Episode 086 - Matty Overhauls Her Keywords Inbetweenisode
July 3, 2021
In Episode 85 of The Indy Author Podcast, I interviewed Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur and creator of Publisher Rocket about keywords, and after that episode I got pretty obsessed about my own keywords, and played around a bit with Dave’s four-column method. Of course, the devil’s in the details, so as I was working on optimizing my keywords, I decided to tap into a couple of additional resources, including two previous guests of the podcast, and I’m going to share with you my “before” keywords, the process I went through, and my “after” keywords.
I hope this will inspire you to take a look at your own keywords with an eye to making sure you are getting maximum value in guiding the right readers to your books.
Many thanks to previous guests Dale L. Roberts and Joshua Tallent for contributing to this inbetweenisode.
Many thanks to previous guests Dale L. Roberts and Joshua Tallent for contributing to this inbetweenisode.
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Hello, fellow creative voyagers, and welcome to the first “inbetweenisode” of The Indy Author Podcast: Matty’s Keyword Overhaul!
In Episode 85, I interviewed Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur and creator of Publisher Rocket about keywords, and after that episode I got pretty obsessed about my own keywords, and played around a bit with Dave’s four-column method. Of course, the devil’s in the details, so as I was working on optimizing my keywords, I decided to tap into a couple of additional resources, including two previous guests of the podcast, and I’m going to share with you my “before” keywords, the process I went through, and my “after” keywords. I hope this will inspire you to take a look at your own keywords with an eye to making sure you are getting maximum value in guiding the right readers to your books.
For this inbetweenisode, I’m going to dispense with a personal update and the message from a featured affiliate. I’m also going to dispense with the full Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee plugs, but I do hope that if you find this information useful, you’ll consider supporting me on one of those platforms. You can find out more about Patreon at theindyauthor.com/podcast, and you can find a Buy Me a Coffee link at the bottom of any page at theindyauthor.com.
And finally, just a note that as I was working on this first inbetweenisode, I realized that to make it feasible for me to get this produced without shortchanging my next “official” episode, I would need to spend a little less time polishing it up as I usually and I’d be curious to get your thoughts on whether you found this distracting or whether you enjoyed the more informal tone. (If the informal tone is popular, I might pull back on some of the editing I’m doing for the regular episodes, which would be a huge time savings for me.)
So, on to a look at what I did to optimize my keywords …
First, let’s take a look at what I started with. I’m going to use my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels as an example, and I’m going to focus on the first book in the series: THE SENSE OF DEATH.
Just to give you a sense of what the book is about, here’s the description:
Ann Kinnear thought the job was just another sensing-for-hire ... until she realized that the woman in the Philadelphia townhouse was the victim of murder. Will Ann be able to bring the victim's killer to justice—or will she pay the ultimate price herself?
Ann Kinnear has created a peaceful existence at her cabin in the Adirondack woods. But the calm is shattered after socialite Elizabeth Firth is reported missing. With few clues and fewer options, Detective Joe Booth calls upon Ann's spirit sensing abilities to help solve the mystery, and to uncover what Elizabeth's husband is hiding beneath his cloak of wealth and privilege.
As Ann is drawn deeper into a web of lies and betrayal, will its fatal threads snare her as well?
*Many* years ago I paid someone I found through Upwork or Fiverr or some similar platform to come up with keywords for me, and here’s what I got:
paranormal psychic
ghost thriller
psychic medium
philadelphia suspense
psychic series
supernatural book
supernatural thriller
Obviously those are violating several of Dave Chesson’s guidelines—most notably that they repeat words (like “psychic” and “supernatural”) to no good end. Also, I was woefully underutilizing the 50 characters available to me for each keyword phrase, although this list is from so long ago that it’s possible that the limitations were different back then.
Now that you know where I started, let’s check out what KDP itself has to say about best practices for keywords. Oftentimes the website of the platform itself is the last place I go for information because it’s usually confusingly written, but in this case, the information on the KDP site is quite clear and helpful. (I’ll include a link in the show notes.) Much of what KDP has to say echoes Dave Chesson’s advice, but I thought it would be useful to recap it.
