If you have a book listed on Amazon, you are probably familiar with “tags.” Amazon allows you, the author, to assign tags to your book listing. Tags are descriptive words or short phrases which describe your book. Some tags relate to characteristics of your book (kindle, text to speech enabled, nonfiction, etc.) and others hint at the contents (paranormal, suspense, female sleuths, etc.).
Any Amazon customer can add tags to your book. They can also vote tags up or down, indicating whether or not they agree with the tags.
Amazon uses these tags as one of the parameters when deciding where to place your book in search results. If someone searches for UKULELE FOR BEGINNERS, Amazon searches for matching titles, then looks at book descriptions and finally looks at tags. Using some algorithm known only to them, they then rank the matching titles and display them to the customer.
[Off-topic comment: I am only guessing at the sequence Amazon uses when deciding which book to list first, second, third, etc., but I think I'm pretty close to being right. If you have a book about ukulele for beginners and you title it "Play That Thang!" with a description like "Be the life of the party! Everybody loves the uke player!", you are not going to show up in the top million results for UKULELE FOR BEGINNERS.]
From time to time, I read a forum post from an author expressing their angst at the inappropriate tags associated with their book. The good thing about tags is that anybody can tag your book. The bad thing is that anybody can tag your book with whatever tags they like. So somebody could tag our ukulele book with things like ‘this book sucks’, ‘grating instruments’ or ‘overpriced’.
My question to those who are upset with inappropriate tags is “why do you care?”
First of all, hardly anybody will search for THIS BOOK SUCKS, and if they do, they aren’t going to buy anything in the search results anyway. But let’s say they do search for THIS BOOK SUCKS. Do you want your book to show up in the search results? OF COURSE YOU DO! You want your book to be on top of every search result, whether it belongs there or not. Do you want your book to show up if somebody searches for UKALALY FOR BEGGINERS? OF COURSE YOU DO! I think you should tag your book with every possible misspelling of ukulele. Actually, if somebody misspells a word and that misspelling matches one of your tags, your book will automatically be placed above every book that isn’t tagged with that particular misspelling.
Switching roles from author to marketer is always difficult. Force yourself to tag your book like a marketer, not an author. Tag your book with ‘guitar for beginners’, ‘childrens music’, ‘don ho’, anything potential buyers might search for.
Do you have any tips about how to use tags effectively? Please share your thoughts about tags in the comments below.