men who do magic. Oh, warlock. There's another one. Witcher is now a new word, apparently.
[00:17:02] And a lot of these things come into play. And as a matter of fact, as time goes by, more words come in. But each one of those words has a completely different connotation to the story. A necromancer is usually dark and deadly. They raise the dead, they use the dead as their own zombies. That's a completely different word than wizard. Wizard already connotates Lord of the Rings kind. A magician could honestly be a modern magic person or whatever. They all are completely different. Warlock is somebody who practices in the dark arts, which is a male witch. If I have a sorcerer or I just have a wizard, my guy is truly a wizard and he embodies that kind of book, but I'm trying to target necromancer, it's going to throw it off because I'm not a dark, deadly tale. I'm not dealing with, raising the dead and army of dead, fighting against the hordes of knights. That's just not going to fit.
[00:17:54] So even though maybe we do the market research, we find out, oh man, the word "mage" is actually perfect, it's really hot, a lot less competition, but your book might not be suited for the word "mage" because it's not technically a mage. Same thing with ghosts. If I said poltergeist, or I said evil spirit or ghoul, but maybe that's not what it is. And as an author in that area, I'm sure you know all the subtle differences between each one of the different ways you call a spirit. And your readers know that too.
[00:18:26] Same thing with dragons. I didn't know this, but most of the time we think something's a dragon, it's actually not. It's a wyvern. Because there's actually definition of what makes a dragon. There's a really cool PDF out there that actually explains all the different types of dragons and dragons are usually the most uncommon of them because, and I might get this wrong, but a dragon actually has four legs. And it walks on four legs and the wings sprout out. Most of the time though, you'll see dragons that use their wings, like this first set of legs. And then there's the two back legs and then there's all these others. And anyways, my point is that we, the authors of our genre, know these nuances and differences, and that is a very crucial point to getting in front of your right people. Knowing that I call it a wyvern when it should be is important. And it also says what kind of dragon fantasy book this is. And even just saying "dragon fantasy," that's already putting me into a special group inside. I can go even further.
[00:19:28] Matty: That suggests an interesting perspective, which is that these terms are going to change over time. So you were mentioning Witcher is a new term for a male person who's performing magic. Are there guidelines about how often you go in and reassess your keywords to accommodate those kinds of changes in the usage or I suppose another example could be you're writing about mages, but now there's a popular TV show called "Warlocks and Something," and your book is close enough to warlocks to use that. How do you keep on top of what at this moment is going to be the right set of terms you should be using?
[00:20:05] Dave: Yeah, that's a really good question. If your book is doing well on sales already, then I really wouldn't play with the main keywords. And what I would do is I would start doing Amazon ads directed towards that new hot term. However though, if your books have tanked and they're not making any sales, then absolutely going through a process by which to change your keywords and maybe choose some that are more popular at the time can definitely help. If anybody is curious about the process, because it could probably be an entire podcast episode to talk about it, but I have it chronicled. Just type into Google, "how to change your Kindle keywords," and it should show up number one, and that will take you step by step.
[00:20:46] But otherwise though, Amazon ads are a great way to jump on the wave of something hot. I say the word Witcher, because Witcher is actually it's not the title of the book, but there was a series of books that actually I didn't like it and I'm probably going to get slammed by the fantasy people out there. I really just didn't like the books. I tried. However, though, there was a video game that came out of it. Now the video game is really popular. It's supposedly an amazing game. And Netflix last year made a TV show called THE WITCHER based off of the video games, which are technically based off the books.
[00:21:22] Henry Cavill, who plays Superman, is the biggest fan of that video game and says, I want to be the Witcher. And so they did, they put him in it. And it was super popular. It was very well done. It's a great show. And they're now coming out with season two and people are hungry for it. They have been a year without Henry Cavill and the Witcher and he plays it perfectly. He really does.
[00:21:48] Right now people are searching for "witcher," they're trying to satiate their hunger. Man, if I was a fantasy author who had a male who did magic, I would so make an entire campaign on just the Witcher to ride off the giant drive and interest for the books as well as that kind of book.
[00:22:10] And so that's a really good opportunity. The other thing too is technically, "witcher" really just pertains to one book. It was a name that's really become popular for their kind of male magic and a Witcher is sort of this weird thing where they're like really knights but they can do magic but they're not Paladins. Paladins are a good word for Knights who can do holy magic, but they're not dark magic either. It is its own thing, I guess. But obviously the word "Witcher" usually means awesome fighter who can do magic and they're mercenaries. In time, it may just become one of those words that we add to the list of men who do magic. Right now, it's attached to a particular book.
[00:22:55] So that's a really good example of how things kind of branch off and maybe take either popularity because of new movies or new things in the media. Case in point, I still call it a Kleenex, you know, for tissue paper, right? It's technically tissue paper. Kleenex is a brand, but it was the first and it was so popular that it became the word. I'm also from the south. I call everything Coke. And sometimes that same thing about how we describe a character can become a part of our natural lexicon for describing things. "Witcher" is probably a great keyword term in that genre.
[00:23:31] Another great one that happened was "lycan." Lycan became very popular because of the movies. It was about werewolves versus vampires but they didn't call them werewolves. They called them lycan. Well, now I hear that term all the time. And that was like 10 years ago. It had Kate Beckinsale in it. But now Lycan is just, it's not as used as werewolf, but I hear all the time in mainstream media and it's just thanks to those books. And maybe the word existed before then. I don't know. But when I'm looking for werewolves and I keep seeing the typical werewolves, I know that the word lycan is usually more associated with vampire werewolf fighting books. And if I type in "lycan," I usually find what I'm looking for. That's a great keyword.
[00:24:11] Matty: Witcher is an interesting example because it's a book name, as I think you said, so if you put book names in your keywords, like let's say you think you're just like Thomas Harris, so you put in "silence of the lambs" as a keyword. That's not allowed, is it?
[00:24:27] Dave: So Amazon, they say that's a bad practice. And what the real truth is that, and I that's why I'm explaining it this way, because I don't want authors going through and then saying, oh, I found this perfect phrase, and then they find the title of a book and think, I can't do it. No, no, no. The real intent of Amazon saying, please don't use other people's titles as your keywords is what they really mean is please don't try to confuse the shoppers or to do something heinous. So for example, if I type in "Harry Potter" into Amazon, I'm looking for Harry Potter. Okay. For me to try to, not that I could, but for me to try to overtake Harry Potter's spot and maybe confuse them and think it's a Harry Potter book and then buy it, that's a bad experience for Amazon. Amazon doesn't like that.
