Sally Jenkins

If you’ve published on Kindle or in paperback via Amazon KDP, you’ll be familiar with the concept of keywords. The purpose of these keywords is to make your book more discoverable in Amazon searches. But deciding which seven keywords or phrases (a keyword can be a short phrase rather than a single word) to use is difficult, especially for works of fiction.

A few days ago I watched an online presentation organised by the the Alliance of Independent Authors, featuring Darren Hardy who is the UK Author and Editorial Programmes Manager at Amazon KDP. He was talking about how to increase book sales via KDP and he gave some useful tips about keywords:

• Keep them generic but relevant
• Don’t use punctuation or ‘stop’ words. A ‘stop’ word is something like ‘also’, ‘and’ or ‘because’. These words are skipped over by the automated search logic.
• Don’t waste words by repeating words already in the book’s title or subtitle.
• Avoid using things like, ‘brand new’, ‘amazing’, ‘free’ etc.
• Do not use the names of other authors or the titles of other books.
• Include synonyms or alternative spellings of words. Readers may use these in their searches.
• Include the setting of your book.
• Include character types, e.g. ‘single dad’.
• Include character roles, e.g. ‘strong female’.
• Include plot themes, e.g. ‘coming of age’ or ‘forgiveness’.
• Include the story tone, e.g. ‘feel good’ or ‘dystopian’.

Darren also mentioned the importance of category selection in making a book more discoverable. I’ve previously written about Amazon categories in this post.

If you’d like to generate more sales for a book, it’s well worth reviewing your keywords and categories to see if they can be improved.