Best practices
· Combine keywords in the most logical order. Customers search for "military science fiction" but probably not for "fiction science military"
· Use up to seven keywords or short phrases. Keep an eye on the character limit in the text field
· Before publishing, search using keywords you’re considering on Amazon. If you get irrelevant or unsatisfying results, make some changes. When searching, look at the suggestions that appear in the "Search" field drop down
· Think like a reader. Imagine how you'd search if you were a customer
Useful keyword types
· Setting (Colonial America)
· Character types (single dad, veteran)
· Character roles (strong female lead)
· Plot themes (coming of age, forgiveness)
· Story tone (dystopian, feel-good)
Keywords to avoid
· Information covered elsewhere in your book's metadata (title, contributors, etc.)
· Subjective claims about quality (e.g. "best novel ever")
· Time-sensitive statements ("new," "on sale," "available now")
· Information common to most items in the category ("book")
· Spelling errors
· Variants of spacing, punctuation, capitalization, and pluralization ("80GB" and "80 GB," "computer" and "computers", etc.). Exception: Words translated in more than one way (e.g. "Mao Zedong" or "Mao Tse-tung," "Hanukkah" or "Chanukah"
· Anything misrepresentative like the name of an author not associated with your book. This kind of information can create a confusing customer experience. Kindle Direct Publishing has a zero tolerance policy for metadata that is meant to advertise, promote, or mislead
· Quotation marks in search terms. Single words work better than phrases, and specific words work better than general ones. If you enter "complex suspenseful whodunit," only people who type all of those words will find your book. For better results, enter this: complex suspenseful whodunit. Customers can search for any of those words and find your book
· Amazon program names like as "Kindle Unlimited" or "KDP Select"
Note: This list is not exhaustive. All keywords must comply with our Terms and Conditions.
Now that I was armed with KDP’s guidance, I figured I’d tap into a couple of other resources to determine how I should update my own keywords.
My first stop was Joshua Tallent, who appeared in Episode 042 - The Importance of Metadata, and I’ll include a link to that episode. Coincidentally, Joshua had just done a great episode on keywords for his own podcast, BookSmarts. He gave me the okay to share an excerpt from that episode here, and I’ll include a link to the full episode as well.
You’ll hear Joshua refer to ONIX in this clip, and ONIX (ONline Information eXchange) refers to XML standard metadata formats used within the book trade.
Joshua Tallent BookSmarts Podcast Excerpt
So now that we've talked about how search works, let's get down to a couple of practicalities for publishers about keywords specifically on Amazon. So we'll start with the keyword limits. Now the Nielsen UK study that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast also found that titles with more than 30 individual keywords in their keyword element saw significantly higher average sales than those with fewer words. 30 was kind of the breaking point. And when you get to about 30 words or so, from that point forward, the results of the number of sales, average sales, were fairly consistent. Whereas below that the number was going down as the number of keywords went down. So Amazon allows publishers who are sending them metadata via ONIX to provide up to 210 characters or actually bytes of keyword content, not including spaces and semi-colons. So this means that Amazon doesn't care about the specific keyword phrases that you might provide Amazon mixes and matches your keywords in ways that you might never expect. And it combines different keywords together to create what are called derived keywords from the individual words, because they're taking out those spaces and semi-colons, they're just looking at each individual word itself and then combine them together.
So for example, if you have, let's say, japanese cooking as a keyword phrase in your Amazon ONIX file and farm to table in your keywords list as well, then Amazon can combine those two different keyword phrases to match a query that someone types in for Japanese farm. Now what's great about this is that you don't always have to know what keyword phrases are the most popular or which phrases are likely to show your book higher in the search results.
So instead of you having to know that you should include the word keyword Japanese farm in your keywords list, amazon system just breaks your book for that as a derived keyword automatically. And this is why you want more keywords. The more words that you put into your search, the more words that are available to that search engine, the more long tail queries your book is able to rank for an Amazon search results, because it has more words to work with and create more variables, more derived keywords.