[00:25:13] Now that being said, though, the Witcher is one of those where right now it really is attached to a title and it could technically be perceived as maybe as infringing upon or confusing people, especially if you're trying to pass your book off as a Witcher series book. However though, It's one of those terms that's going to just get more and more popular to the point that the word "witcher" might honestly be used for other things. Maybe it becomes the antithesis to Paladins.
[00:25:44] Paladins were always the holy knights that could cast healing magic and a little bit of that attack magic. And then all of a sudden, we're going to start to see witchers as being the opposite, where they're knights, but they're not holy, they're maybe more dark. And then all of a sudden, our industry, especially in fantasy, will start to pick up on that.
[00:26:03] So I would say if you use "Witcher," that's you tapping into helping people know that kind of book. I don't think that's you trying to be like, no, I'm trying to pretend I'm the Witcher so that people will buy me. I think that's really the nuance difference.
[00:26:17] And that's also why too Amazon does not hit authors in their keywords unless you're going for something super egregious. They're not going to say, oh, you use the phrase "supernatural." There's a book called SUPERNATURAL and a show called SUPERNATURAL, which is one of my favorites. They're not going to come after you because, yeah, that it doesn't work that way. But if you put a picture of Sam, the Winchester brothers, on your cover and you called your book SUPERNATURAL, and it's not actually about that, yeah, you might have a copyright infringement, but you're also going to get the banned hammer from Amazon as well.
[00:26:50] But that's really the nuance that I'm trying to project here. But here's the other thing too, Amazon ads, oh, you can target author names, book titles, all you want. And I would 100%, like I said, create an Amazon campaign targeting the high swell of popularity for the term Witcher right now, as people wait for the release of it.
[00:27:10] A great example of this was I was working with a woman, she wrote a book about dealing with pet loss, like when your dog dies or when your pet dies, how do you deal with that? Well, with a couple of weeks before A DOG'S LIFE was actually coming out in theaters, so we did an entire campaign targeting A DOG'S LIFE.
[00:27:33] Oh, man. She made more sales in just those two months right there than she had made in years because everybody who would go to Amazon looking at A DOG'S LIFE or looking up, anything on "dog's life," Amazon would pop her ad for dealing with pet loss. It's a perfect fit because here I am looking for this thing that's popular because of entertainment, but the truth is so many people who are really interested in A DOG'S LIFE is really interested in how important a dog was in their life and of course those dogs have passed on and maybe they haven't dealt with it. And it was just a beautiful marriage between that popularity and her particular book and creating those campaigns.
[00:28:15] Matty: Maybe they needed to read her book in order to deal with the trauma of having read A DOG'S LIFE.
[00:28:19] Dave: Yeah. That too, that too. But again, that's the big thing is, is that she was able to tie her book into a large movement, for that people that fit. If I'm writing, a battle mage book or something like that, I would be hitting Amazon campaigns like crazy targeting everything the Witcher. Even the actor's name, Henry Cavill, I would totally target that one.
[00:28:42] Matty: As a keyword or as an ad?
[00:28:44] Dave: As an ad. Yep. A hundred percent.
[00:28:47] Matty: I've watched lots of online tutorials about keywords, and many of them seem to use the examples, the very specific examples, like " lit RPG cultivation" or "mage," you know, the people I think who are doing it are themselves fans of very specific kinds of genres and sub genres, and so they use those as examples. But let's say someone just read a great story about a couple who goes on vacation to Vermont and works through a personal relationship. And they're like, wow, that was great. I want more of that. And it's very general. They just want "married relationship issues" or something like that. And if someone is writing that kind of book that doesn't fall into what they know to be a very specific sub-genre, are there any approaches they should use in order to know what keywords they should be using for that?
[00:29:39] Dave: Yeah. There's a little exercise that I tell authors to take. As a matter of fact, if anybody wants more details, if you type into Google "fiction keywords," this article will pop up. And I wrote this article as well as this exercise and literally one to two weeks after I published this, Amazon not only promoted the article and said, this is the way to do it. They then changed their FAQ to reflect exactly my article. Yeah, so I really mean that this is the best thing a fiction author can do.
[00:30:12] I like to take a sheet of paper and I create four columns. And under those four columns, I will write in each column time period and settings, character types and roles, plot themes or special events, and style and tone of your genre. Then from that point on, I will sit down and I will literally try to think of every way possible to describe something that fits in one of those four columns that fits from my book.
[00:30:40] So time periods and settings, you said on this example, you said Vermont. So now I would start by putting in "Vermont" because you came up with that word, by the way, Vermont, off the top of your head, because that just symbolizes that kind of, maybe it's a getaway, maybe it's a wholesome, a cozy, and now all of a sudden there's all these words. It's not just Vermont, but Vermont symbolize something. How do you expand beyond Vermont? Maybe there are other states that kind of represent that. It could be Connecticut or Rhode Island or small states. Or it could be ones that are out in the wilderness. Notice that Vermont has a setting of trees and forest, not prairie, not desert. So all of a sudden we can expand from time period and settings and start to create this giant list of things. Not just Vermont.
[00:31:32] Then we move over to character types and roles. Okay. See, you said that there was conflict. And by the way, when I start to split the word conflict right there, their marriage is on the rocks, but for what kind of conflict. The conflict can be something. And that might be in the next column, which is plot themes and special events. What got this family to the point, this husband and wife, that they need to escape to Vermont to repair their marriage? Maybe it is a death of their son. Maybe it is adultery. Maybe it is loss of dreams, lack of support, lack of communication. Maybe their child was murdered and they haven't dealt with it. You know all of a sudden, THE SHACK is popping into my mind as I'm like trying to drive down this path.
[00:32:22] But the point though is that how we describe these things are really important because just like you said, when the reader shows up to Amazon, there was a book they just read, they want to read something like it. They're going to start adding more and more words to help cull out the list of romance books that might show up. For example when I was talking about the romance books, so you type in "romance book," all of a sudden you see hot and steamy and a whole bunch of men without a shirt. Whoa. I want about a marriage, a broken marriage rebuilt, or unfaithful husbands, love again.
[00:32:59] And again, this is not my genre, so I don't know the special words, like I know like "lit RPG cultivation" or "mage," but the writers in that area will kind of know, no, no, no, actually he should say this phrase and oh yeah, that's it, you know, " second chance romance." Got it. You know, I'm probably wrong on that one, but as you can see you, the artist, when you look at those four phrases, you can start to really come up with some interesting terms that you're like, yes, that's a great word.
