Visibility on Amazon: Changing Categories and Keywords, Part 2…

Posted: April 25, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: popular, Publishing, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing, writing skills | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How to Increase the Visibility of Your Book on Amazon, Part 2:

How to find your category on Amazon:

I got some questions on how to find your category, so here are some detailed instructions:

Go to the homepage of Amazon. Do not type anything in the search bar, but tap the ‘All’ and select Kindle Store in the drop down menu. Now you get everything in the Kindle Store with a list on the left that can help you narrow down your search.

Leaving the search bar empty, you go to the second filter option ‘Kindle Store’, where you have a list:

Kindle Devices (34)
Kindle Accessories (466)
Kindle Blogs (4)
Kindle eBooks (2,627,280)
Kindle Magazines (490)
Kindle Newspapers (157)
Kindle Singles (519)
Kindle Worlds (475)

Select Kindle eBooks (2,627,280)

If you scroll down, you’ll find a list in the left bar with:

Kindle eBooks
Arts & Photography (146,000)
Biographies & Memoirs (115,714)
Business & Money (167,153)
Children’s eBooks (136,939)
Comics & Graphic Novels (21,583)
Computers & Technology (46,320)
Cookbooks, Food & Wine (38,428)
Crafts, Hobbies & Home (49,929)
Education & Reference (162,350)
Gay & Lesbian (25,800)
Health, Fitness & Dieting (165,809)
History (145,069)
Humor & Entertainment (72,955)
Literature & Fiction (856,128)
Mystery, Thriller & Suspense (148,423)
Nonfiction (1,339,206)
Parenting & Relationships (51,240)
Politics & Social Sciences (183,981)
Professional & Technical (209,018)
Religion & Spirituality (275,450)
Romance (189,206)
Science & Math (156,301)
Science Fiction & Fantasy (161,909)
Self-Help (68,535)
Sports & Outdoors (45,612)
Teen & Young Adult (55,344)
Travel (41,338)
Foreign Languages (554,299)

If you select one of them, you’ll narrow down further.
Select ‘Mystery, Thriller & Suspense (148,423)’ and you get:

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Crime Fiction (33,009)
Mystery (67,450)
Suspense (42,654)
Thrillers (55,928)

Select Mystery (67,450) and you get:

Mystery
African American (700)
British Detectives (3,561)
Collections & Anthologies (4,130)
Cozy (2,982)
Gay & Lesbian (832)
Hard-Boiled (5,786)
Historical (4,790)
International Mystery & Crime (1,626)
Police Procedurals (6,312)
Private Investigators (3,063)
Series (567)
Women Sleuths (11,826)

This is the last selection you can make in this area. So say your protagonist is a female detective, so you select Women Sleuths (11,826)

Now select the first book at the top.

Now scroll down to Product Details and you’ll find:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery > Police Procedurals
#1 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery > Women Sleuths
#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Women’s Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Women Sleuths

Copy the link you like:
Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Women’s Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Women Sleuths

And go through the procedure to tell KDP you want your category changed to: Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Women’s Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Women Sleuths

Good luck

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Visibility on Amazon: Changing Categories and Keywords…

Posted: April 18, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: popular, Publishing, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing, writing skills | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

How to Increase the Visibility of Your Book on Amazon:

Categories on Amazon seem limited when you try to add them to your ebook in the KDP dashboard. When I tried to categorise the Amsterdam Assassin Series, all I could get was ‘Fiction>Mystery & Thriller>Suspense’ and ‘Fiction>Mystery & Thriller>General’, both categories that have hundreds of thousands of books in them. Which makes your book pretty difficult to get on the first few pages. What you need to do is adjust your category so you’re no longer a small fish a big pool, but the big fish in the small pool. And here is how you do that:

Changing Your Category:
If you go to Amazon Kindle Store and you see all the books available, click down on your category. First you select ‘Kindle e-books’ (2,610,028 books), then click ‘Mystery, Thriller & Suspense’{147,801), and select ‘Suspense’ (42,470). You’ll find that Suspense is divided into different categories that were not visible in the KDP dashboard, namely Ghosts, Horror, Occult, Paranormal, Political, Psychological. By narrowing down to, for instance, ‘Psychological’, despite the fact that Psychological is one of the larger subcategories, you still reduce your competition from 42,470 (Suspense) to 9,723 (Psychological).

(Below the categories, you also see two more selections you’re able to make; ‘Moods & Themes’ and ‘Characters’. We’ll come back to that in a minute, but we come to changing/adding categories to your book.)

First, copy the string that denotes the category you want to be in: ‘Kindle eBooks › Mystery, Thriller & Suspense › Suspense › Psychological’’.

Now, go to your KDP dashboard, where you edit details of your book. If you check your categories, they’ll be different from the Amazon website. Now, what you’ll do is go to the bottom of the page, where in the lower right corner you can click on ‘Contact Us’. That will take you to the ‘What is the problem?’ page.

Choose ‘Publish Your Book’, and ‘Add/Change Categories’. You’ll find that you can choose to contact by telephone or email. Select email and in the subject line you put ‘Category Not Listed’.