And also you want your keywords to be specific, as specific as possible. If you have 50 keywords, more specific keywords are better because of how they're going to be combined. You'd rather be a big fish in a lot of different small ponds than a small fish in a big ocean of books. And that's what a lot of keywords can do for your book.
https://booksmartspodcast.com/2021/06/23/episode-8-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-keywords/
Joshua’s BookSmarts episode offered insight not only into how Amazon keywords help readers find your books when searching on Amazon, but also at a very high level how Google search works and how it differs from Amazon.
Next I chatted with Dale L. Roberts of Self Publishing with Dale, who is a four-time guest, having appeared in …
034 The Importance of a Video Presence
044 Using Aggregators versus Going Direct
074 Perspectives on Personal Branding
082 Perspective on … Writer's Block
So listen in on the conversation I had with Dale ...
<No transcript for the conversation with Dale>
I think Dale is a little skeptical of my experiment but as I said I don’t have any compunctions about giving this approach of trying for cross-pollination of keywords a try since it can’t be any worse than my current keywords.
I also tapped into the Facebook group Wide for the Win, which Mark Leslie Lefebvre discussed when he joined me for Episode 063 – Wide for the Win …
There I was reminded of something that I probably knew but had never struck me before: that not many of the platforms that indy authors use include keywords.
B&N relied heavily on categories, not keywords, to lead readers to new books
There are no keywords on Apply, Kobo, or Google Play
For Google Play, Erin Wright of the Wide for the Win FB Group recommends putting a list of keywords (explicitly marked as such) at the bottom of the description field … as with the Amazon keywords, this works better if you enter phrases that match what the reader might search for. For example, for Erin’s book Accounting for Love: A Long Valley Romance, at the bottom of the description, Erin entered:
KEYWORDS: free romance books full novel, cowboy love, free romance audiobooks, happily ever after, free romance novels, romantic novels, small town romance …
… and so on—there are about 60 words entered as phrases, as Erin recommends.
One thing I liked about this is that it’s probably helpful not only for readers finding the book in a search, but if a reader just happens upon the page, the keywords provide useful information to them in that scenario as well.
Although this works well on Google Play, if you try to do this on Apple, it will kick it back to you.
Erin: Apple search indexes your blurb so you want to use keywords as you can in your blurb, but it has to read well for a reader, as opposed to just a keyword dump of a bunch of words at the end of the blurb.
The final group I pinged for input on keywords was my private Facebook group for my fiction work—Matty Dalrymple Readers Group—and posted this request:
Market research request: If you wanted to recommend my Ann Kinnear books (yay!) to someone who shops on Amazon but couldn't remember my name or the names of the books (oh no!), what terms would you suggest he/she search for to find them? Note your suggestions in the Comments ... and please enter your ideas before scanning others' suggestions since I don't want anyone to be swayed by what someone else suggests. Thank you!!
I’m mainly seeing the words that I had already come up with, but I am seeing a couple that I hadn’t thought of, so it’s a good check, and one that I plan to repeat every quarter or so.
So just to recap, the keyword phrases I started out with were …
paranormal psychic
ghost thriller
psychic medium
philadelphia suspense
psychic series
supernatural book
supernatural thriller
… and here’s what I came up with …
supernatural suspense novel series
amateur women sleuth senser psychic medium
supernatural paranormal ghosts spirits sensing
suspense thriller murder crime investigator
Philadelphia Pennsylvania Delaware New Jersey
paranormal suspense novel series [large print]
spectral haunted wilmington chester county
Based on what Dave and Joshua had to say, by entering the data this way, Amazon should be able to match to an almost limitless number of phrases a reader could type into a search: “supernatural ghost crime,” “suspense murder amateur sleuth, “woman medium thriller,” “Philadelphia psychic series,” etc., etc., etc.