[00:33:29] Now, what I love most about this sheet is that by the time you're done with it, you've gone through, and I'm sorry, I forgot to talk about styles and tones, so I'll get to that in a second, but when you're done with this sheet, this sheet is awesome. This sheet is awesome because you can start to put those words through Publisher Rocket and actually figure out which ones are the right ones to use that'll be the most powerful for you. And then you can use those words or phrases, you can also pair words together and see how they work as phrases, you can use them as one of your seven Kindle keywords. But also what's really important is that this list is phenomenal for building out your subtitle and your description because you have now just found all these different phrases that truly should connect with your kind of reader and they should help you in shall we say bolstering your book description.
[00:34:17] You are not a sci-fi person, but let me give you two examples of sci-fi book description. "In the not so distant future, the Vulcans have attacked, Earth has been destroyed, and the military is down." Now let's say, "The year is 2148 and Earth is embroiled in intergalactic war with the Vulcans, who are ruthless, blood thirsty, technocrats. The U S military has been just utterly destroyed, is in shambles. Their last hope relies on ..."
[00:34:50] Notice that all I did was, yeah, I bolstered a bit of the sentence, but I used a lot of very science fictiony words, sci-fi military, intergalactic, embattled, embroiled, in shambles. I used even a couple more. Heck, if I had just thrown in "battle cruiser," this would have been great. You know, " ... The last hope is the remnant battle cruiser..." See what I'm saying? Like these words can help to remind your reader, oh yeah, this person knows what I'm talking about. It's connecting with me.
[00:35:18] So I love this list because it helps me as a great starting point for data mining to find the right keywords for my seven Kindle keywords. And then it's amazing for me thinking of, oh man, I should totally use that word in my book description. Oh, I should focus on that. I should say these things. And I think that all together not only helps Amazon and figuring out where your book should show up, but it also helps to convince your target reader once they get there that this is the kind of book they're looking for, because it really hits them on all the levels.
[00:35:48] Matty: It's nice to think that this kind of research serves many purposes because I know sometimes I get discouraged after a while if I'm just thinking of the end result is having readers find it on a particular online platform. But if I think about what you're saying, that it expands to descriptions and other promotional material, and even how you would speak to your book if you're pitching someone in the elevator, that's a kind of a nice bonus for doing that research.
[00:36:16] Dave: Yeah, I think your book, cover title, subtitle, book description, keywords, play this super symbiotic role. Okay. If you have a great book description and you have a great title and you have great keywords, but your book cover doesn't look anything like that kind of book, like it doesn't fit, then that's not right.
[00:36:35] Say for example, you were talking about a wholesome, love again, marriage rebuilding in Vermont book. Okay. If say that. Let's just pretend that was actually the keyword phrase I typed into Google, and that was also the phrase that you targeted. And then I get to your cover and it shows woods with some evil eyes in the back. Well, no, I'm not going to click on it no matter what because that doesn't embody what I'm looking for. Whereas if I get to a book cover, and again, I'm not as skilled in this area, but let's pretend that you see the woods and a family huddled around the fire, looking distant, you know then, okay this feels right because it shows the family.
[00:37:10] One thing I am going to throw in here that's my recommendation when it comes to a book covers is don't try to recreate the wheel, go ahead and look at other authors' book covers, because the thing about it is readers have an expectation of what they're looking for because of what they've seen. And when you create something that's vastly different, sometimes that just feels like, oh, that can't be the kind of book I'm looking for. If you go to sci-fi military, 80% of every sci-fi military book is going to show some giant spaceship up in space. That's it. There might not be a spaceship, but it's going to happen on the cover.
[00:37:44] When I was working with Orson Scott Card, he once got mad on his famous book, ENDER'S GAME. He had said that when the first cover came out as this giant spaceship, a little spaceship coming out of it, and he's like, there's no scene in my book that has that. And the publishing company was like, but Orson ... he goes by Scott ... but Scott, that's not what people are looking for. Like they see the spaceship, they know it's a sci-fi military book. Now they're going to read the book description. That's what we want. And years later he said, yeah, biggest mistake I ever did was argue with them about it. But luckily, I let them go with it cause they were so right. And it was funny. I was chuckling, because as a kid, I did exactly that. I was in the library. I flipped through the book. I saw a spaceship. I was like, ENDER'S GAME, I'm going to read it. And it turned into one of my all-time favorite books.
[00:38:27] Matty: I did an interesting experiment on The Indy Author Facebook page. I got a BookBub Featured Deal email, and I was reading through it and I noticed that two of them had a woman who was dressed in red from the back at a distance with I think in both cases it was noticeably either Paris or London in the background with either the Eiffel Tower or a lamppost forming sort of a vertical element. And then World War II airplanes in the sky. And I thought that's interesting that two of those in the same thing. And since then I've collected probably two dozen of these book covers that are all clearly historical, probably romance, the woman from the back in red. Something identifiable and vertical.
[00:39:12] And I finally just gave up because I thought I could collect hundreds of these things. And they all had titles like THE HEIRESS or THE TRANSLATER or THE DIPLOMAT. And I thought that's perfect because I want the woman in the red dress with THE SOMETHING title, exactly what you're saying. It's a very clear message to the reader about what they're going to get.
[00:39:33] Dave: Exactly. I know what I'm looking for when I'm looking for sci-fi military. And if I don't see it, I'm rarely going to take a chance to look more into the book. I love the example that you gave, because what's really cool about those terms, especially in the title, those are aged titles. THE DUCHESS, right? We all know what time period that's talking about. Or what kind of high society it is. THE DIPLOMAT. Like these are all terms that fit really well with that cover, which, you don't even know the book description, but when you describe that book cover and you told me that title, well, we got a clear indication of what time period it is, what kind of book this is, who is the main character. We can already start to figure out some of the plot themes and special events going on in the background. That's what's most important. That's why when I have those four areas to focus on, I don't just want that for my seven Kindle keywords. I want to use it in my book description.
[00:40:22] And also too, when I hire my book designer, I send them the keywords and I tell them, hey, heads up buddy or gal. These are going to be the phrases that are going to drive people to see the book. So now that you know that this person that I'm going to work to attract use these words in looking for the book are they're looking for, let's do that.
[00:40:45] I was working with an author, I don't have permission to use her name, but she's actually really big in the industry. She was writing a book and we were working on the time periods and settings. And sure enough, I did not know this, it was not Victorian era because it was much later. It was during the time period in England where the industrial age happened, they were moving away from these things. And through research, we found out that there's actually a name for this time period called Gas Lamp, because that's when they had the lamppost with the gas. They had switched from candles. It was that exact time period.
