Why Amazon Keywords Matter For Your Book

Here are some important do’s and don’ts to help you choose your Amazon keywords because the better your keywords, the better your chance of discovery.

Remember those days when there were thousands of bookstores in every in every state, and you’d wander in on your lunch hour and talk to a friendly person about your preferences and browse with them and maybe sit and have a cup of coffee before deciding to take some books to the counter and buy them?

Well, today, it’s estimated that 84 percent of all book sales are happening online. And guess what? For independent authors, it’s more like 98 percent of book sales occurring online.

We indies don’t have the name recognition, and we don’t have the marketing mechanisms of a traditional publisher to get an endcap in Barnes & Noble, so very few indie book sales are happening in these types of retail settings. That’s why you’ve got to get everything right in your book’s metadata and your Amazon keywords.

You need to make it easy to find your book on Amazon, so you need keywords that accurately portray your book’s content and match the words customers use when searching.

If you don’t use the right keywords, your book is never going to come up in an online search, unless somebody’s typing in your book’s title or your name. You’ve got to help yourself by putting in those those seven words or phrases Amazon allows you to input and list your book in the proper Amazon categories.

Amazon keywords

Amazon allows seven keywords to be listed with your title — seven opportunities to describe your book, if you will — seven 50-character descriptors or phrases.

Here are some things to think about.

Setting. Every book has a setting, so be as descriptive as you can: Colonial America, French Provence, Philadelphia, rural.

Character type. Single dad, veteran, angry old man, angry old man who raises ducks. Be specific and add to the richness and fullness of your book description.

Character role. Strong female lead is one, and there are plenty of other character types that are worth calling out.

Plot themes. Coming-of-age, forgiveness — these are the types of things people are searching for on Amazon.

Story tone. Dystopian, feel good, World War I — these types of descriptors add depth to the picture you’re trying to paint about your book.

Keyword do’s

There are plenty of opportunities to add to the discoverability of your book using Amazon keywords. Here are a few tips to add to your chances of success.

• Focus your book’s description on the actual content of your book.
• Arrange keywords in the most logical order. For instance, someone will likely search for “French murder mystery,” not “murder mystery in France.”
• Keep an eye on the character limit.
• Don’t use symbols or punctuation, it will confuse the algorithm.
• If your book is available in different formats — eBook, printed book — keep the keywords and descriptions consistent across all formats.

Keyword don’ts

Misrepresentations, like listing the name of an author not associated with your book as an Amazon keyword, is going to create a confusing customer experience, at best, and I’ve heard different things about what Amazon does about it.

So, if you include “Jack Reacher meets Jack Ryan at a Cardinals game,” or “The one book James Patterson hasn’t written,” Amazon may reject the book and make you redo your metadata. Or, sometimes, they just basically blacklist or don’t even consider those keywords, so you’ve lost your opportunity and you’re not going to get anywhere.

Now, you can put those descriptions in your book description.

Other things to avoid:

• Don’t include any information covered elsewhere in your book’s metadata. You don’t need to put your title or your contributors or illustrator — that info doesn’t belong in the keywords.
• No qualifiers like “best novel ever.”
• Time-sensitive statements like “new” or “on sale now.” If you want to put that in your description, that’s fine — in fact, you should update that info as relevant.
• Variants of spacing, punctuation, capitalization, and pluralization — “80GB” and “80 gb,” or “computer” and “computers” — including multiple variations of the same thing won’t help you. (Now, I’ll note that, with spelling, there are some exceptions. Hanukkah, for instance, can be spelled two ways, and it’s probably a good idea to include both if that happens to be part of your book.)
• Don’t put quotation marks in your search terms.

As a rule, specific words are better than general ones — be as specific as possible so that you grab the attention of the reader looking for the content in your book.

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Want to hear Steven’s (totally legal and Amazon-approved) keyword and category hacks? Watch the video of the BookBaby Live broadcast!

Learn more about self-publishing — catch up on all of our BookBaby Live presentations on BookBaby’s YouTube channel.

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