Of course, it would be great if I could run some report on KDP that would tell me whether that’s happening or not, but the one thing that’s still not entirely clear to me is how I will be able to tell if this is working, and, if it is, which words are working best and which should be swapped out for new ones. I plan to tap into my expert resources to better understand how I should be assessing my keywords going forward, and I’ll share that information as I get it.
In Episode 85, I interviewed Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur and creator of Publisher Rocket about keywords, and after that episode I got pretty obsessed about my own keywords, and played around a bit with Dave’s four-column method. Of course, the devil’s in the details, so as I was working on optimizing my keywords, I decided to tap into a couple of additional resources, including two previous guests of the podcast, and I’m going to share with you my “before” keywords, the process I went through, and my “after” keywords. I hope this will inspire you to take a look at your own keywords with an eye to making sure you are getting maximum value in guiding the right readers to your books.
For this inbetweenisode, I’m going to dispense with a personal update and the message from a featured affiliate. I’m also going to dispense with the full Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee plugs, but I do hope that if you find this information useful, you’ll consider supporting me on one of those platforms. You can find out more about Patreon at theindyauthor.com/podcast, and you can find a Buy Me a Coffee link at the bottom of any page at theindyauthor.com.
And finally, just a note that as I was working on this first inbetweenisode, I realized that to make it feasible for me to get this produced without shortchanging my next “official” episode, I would need to spend a little less time polishing it up as I usually and I’d be curious to get your thoughts on whether you found this distracting or whether you enjoyed the more informal tone. (If the informal tone is popular, I might pull back on some of the editing I’m doing for the regular episodes, which would be a huge time savings for me.)
So, on to a look at what I did to optimize my keywords …
First, let’s take a look at what I started with. I’m going to use my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels as an example, and I’m going to focus on the first book in the series: THE SENSE OF DEATH.
Just to give you a sense of what the book is about, here’s the description:
Ann Kinnear thought the job was just another sensing-for-hire ... until she realized that the woman in the Philadelphia townhouse was the victim of murder. Will Ann be able to bring the victim's killer to justice—or will she pay the ultimate price herself?
Ann Kinnear has created a peaceful existence at her cabin in the Adirondack woods. But the calm is shattered after socialite Elizabeth Firth is reported missing. With few clues and fewer options, Detective Joe Booth calls upon Ann's spirit sensing abilities to help solve the mystery, and to uncover what Elizabeth's husband is hiding beneath his cloak of wealth and privilege.
As Ann is drawn deeper into a web of lies and betrayal, will its fatal threads snare her as well?
*Many* years ago I paid someone I found through Upwork or Fiverr or some similar platform to come up with keywords for me, and here’s what I got:
paranormal psychic
ghost thriller
psychic medium
philadelphia suspense
psychic series
supernatural book
supernatural thriller
Obviously those are violating several of Dave Chesson’s guidelines—most notably that they repeat words (like “psychic” and “supernatural”) to no good end. Also, I was woefully underutilizing the 50 characters available to me for each keyword phrase, although this list is from so long ago that it’s possible that the limitations were different back then.
Now that you know where I started, let’s check out what KDP itself has to say about best practices for keywords. Oftentimes the website of the platform itself is the last place I go for information because it’s usually confusingly written, but in this case, the information on the KDP site is quite clear and helpful. (I’ll include a link in the show notes.) Much of what KDP has to say echoes Dave Chesson’s advice, but I thought it would be useful to recap it.
Best practices
· Combine keywords in the most logical order. Customers search for "military science fiction" but probably not for "fiction science military"
· Use up to seven keywords or short phrases. Keep an eye on the character limit in the text field
· Before publishing, search using keywords you’re considering on Amazon. If you get irrelevant or unsatisfying results, make some changes. When searching, look at the suggestions that appear in the "Search" field drop down
· Think like a reader. Imagine how you'd search if you were a customer
Useful keyword types
· Setting (Colonial America)
· Character types (single dad, veteran)
· Character roles (strong female lead)
· Plot themes (coming of age, forgiveness)
· Story tone (dystopian, feel-good)
Keywords to avoid
· Information covered elsewhere in your book's metadata (title, contributors, etc.)