[00:41:23] Well, sure enough. That's actually a really good keyword for that time period, especially for that setting. And so using that, we wanted to make sure that readers, when they saw the cover, knew that it was going to be England in that time period. So we had the designer actually add the gas lamps in it. So then you knew what it was and what time period it was. And this was a really great thing, it really helped out with the marketing of this book, because the cover even gave out more information to the reader of what kind of book, and this was a perfect fit. So this is why I think that your keywords play a vital role in your book cover, title, subtitle, and book description, and creating that four-column approach is a very good start to it all.
[00:42:07] Matty: Well, Dave, thank you so much. This was so interesting. And please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your offerings online.
[00:42:15] Dave: You could go to kindlepreneur.com. I've got a contact page there, and if there's any questions you have based off of what we talked about, hit me up there.
[00:04:01] And people are like, wait a second, that doesn't make sense. Here's the thing. If I go to Amazon and I type in the word "mystery," do I actually know what I'm looking for? And when it comes to fiction, most readers really know what it is they want. They know the difference. They may start by just saying "mystery," but then when they see a whole bunch of these books show up that don't have the kind of mystery they want, they start adding more and more words until they get to the right definition that shows them the right kind of book.
[00:04:27] So you may start by saying "romance novel." And then you see a whole bunch of hot and steamy books showing up. You're like, whoa, I'm like wholesome Christian. So then you add "wholesome Christian" to the end of it. And now you're like, okay, great, but all I see is these weird time period pieces where there's a Western, a Victorian. You're like, all right, I want modern. So you put "modern." And so the key is that people just keep augmenting their search until they get to it.
[00:04:54] And once they really are, there's a lot of avid readers, they know what to type in. I'm a diehard lit RPG cultivation fan. So I will go to Google to see what's the latest out there. I will type in "lit RPG" along with the word "cultivation," because I love those kinds of books.
Matty: What does that mean?
Dave: Yeah. So lit RPG stands for literature role-playing game. Generally speaking, it's somewhat newish. I would say in the past four years, it's really come into its own and it's really taking off at this time period. Generally speaking, it's like when somebody gets trapped it, and so they're stuck in a game or they're in a game, mentally and physically in a game, and they have to, there's some adventure they have to do.
[00:05:36] Now the word cultivation, though, adds to it that it's not just a lit RPG game, a book about somebody in a game. But it's one of those games where when you fight somebody, you get more points and your points then you can use for attributes to build yourself up. So you cultivate points, which cultivates power. World of Warcraft is a game that cultivates points as you play.
[00:05:57] And so I love those because to me, I see the character and the characters they go from the real world to all of a sudden the game. Okay, and I battle this thing. Great. Now I have this new firebolt. I know that I just totally labeled myself as goofy, but the fact of the matter is it's just those two words together really gets me a lot closer to the exact kind of book I want. Not a "lit RPG," but a "lit RPG cultivation." And if I put in the word "dungeon" in there too, boy, every book shown is my kind of book. And that's exactly how keywords are working today.
[00:06:32] So to recap on what I said, back in the day, we could have gone for something broad and that was probably good enough. But now because of the competition, it's more important for authors to really nail down the phrase or three or four words that truly embody your book, because that's where your people are going to find you. And that's where you're going to have higher conversions and you're going to benefit from it.
[00:06:54] Matty: So when people are picking these seven things, key "words" is a little misleading, right? Because you don't just put a single word into one of those slots. It's key "phrases," correct? So you might put "Lit RPG cultivation" as one of your keywords.
[00:07:09] Dave: That's right. So when you go to Amazon and you're in your KDP and you're going to publish, they have those seven boxes, right? In each box, they allow you 50 characters, and a character is a space, a letter, or a symbol. That is a character. So if you typed in a word that happened to have 50 letters in it, then you could only have the one word. If you had two words plus a space and it came up to 50, that would fill the box and that's it. The thing is that I would definitely not recommend putting one word in there. Instead, you should be looking at really good phrases.
[00:07:43] Now I did an experiment a year and a half ago. We built this crawler to try to figure out what's the best way to handle those boxes. Should you put as many words as possible into each box, just random words, or should you be very particular about what you put in there?
[00:08:00] And what we found was there's a pro and a con to both. If there's a phrase, like for example, I said, "lit RPG cultivation" and "dungeon," say that phrase, that exact phrase, is a really good one. You use something like Publisher Rocket and you found that, yes, people are typing that in and, yes, it fits your book. I would put that exact phrase in one box and I wouldn't stuff anymore words in there because it's such an important phrase to me. My recommendation is you do that for three or four of those boxes. And then for the rest of them, you shove all the words you can in there that still describe your book.
[00:08:34] And the reason why having the more words in there is because it gives Amazon more of an understanding of what exact kind of book it is. Say you wrote a fantasy book. And all you put on there is "fantasy," "epic fantasy," the title, "swords," "war," all you've given Amazon is because of your category selection, they know, okay, it's a fantasy book. I think I have nothing else to go off of. There's no way they can help to get your book in front of the right kind of fantasy shopper. And that sucks for them, which means your book's not going to show up anywhere. They will not decide to just show you for fantasy to anybody who shows up, unless it's like the greatest fantasy book ever, then maybe it will help, but it's not.
[00:09:19] Instead we need to kind of help Amazon to say, look, this is an epic battlemage, there's magic in this fantasy. There's elves and goblins. There's middle earth, that kind of style of fantasy. This isn't some modern fairies in New York fantasy. Again, there's so many flavors of it, right?
[00:09:40] So when I've nailed it down and I help Amazon to know, oh, it's one of those books. Then they know to show the book and they know where to show the book. Amazon does not want to show the wrong kind of book to the wrong shopper. So that's where choosing these keywords really helps them to understand what your book is. And so by putting those extra words there in the bottom helps them to do that.
[00:10:04] So to recap on what we covered, you have the seven boxes. I recommend that if you find an exact phrase that you really love, put it in one box, do that three to four times. And then for the rest of the boxes, use all the different words that you truly believe that represent your book or help to describe your book and put as many of them into those remaining boxes as possible.
[00:10:25] Matty: Is there any pro or con to repeating a word, like if you've put "supernatural suspense" as one of your entries, should you put "supernatural thriller," or once you've got "supernatural" in there, then Amazon knows and you don't have to spend characters covering that again?