Fill in the required tabs: Name and ASIN of the book, and you have a window where you can explain your reason for contacting KDP.

Officially, you can have two categories, but KDP is known for adding categories without removing old ones. So, phrase your question something like this:

Hello,
I’d like to add (Title of your book) to this category: ‘Kindle eBooks › Mystery, Thriller & Suspense › Suspense › Psychological’.
If necessary, you can remove the category: ‘Kindle eBooks › Mystery, Thriller & Suspense › Suspense’.
Cordially, (Your name).

In my case, they didn’t remove categories, but just added the new one.

Keywords:
We also noticed the ‘Moods & Themes’ and ‘Characters’ below the Categories and Subcategories. I asked KDP about them, and they replied that they cannot add them to the category, but both can be added to the seven keywords you’re allowed. For Reprobate, I selected (Characters:) ‘Female Protagonists’ (146) (which counts as one keyword!) and (Moods & Themes) ‘Dark’ (362). If you check both boxes, it reduced the amount of books to… 23 books.

Conclusion, by adding ‘Psychological’ to your category, and adding the words ‘Dark’ and ‘Female Protagonists’ to your keywords, you reduce the competition from 42,470 to 23.

So, to make sure that your book can be found easier by browsers, select a less competitive category and insert a Theme and a Mood into your keywords. One important note on Keywords, don’t put words in your limited keyword section that are already in your book title or description, because they are already in the search facility. So, I shouldn’t put ‘Amsterdam, Assassin, homicide’ in my keywords, because those words are already being used. Instead, my keywords should be ‘dark, female protagonist, police procedural, crime fiction’, or something similar.

Although changing category and keywords will make your book more visible than the standard categories and wrong keywords, take you time to experiment by changing/adding other categories and keywords.

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RANT: Toddlers and Tiaras

Posted: November 5, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: popular, Reading, review, television, Uncategorized, Writing, writing skills | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

The rainy season came and with it indoor exercise. So I went down to the gym to walk the treadmill.

Right in front of the treadmill are huge TV screens that show a variety of channels. Today, during my exercise, I watched a reality show around underage beauty pageants called ‘Toddlers & Tiaras’ on TLC, which is a show about beauty pageants for infants.

I don’t mind (too much) if an adult wishes to enter into a pageant. Although I dislike the vapid nature of pageants where superficial aesthetics are awarded, I can understand why some people need the validation. I can understand pet pageants, where dogs and cats are groomed until sometimes they no longer resemble pets.

I cannot stand these beauty pageants for infants and children. Of course I’d heard of the show and I’d seen flashes of announcements, but I never watched a whole T&T episode.

Apart from dressing up toddlers as adults and teaching them how to ‘seduce’ the panel, the children seemed to be programmed to become self-centered superficial brats. An 8-year old girl was behaving horridly egotistical, smugly announcing that she’d feel bad for the other contestants who would be crying when she’d walk off with the crown. She ended up getting a price for best personality (!) and three other awards, but the ulitmate award went to a 1-year old. She was visibly upset, crying and pouting, and went into a total meltdown in the corridor behind the stage.

And the parents looking at each other with tight plastic smiles hiding the raging hatred. Talking to each other how ‘rude’ some parents were for not having their child on the stage on time, and gnashing their teeth about the injustice of a one-year old winning a 1,000 dollar award.

I look at my three-year old, smearing her face with chocolate and laughing at herself in the mirror and I realise how child abuse can take different forms. Dressing a child up as an adult and proclaiming that they ‘like’ going to these meat market pageants is just as horrific as claiming they ‘like’ to be sexually intimate with adults. These beauty pageants teach children how to behave like adults in order to please adults.

Children have an innate need to please their parents, both because they love them and because children do realise that they are dependent on their caregivers. To abuse that need for affection by parading them on superficial beauty/popularity meat markets is just as despicable as sexual abuse.

Of course the parents who project their vapid ambitions on their children will claim that the children enjoy the pageants, relish the dressing up, and welcome the competition. I won’t deny that. I’m sure they do. But you have to ask yourself ‘why’?

A child needs affection and encouragement. And children have excellent antennae to gauge their parents feelings.

These pageant children relish dressing up. So does my 3-year old daughter. She dresses up like a lion or a horse or a crocodile. Sometimes she dresses up like a princess. It’s a way for children to try out different personae and interact with the world.

The competition is a different aspect. Children are geared towards pleasing their parents and they know they’ll be praised for performance. However, competition has a dark side where sportsmanship is denied and children are encouraged to ‘crush’ the competition. Children crying because a panel didn’t consider them the most beautiful child is a clear signal of rampant egotistical superficiality. Instead of teaching children that happiness is more important than beauty, these children will become self-centered brats for whom adoration equates success. And where the lack of adoration plunges them into deep and dark despair. They’ll be beautiful on the outside, but ugly and twisted inside because their beauty becomes their only currency for affection. And they won’t have the mental development of adults to deal with this ignominy.

And no child welcomes a highly strung competitive ‘beauty pageant’, where they are taught that dressing up provocatively and wiggling their undeveloped bodies for adult strangers will get them parental adoration from ‘caregivers’ who have no idea how grotesque their ambitions truly are.