Today’s marketing tips are about finding new categories to place your books in if the current ones aren’t working for you.
1. Go to Amazon.com and type Kindle store into the search box.
Click on the Kindle Ebook tab under the search bar.
Click on the genre for your book (for example Romance) and look at the sub categories.
Click on a sub genre for your book (for example Contemporary).
Underneath are sections to refine by. If you choose one from the top and one from the bottom section, or two from a section, it will tell you along the top how many books are in this category. The lower the number, the less books there are in that category to compete with. For example in Contemporary Romance, with sub categories Wealthy and Beaches, there are 898 other books. If your chosen category for your book was Contemporary Romance, you could use the keywords, Wealthy and Beaches for a romantic book about an exotic wedding on a beach with gorgeous men. Alternatively, for the same book, Wealthy and Wedding as keywords would result in 1,450 competing titles.
Try lots of combinations and see which are the best selection of keywords for your work.
If you chose Cowboys and Amnesia in this genre, you would only have 38 competing titles! Remember you need a strong main category or no one will find you anyway, unless you are well promoted or well known. Don’t pick random categories, as they must fit within the context of your book.
2. Pick your two book categories very carefully, but if they don’t work, change them!
3. You have up to seven optional extra keywords. These keywords can be more than one word. For a book about Book marketing, you could use: Books on marketing, Marketing & Promotion, Making more sales, PR & sales, How to sell books, Books on marketing, Publishing success. These would be one keyword each. Check out possible combinations first and see how many competing titles there are.
I’ve just changed all of the categories for my own books, so I’ll let you know how I get on in the coming months.