[00:10:42] Dave: Technically, and Amazon even says this publicly, hey, repeating words, doesn't do anything. Technically true. But from what we found in the data, let me answer it this way. If I've got a phrase and it has one word, and then I found another phrase and it has that same word, I'm not taking it out. I'll leave it. I find that it's still beneficial for Amazon to see those words together.
[00:11:07] It doesn't hurt you to have it in there and I really don't want to overthink it to the point where I'm like, oh, I said that word in my title. I better also take it out of here. No, I just go with it. That's my personal recommendation.
[00:11:19] Matty: I realized that I have repeated words because I was thinking in terms of Amazon trying to match phrases so that if somebody typed in "supernatural thriller," then they might see my book if I had entered "supernatural thriller," but not "supernatural suspense" because they were looking for that phrase as a whole in the user search.
[00:11:38] Dave: Exactly. I won't waste the minutes or seconds of trying to cull out words just because it was said somewhere else. It doesn't hurt you, and I have reason to believe it actually helps to be there to an extent. That being said, nobody listening to this should go in there and put the same word in all seven boxes, just because they think it's going to help. My point is that it helps to have it. If it's in there a couple of times. It's definitely not going to hurt. So my recommendation is don't waste your time and trying to pull it out.
[00:12:05] Another thing to bring up too is that what we did find out was if the word or phrases in your title or subtitle, that's actually more powerful than if it's one of your seven Kindle keywords, one of those boxes. This is because it's weighted. If I type in the title of a book, Amazon wants to find them. Now that doesn't mean that you get a trump card and you always win that keyword because that is the title of your book. There's some people who will search the title of their book and they still can't find their book.
[00:12:31] That being said, if you chose some really unique name, you're going to come up for sure. If you chose some really unique wording you put in one of your seven Kindle keywords, you won't show up. Some people have done this test where they'll make up a word. Just some random word, "habazaba," I don't know, just came up with it, and they put as one of their Kindle keywords and then they'll go to Amazon after they publish and they type in "habazaba," and it doesn't show up. They're like, what's going on here?
[00:12:55] Well, if the title of your book was HABAZABA, you'd show up, but Amazon also knows those that what keyword phrases are supposed to be is not what you come up with. It's what the customers come up with. And that's what's really important. Keywords are the words your customers use in describing the book they're looking for. That's why you making up some random name is not going to help index you, which is a word for making your book show up on their search result for that phrase. It just doesn't work that way. It's using key particular words to help them figure out where to put you. And if I "habazaba" doesn't exist, then it's useless to them. They don't make something up for you. So I think this is one of those ways to understand the power of a title and subtitle compared to those seven Kindle keywords.
[00:13:38] If anybody wants to actually see this visually, there's this really cool new feature that Amazon added, and I say new feature, but it's about six months ago, but either way, it's still new to me, is that if you go to an Amazon books sales page and you scroll down to where the reviews are, you're going to notice that right above where the reviews start on an Amazon book sales page, you'll see these boxes that have words in them. What those boxes are, they're kind of like a good way to call it is word cloud density. Amazon analyzes all the words and all the reviews for this book. And it found these common reoccurring threads. These words that they saw used throughout the reviews. And what's really neat is if you click on one of those boxes, they'll only show you the reviews that said this.
[00:14:22] But this is a really good visual of what it's like with keywords, because first off the word "the," "is," "he will," they're not in there. There's only three types of boxes in that little review section. The first is review related terms, like any term that Amazon's algorithm has figured is related to how a reviewer describes the book. So "fast paced." Also, one thing that always happens is that if you have given an advance review copy and somebody announces that, hey, I got an advanced review copy, here's my review. You'll actually see ARC as one of the boxes. So you can read only the ARC people. But they figured this out.
[00:15:03] The second is book information, title, author, name, character, you know, these kinds of things that are about the book that they see. They pick that up. And the third is actually keyword related, which is cool. You can go down there and see some of the words that Amazon, and by the way, it's not like if I wrote a romance and somebody kept saying fantasy in the review, Amazon's not going to show the word "fantasy" because they know better. They know what kind of book this is. Instead though, they look like, oh, "intergalactic," "epic space war," "star cruiser," "battle cruiser," because they know it's a sci-fi military book, so they pull out those.
[00:15:34] And now you can see the reviews of people who use the word "battle cruiser." And I think that this is a great visual on how they do with keywords is that they look at these keyword phrases and they know what your book is about thanks to your category selection and a lot of other input. And now they're saying, okay, great, where does it fit in there? And if they see phrases that don't exist or don't fit the mold of what they're expecting, they're just like, eh, not going to use it.
[00:16:01] Matty: I didn't realize that was available. One of the things that I really like about that is that I write supernatural suspense. So there are all sorts of ways you could reference supernatural, "spirits," "ghosts," all these different phrases, and I was always debating about which of those terms should I be using in my keywords? And I like the idea that Amazon may already know what phrase my reviewers are using most frequently in that context, and one assumes that appeals to the readers of that kind of book.
[00:16:30] Dave: Exactly. Yeah, that's a really good example about just trying to figure out the kind of ghost. I'm not as knowledge on supernatural books, but I can say a good example, as you can tell, I'm a fantasy nerd, how do I describe men who have magic? And I mean that because wizard and mage and all that, there's so many different ways to say it. You could say necromancer, wizard, mage, magician, sorcerer ... boy, my fantasy buddies are going to make fun of me, I can't remember the rest. But the point is I've already named five different ways to say men who do magic. Oh, warlock. There's another one. Witcher is now a new word, apparently.
[00:17:02] And a lot of these things come into play. And as a matter of fact, as time goes by, more words come in. But each one of those words has a completely different connotation to the story. A necromancer is usually dark and deadly. They raise the dead, they use the dead as their own zombies. That's a completely different word than wizard. Wizard already connotates Lord of the Rings kind. A magician could honestly be a modern magic person or whatever. They all are completely different. Warlock is somebody who practices in the dark arts, which is a male witch. If I have a sorcerer or I just have a wizard, my guy is truly a wizard and he embodies that kind of book, but I'm trying to target necromancer, it's going to throw it off because I'm not a dark, deadly tale. I'm not dealing with, raising the dead and army of dead, fighting against the hordes of knights. That's just not going to fit.
[00:17:54] So even though maybe we do the market research, we find out, oh man, the word "mage" is actually perfect, it's really hot, a lot less competition, but your book might not be suited for the word "mage" because it's not technically a mage. Same thing with ghosts. If I said poltergeist, or I said evil spirit or ghoul, but maybe that's not what it is. And as an author in that area, I'm sure you know all the subtle differences between each one of the different ways you call a spirit. And your readers know that too.