· Subjective claims about quality (e.g. "best novel ever")
· Time-sensitive statements ("new," "on sale," "available now")
· Information common to most items in the category ("book")
· Spelling errors
· Variants of spacing, punctuation, capitalization, and pluralization ("80GB" and "80 GB," "computer" and "computers", etc.). Exception: Words translated in more than one way (e.g. "Mao Zedong" or "Mao Tse-tung," "Hanukkah" or "Chanukah"
· Anything misrepresentative like the name of an author not associated with your book. This kind of information can create a confusing customer experience. Kindle Direct Publishing has a zero tolerance policy for metadata that is meant to advertise, promote, or mislead
· Quotation marks in search terms. Single words work better than phrases, and specific words work better than general ones. If you enter "complex suspenseful whodunit," only people who type all of those words will find your book. For better results, enter this: complex suspenseful whodunit. Customers can search for any of those words and find your book
· Amazon program names like as "Kindle Unlimited" or "KDP Select"
Note: This list is not exhaustive. All keywords must comply with our Terms and Conditions.
Now that I was armed with KDP’s guidance, I figured I’d tap into a couple of other resources to determine how I should update my own keywords.
My first stop was Joshua Tallent, who appeared in Episode 042 - The Importance of Metadata, and I’ll include a link to that episode. Coincidentally, Joshua had just done a great episode on keywords for his own podcast, BookSmarts. He gave me the okay to share an excerpt from that episode here, and I’ll include a link to the full episode as well.
You’ll hear Joshua refer to ONIX in this clip, and ONIX (ONline Information eXchange) refers to XML standard metadata formats used within the book trade.
Joshua Tallent BookSmarts Podcast Excerpt
So now that we've talked about how search works, let's get down to a couple of practicalities for publishers about keywords specifically on Amazon. So we'll start with the keyword limits. Now the Nielsen UK study that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast also found that titles with more than 30 individual keywords in their keyword element saw significantly higher average sales than those with fewer words. 30 was kind of the breaking point. And when you get to about 30 words or so, from that point forward, the results of the number of sales, average sales, were fairly consistent. Whereas below that the number was going down as the number of keywords went down. So Amazon allows publishers who are sending them metadata via ONIX to provide up to 210 characters or actually bytes of keyword content, not including spaces and semi-colons. So this means that Amazon doesn't care about the specific keyword phrases that you might provide Amazon mixes and matches your keywords in ways that you might never expect. And it combines different keywords together to create what are called derived keywords from the individual words, because they're taking out those spaces and semi-colons, they're just looking at each individual word itself and then combine them together.
So for example, if you have, let's say, japanese cooking as a keyword phrase in your Amazon ONIX file and farm to table in your keywords list as well, then Amazon can combine those two different keyword phrases to match a query that someone types in for Japanese farm. Now what's great about this is that you don't always have to know what keyword phrases are the most popular or which phrases are likely to show your book higher in the search results.
So instead of you having to know that you should include the word keyword Japanese farm in your keywords list, amazon system just breaks your book for that as a derived keyword automatically. And this is why you want more keywords. The more words that you put into your search, the more words that are available to that search engine, the more long tail queries your book is able to rank for an Amazon search results, because it has more words to work with and create more variables, more derived keywords.
And also you want your keywords to be specific, as specific as possible. If you have 50 keywords, more specific keywords are better because of how they're going to be combined. You'd rather be a big fish in a lot of different small ponds than a small fish in a big ocean of books. And that's what a lot of keywords can do for your book.
https://booksmartspodcast.com/2021/06/23/episode-8-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-keywords/
Joshua’s BookSmarts episode offered insight not only into how Amazon keywords help readers find your books when searching on Amazon, but also at a very high level how Google search works and how it differs from Amazon.
Next I chatted with Dale L. Roberts of Self Publishing with Dale, who is a four-time guest, having appeared in …
034 The Importance of a Video Presence
044 Using Aggregators versus Going Direct
074 Perspectives on Personal Branding
082 Perspective on … Writer's Block
So listen in on the conversation I had with Dale ...