[00:18:26] Same thing with dragons. I didn't know this, but most of the time we think something's a dragon, it's actually not. It's a wyvern. Because there's actually definition of what makes a dragon. There's a really cool PDF out there that actually explains all the different types of dragons and dragons are usually the most uncommon of them because, and I might get this wrong, but a dragon actually has four legs. And it walks on four legs and the wings sprout out. Most of the time though, you'll see dragons that use their wings, like this first set of legs. And then there's the two back legs and then there's all these others. And anyways, my point is that we, the authors of our genre, know these nuances and differences, and that is a very crucial point to getting in front of your right people. Knowing that I call it a wyvern when it should be is important. And it also says what kind of dragon fantasy book this is. And even just saying "dragon fantasy," that's already putting me into a special group inside. I can go even further.
[00:19:28] Matty: That suggests an interesting perspective, which is that these terms are going to change over time. So you were mentioning Witcher is a new term for a male person who's performing magic. Are there guidelines about how often you go in and reassess your keywords to accommodate those kinds of changes in the usage or I suppose another example could be you're writing about mages, but now there's a popular TV show called "Warlocks and Something," and your book is close enough to warlocks to use that. How do you keep on top of what at this moment is going to be the right set of terms you should be using?
[00:20:05] Dave: Yeah, that's a really good question. If your book is doing well on sales already, then I really wouldn't play with the main keywords. And what I would do is I would start doing Amazon ads directed towards that new hot term. However though, if your books have tanked and they're not making any sales, then absolutely going through a process by which to change your keywords and maybe choose some that are more popular at the time can definitely help. If anybody is curious about the process, because it could probably be an entire podcast episode to talk about it, but I have it chronicled. Just type into Google, "how to change your Kindle keywords," and it should show up number one, and that will take you step by step.
[00:20:46] But otherwise though, Amazon ads are a great way to jump on the wave of something hot. I say the word Witcher, because Witcher is actually it's not the title of the book, but there was a series of books that actually I didn't like it and I'm probably going to get slammed by the fantasy people out there. I really just didn't like the books. I tried. However, though, there was a video game that came out of it. Now the video game is really popular. It's supposedly an amazing game. And Netflix last year made a TV show called THE WITCHER based off of the video games, which are technically based off the books.
[00:21:22] Henry Cavill, who plays Superman, is the biggest fan of that video game and says, I want to be the Witcher. And so they did, they put him in it. And it was super popular. It was very well done. It's a great show. And they're now coming out with season two and people are hungry for it. They have been a year without Henry Cavill and the Witcher and he plays it perfectly. He really does.
[00:21:48] Right now people are searching for "witcher," they're trying to satiate their hunger. Man, if I was a fantasy author who had a male who did magic, I would so make an entire campaign on just the Witcher to ride off the giant drive and interest for the books as well as that kind of book.
[00:22:10] And so that's a really good opportunity. The other thing too is technically, "witcher" really just pertains to one book. It was a name that's really become popular for their kind of male magic and a Witcher is sort of this weird thing where they're like really knights but they can do magic but they're not Paladins. Paladins are a good word for Knights who can do holy magic, but they're not dark magic either. It is its own thing, I guess. But obviously the word "Witcher" usually means awesome fighter who can do magic and they're mercenaries. In time, it may just become one of those words that we add to the list of men who do magic. Right now, it's attached to a particular book.
[00:22:55] So that's a really good example of how things kind of branch off and maybe take either popularity because of new movies or new things in the media. Case in point, I still call it a Kleenex, you know, for tissue paper, right? It's technically tissue paper. Kleenex is a brand, but it was the first and it was so popular that it became the word. I'm also from the south. I call everything Coke. And sometimes that same thing about how we describe a character can become a part of our natural lexicon for describing things. "Witcher" is probably a great keyword term in that genre.
[00:23:31] Another great one that happened was "lycan." Lycan became very popular because of the movies. It was about werewolves versus vampires but they didn't call them werewolves. They called them lycan. Well, now I hear that term all the time. And that was like 10 years ago. It had Kate Beckinsale in it. But now Lycan is just, it's not as used as werewolf, but I hear all the time in mainstream media and it's just thanks to those books. And maybe the word existed before then. I don't know. But when I'm looking for werewolves and I keep seeing the typical werewolves, I know that the word lycan is usually more associated with vampire werewolf fighting books. And if I type in "lycan," I usually find what I'm looking for. That's a great keyword.
[00:24:11] Matty: Witcher is an interesting example because it's a book name, as I think you said, so if you put book names in your keywords, like let's say you think you're just like Thomas Harris, so you put in "silence of the lambs" as a keyword. That's not allowed, is it?
[00:24:27] Dave: So Amazon, they say that's a bad practice. And what the real truth is that, and I that's why I'm explaining it this way, because I don't want authors going through and then saying, oh, I found this perfect phrase, and then they find the title of a book and think, I can't do it. No, no, no. The real intent of Amazon saying, please don't use other people's titles as your keywords is what they really mean is please don't try to confuse the shoppers or to do something heinous. So for example, if I type in "Harry Potter" into Amazon, I'm looking for Harry Potter. Okay. For me to try to, not that I could, but for me to try to overtake Harry Potter's spot and maybe confuse them and think it's a Harry Potter book and then buy it, that's a bad experience for Amazon. Amazon doesn't like that.
[00:25:13] Now that being said, though, the Witcher is one of those where right now it really is attached to a title and it could technically be perceived as maybe as infringing upon or confusing people, especially if you're trying to pass your book off as a Witcher series book. However though, It's one of those terms that's going to just get more and more popular to the point that the word "witcher" might honestly be used for other things. Maybe it becomes the antithesis to Paladins.
[00:25:44] Paladins were always the holy knights that could cast healing magic and a little bit of that attack magic. And then all of a sudden, we're going to start to see witchers as being the opposite, where they're knights, but they're not holy, they're maybe more dark. And then all of a sudden, our industry, especially in fantasy, will start to pick up on that.
[00:26:03] So I would say if you use "Witcher," that's you tapping into helping people know that kind of book. I don't think that's you trying to be like, no, I'm trying to pretend I'm the Witcher so that people will buy me. I think that's really the nuance difference.
[00:26:17] And that's also why too Amazon does not hit authors in their keywords unless you're going for something super egregious. They're not going to say, oh, you use the phrase "supernatural." There's a book called SUPERNATURAL and a show called SUPERNATURAL, which is one of my favorites. They're not going to come after you because, yeah, that it doesn't work that way. But if you put a picture of Sam, the Winchester brothers, on your cover and you called your book SUPERNATURAL, and it's not actually about that, yeah, you might have a copyright infringement, but you're also going to get the banned hammer from Amazon as well.
[00:26:50] But that's really the nuance that I'm trying to project here. But here's the other thing too, Amazon ads, oh, you can target author names, book titles, all you want. And I would 100%, like I said, create an Amazon campaign targeting the high swell of popularity for the term Witcher right now, as people wait for the release of it.
[00:27:10] A great example of this was I was working with a woman, she wrote a book about dealing with pet loss, like when your dog dies or when your pet dies, how do you deal with that? Well, with a couple of weeks before A DOG'S LIFE was actually coming out in theaters, so we did an entire campaign targeting A DOG'S LIFE.
[00:27:33] Oh, man. She made more sales in just those two months right there than she had made in years because everybody who would go to Amazon looking at A DOG'S LIFE or looking up, anything on "dog's life," Amazon would pop her ad for dealing with pet loss. It's a perfect fit because here I am looking for this thing that's popular because of entertainment, but the truth is so many people who are really interested in A DOG'S LIFE is really interested in how important a dog was in their life and of course those dogs have passed on and maybe they haven't dealt with it. And it was just a beautiful marriage between that popularity and her particular book and creating those campaigns.
[00:28:15] Matty: Maybe they needed to read her book in order to deal with the trauma of having read A DOG'S LIFE.
[00:28:19] Dave: Yeah. That too, that too. But again, that's the big thing is, is that she was able to tie her book into a large movement, for that people that fit. If I'm writing, a battle mage book or something like that, I would be hitting Amazon campaigns like crazy targeting everything the Witcher. Even the actor's name, Henry Cavill, I would totally target that one.
[00:28:42] Matty: As a keyword or as an ad?
[00:28:44] Dave: As an ad. Yep. A hundred percent.
[00:28:47] Matty: I've watched lots of online tutorials about keywords, and many of them seem to use the examples, the very specific examples, like " lit RPG cultivation" or "mage," you know, the people I think who are doing it are themselves fans of very specific kinds of genres and sub genres, and so they use those as examples. But let's say someone just read a great story about a couple who goes on vacation to Vermont and works through a personal relationship. And they're like, wow, that was great. I want more of that. And it's very general. They just want "married relationship issues" or something like that. And if someone is writing that kind of book that doesn't fall into what they know to be a very specific sub-genre, are there any approaches they should use in order to know what keywords they should be using for that?
[00:29:39] Dave: Yeah. There's a little exercise that I tell authors to take. As a matter of fact, if anybody wants more details, if you type into Google "fiction keywords," this article will pop up. And I wrote this article as well as this exercise and literally one to two weeks after I published this, Amazon not only promoted the article and said, this is the way to do it. They then changed their FAQ to reflect exactly my article. Yeah, so I really mean that this is the best thing a fiction author can do.
[00:30:12] I like to take a sheet of paper and I create four columns. And under those four columns, I will write in each column time period and settings, character types and roles, plot themes or special events, and style and tone of your genre. Then from that point on, I will sit down and I will literally try to think of every way possible to describe something that fits in one of those four columns that fits from my book.
[00:30:40] So time periods and settings, you said on this example, you said Vermont. So now I would start by putting in "Vermont" because you came up with that word, by the way, Vermont, off the top of your head, because that just symbolizes that kind of, maybe it's a getaway, maybe it's a wholesome, a cozy, and now all of a sudden there's all these words. It's not just Vermont, but Vermont symbolize something. How do you expand beyond Vermont? Maybe there are other states that kind of represent that. It could be Connecticut or Rhode Island or small states. Or it could be ones that are out in the wilderness. Notice that Vermont has a setting of trees and forest, not prairie, not desert. So all of a sudden we can expand from time period and settings and start to create this giant list of things. Not just Vermont.
[00:31:32] Then we move over to character types and roles. Okay. See, you said that there was conflict. And by the way, when I start to split the word conflict right there, their marriage is on the rocks, but for what kind of conflict. The conflict can be something. And that might be in the next column, which is plot themes and special events. What got this family to the point, this husband and wife, that they need to escape to Vermont to repair their marriage? Maybe it is a death of their son. Maybe it is adultery. Maybe it is loss of dreams, lack of support, lack of communication. Maybe their child was murdered and they haven't dealt with it. You know all of a sudden, THE SHACK is popping into my mind as I'm like trying to drive down this path.
[00:32:22] But the point though is that how we describe these things are really important because just like you said, when the reader shows up to Amazon, there was a book they just read, they want to read something like it. They're going to start adding more and more words to help cull out the list of romance books that might show up. For example when I was talking about the romance books, so you type in "romance book," all of a sudden you see hot and steamy and a whole bunch of men without a shirt. Whoa. I want about a marriage, a broken marriage rebuilt, or unfaithful husbands, love again.
[00:32:59] And again, this is not my genre, so I don't know the special words, like I know like "lit RPG cultivation" or "mage," but the writers in that area will kind of know, no, no, no, actually he should say this phrase and oh yeah, that's it, you know, " second chance romance." Got it. You know, I'm probably wrong on that one, but as you can see you, the artist, when you look at those four phrases, you can start to really come up with some interesting terms that you're like, yes, that's a great word.
[00:33:29] Now, what I love most about this sheet is that by the time you're done with it, you've gone through, and I'm sorry, I forgot to talk about styles and tones, so I'll get to that in a second, but when you're done with this sheet, this sheet is awesome. This sheet is awesome because you can start to put those words through Publisher Rocket and actually figure out which ones are the right ones to use that'll be the most powerful for you. And then you can use those words or phrases, you can also pair words together and see how they work as phrases, you can use them as one of your seven Kindle keywords. But also what's really important is that this list is phenomenal for building out your subtitle and your description because you have now just found all these different phrases that truly should connect with your kind of reader and they should help you in shall we say bolstering your book description.
[00:34:17] You are not a sci-fi person, but let me give you two examples of sci-fi book description. "In the not so distant future, the Vulcans have attacked, Earth has been destroyed, and the military is down." Now let's say, "The year is 2148 and Earth is embroiled in intergalactic war with the Vulcans, who are ruthless, blood thirsty, technocrats. The U S military has been just utterly destroyed, is in shambles. Their last hope relies on ..."