<No transcript for the conversation with Dale>
I think Dale is a little skeptical of my experiment but as I said I don’t have any compunctions about giving this approach of trying for cross-pollination of keywords a try since it can’t be any worse than my current keywords.
I also tapped into the Facebook group Wide for the Win, which Mark Leslie Lefebvre discussed when he joined me for Episode 063 – Wide for the Win …
There I was reminded of something that I probably knew but had never struck me before: that not many of the platforms that indy authors use include keywords.
B&N relied heavily on categories, not keywords, to lead readers to new books
There are no keywords on Apply, Kobo, or Google Play
For Google Play, Erin Wright of the Wide for the Win FB Group recommends putting a list of keywords (explicitly marked as such) at the bottom of the description field … as with the Amazon keywords, this works better if you enter phrases that match what the reader might search for. For example, for Erin’s book Accounting for Love: A Long Valley Romance, at the bottom of the description, Erin entered:
KEYWORDS: free romance books full novel, cowboy love, free romance audiobooks, happily ever after, free romance novels, romantic novels, small town romance …
… and so on—there are about 60 words entered as phrases, as Erin recommends.
One thing I liked about this is that it’s probably helpful not only for readers finding the book in a search, but if a reader just happens upon the page, the keywords provide useful information to them in that scenario as well.
Although this works well on Google Play, if you try to do this on Apple, it will kick it back to you.
Erin: Apple search indexes your blurb so you want to use keywords as you can in your blurb, but it has to read well for a reader, as opposed to just a keyword dump of a bunch of words at the end of the blurb.
The final group I pinged for input on keywords was my private Facebook group for my fiction work—Matty Dalrymple Readers Group—and posted this request:
Market research request: If you wanted to recommend my Ann Kinnear books (yay!) to someone who shops on Amazon but couldn't remember my name or the names of the books (oh no!), what terms would you suggest he/she search for to find them? Note your suggestions in the Comments ... and please enter your ideas before scanning others' suggestions since I don't want anyone to be swayed by what someone else suggests. Thank you!!
I’m mainly seeing the words that I had already come up with, but I am seeing a couple that I hadn’t thought of, so it’s a good check, and one that I plan to repeat every quarter or so.
So just to recap, the keyword phrases I started out with were …
paranormal psychic
ghost thriller
psychic medium
philadelphia suspense
psychic series
supernatural book
supernatural thriller
… and here’s what I came up with …
supernatural suspense novel series
amateur women sleuth senser psychic medium
supernatural paranormal ghosts spirits sensing
suspense thriller murder crime investigator
Philadelphia Pennsylvania Delaware New Jersey
paranormal suspense novel series [large print]
spectral haunted wilmington chester county
Based on what Dave and Joshua had to say, by entering the data this way, Amazon should be able to match to an almost limitless number of phrases a reader could type into a search: “supernatural ghost crime,” “suspense murder amateur sleuth, “woman medium thriller,” “Philadelphia psychic series,” etc., etc., etc.
Of course, it would be great if I could run some report on KDP that would tell me whether that’s happening or not, but the one thing that’s still not entirely clear to me is how I will be able to tell if this is working, and, if it is, which words are working best and which should be swapped out for new ones. I plan to tap into my expert resources to better understand how I should be assessing my keywords going forward, and I’ll share that information as I get it.
Links
KDP Help on keywords - https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201298500
Joshua Tallent BookSmarts Podcast Excerpt - https://booksmartspodcast.com/2021/06/23/episode-8-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-keywords/
Dale L. Roberts AMAZON KEYWORDS FOR BOOKS (Amazon affiliate link)
Click here to see Erin Wright's ACCOUNTING FOR LOVE book listing on Google Play, illustrating her recommendation (specific to Google Play) to include keyword phrases after the book description.
Previous Joshua Tallent appearance on The Indy Author Podcast:
Previous Dale Roberts appearances on The Indy Author Podcast:
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment and let us know!