[00:34:50] Notice that all I did was, yeah, I bolstered a bit of the sentence, but I used a lot of very science fictiony words, sci-fi military, intergalactic, embattled, embroiled, in shambles. I used even a couple more. Heck, if I had just thrown in "battle cruiser," this would have been great. You know, " ... The last hope is the remnant battle cruiser..." See what I'm saying? Like these words can help to remind your reader, oh yeah, this person knows what I'm talking about. It's connecting with me.
[00:35:18] So I love this list because it helps me as a great starting point for data mining to find the right keywords for my seven Kindle keywords. And then it's amazing for me thinking of, oh man, I should totally use that word in my book description. Oh, I should focus on that. I should say these things. And I think that all together not only helps Amazon and figuring out where your book should show up, but it also helps to convince your target reader once they get there that this is the kind of book they're looking for, because it really hits them on all the levels.
[00:35:48] Matty: It's nice to think that this kind of research serves many purposes because I know sometimes I get discouraged after a while if I'm just thinking of the end result is having readers find it on a particular online platform. But if I think about what you're saying, that it expands to descriptions and other promotional material, and even how you would speak to your book if you're pitching someone in the elevator, that's a kind of a nice bonus for doing that research.
[00:36:16] Dave: Yeah, I think your book, cover title, subtitle, book description, keywords, play this super symbiotic role. Okay. If you have a great book description and you have a great title and you have great keywords, but your book cover doesn't look anything like that kind of book, like it doesn't fit, then that's not right.
[00:36:35] Say for example, you were talking about a wholesome, love again, marriage rebuilding in Vermont book. Okay. If say that. Let's just pretend that was actually the keyword phrase I typed into Google, and that was also the phrase that you targeted. And then I get to your cover and it shows woods with some evil eyes in the back. Well, no, I'm not going to click on it no matter what because that doesn't embody what I'm looking for. Whereas if I get to a book cover, and again, I'm not as skilled in this area, but let's pretend that you see the woods and a family huddled around the fire, looking distant, you know then, okay this feels right because it shows the family.
[00:37:10] One thing I am going to throw in here that's my recommendation when it comes to a book covers is don't try to recreate the wheel, go ahead and look at other authors' book covers, because the thing about it is readers have an expectation of what they're looking for because of what they've seen. And when you create something that's vastly different, sometimes that just feels like, oh, that can't be the kind of book I'm looking for. If you go to sci-fi military, 80% of every sci-fi military book is going to show some giant spaceship up in space. That's it. There might not be a spaceship, but it's going to happen on the cover.
[00:37:44] When I was working with Orson Scott Card, he once got mad on his famous book, ENDER'S GAME. He had said that when the first cover came out as this giant spaceship, a little spaceship coming out of it, and he's like, there's no scene in my book that has that. And the publishing company was like, but Orson ... he goes by Scott ... but Scott, that's not what people are looking for. Like they see the spaceship, they know it's a sci-fi military book. Now they're going to read the book description. That's what we want. And years later he said, yeah, biggest mistake I ever did was argue with them about it. But luckily, I let them go with it cause they were so right. And it was funny. I was chuckling, because as a kid, I did exactly that. I was in the library. I flipped through the book. I saw a spaceship. I was like, ENDER'S GAME, I'm going to read it. And it turned into one of my all-time favorite books.
[00:38:27] Matty: I did an interesting experiment on The Indy Author Facebook page. I got a BookBub Featured Deal email, and I was reading through it and I noticed that two of them had a woman who was dressed in red from the back at a distance with I think in both cases it was noticeably either Paris or London in the background with either the Eiffel Tower or a lamppost forming sort of a vertical element. And then World War II airplanes in the sky. And I thought that's interesting that two of those in the same thing. And since then I've collected probably two dozen of these book covers that are all clearly historical, probably romance, the woman from the back in red. Something identifiable and vertical.
[00:39:12] And I finally just gave up because I thought I could collect hundreds of these things. And they all had titles like THE HEIRESS or THE TRANSLATER or THE DIPLOMAT. And I thought that's perfect because I want the woman in the red dress with THE SOMETHING title, exactly what you're saying. It's a very clear message to the reader about what they're going to get.
[00:39:33] Dave: Exactly. I know what I'm looking for when I'm looking for sci-fi military. And if I don't see it, I'm rarely going to take a chance to look more into the book. I love the example that you gave, because what's really cool about those terms, especially in the title, those are aged titles. THE DUCHESS, right? We all know what time period that's talking about. Or what kind of high society it is. THE DIPLOMAT. Like these are all terms that fit really well with that cover, which, you don't even know the book description, but when you describe that book cover and you told me that title, well, we got a clear indication of what time period it is, what kind of book this is, who is the main character. We can already start to figure out some of the plot themes and special events going on in the background. That's what's most important. That's why when I have those four areas to focus on, I don't just want that for my seven Kindle keywords. I want to use it in my book description.
[00:40:22] And also too, when I hire my book designer, I send them the keywords and I tell them, hey, heads up buddy or gal. These are going to be the phrases that are going to drive people to see the book. So now that you know that this person that I'm going to work to attract use these words in looking for the book are they're looking for, let's do that.
[00:40:45] I was working with an author, I don't have permission to use her name, but she's actually really big in the industry. She was writing a book and we were working on the time periods and settings. And sure enough, I did not know this, it was not Victorian era because it was much later. It was during the time period in England where the industrial age happened, they were moving away from these things. And through research, we found out that there's actually a name for this time period called Gas Lamp, because that's when they had the lamppost with the gas. They had switched from candles. It was that exact time period.
[00:41:23] Well, sure enough. That's actually a really good keyword for that time period, especially for that setting. And so using that, we wanted to make sure that readers, when they saw the cover, knew that it was going to be England in that time period. So we had the designer actually add the gas lamps in it. So then you knew what it was and what time period it was. And this was a really great thing, it really helped out with the marketing of this book, because the cover even gave out more information to the reader of what kind of book, and this was a perfect fit. So this is why I think that your keywords play a vital role in your book cover, title, subtitle, and book description, and creating that four-column approach is a very good start to it all.
[00:42:07] Matty: Well, Dave, thank you so much. This was so interesting. And please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all your offerings online.
[00:42:15] Dave: You could go to kindlepreneur.com. I've got a contact page there, and if there's any questions you have based off of what we talked about, hit me up there.
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From personal update: Red Dress Cover Trope
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