If you tag it, Twitter will come

(This post will be copied to the author resources section. It's a useful tip!)

So I'm comparing notes with a friend on Goodreads, and she asks me if I've added any tags to the kindle version of The Goldenwealth Light on Amazon. I thought about it and realized that I'd added a few categories when I first published the book, but no, I hadn't done anything with tagging. She mentioned to me that her book is now all over Twitter, simply because she'd added some tags to the bottom of her book's sale page.

Wait, what?

It's true, tagging makes that much of a difference! I didn't think much of it at first, but with a "why not?" attitude, I scrolled to the bottom of my sale page and thought about tags for the book. What tags would I use? Well, if you'll notice, there is a handy link down there that will show you the most popular tags currently in use on Amazon. I clicked on it and did some research. Not every popular tag was relevant of course (I can't very well slap "erotic romance" on a YA fantasy novel), but just above that handy-dandy link is a search box that I used to check on some other tag ideas I had in mind, just to see if there were any other books around with authors who had the same idea. Here's what I came up with:

action, adventure, book, books, childrens books, coming of age, ebook, fantasy, fiction, kindle, knights, magic, teen, young adult, novel

All relevant, and all either from the "popular" list, or they came up in my searches with sufficient results to make them worthwhile. Two hours later, I did a search on Twitter for the title of my book, "The Goldenwealth Light". There were already 23 tweets about my book, all of which had to do with the tags I'd added!

Lesson learned. Tag your book. It might seem like an afterthought to you, but at the end of the day, people use tags. Popular tags will help immensely with your exposure and the more tags the merrier, but be careful not to attach irrelevant tags to your book (you want to draw interest from your target audience, not ire from those that aren't looking for your chosen genre).

Thanks, Rachele!


7 comments:

  1. Wait, what? I thought too while I was reading the first paragraph of your post. This is very helpful and I am going to put tags for my book too. Thanks for sharing and good luck with your book. :)

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  2. Hi, It's me again...you put the tags in section 3 "Target Your Book to Customers" ? :)

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  3. I'm glad you found it useful. I was surprised, too!

    Hmmm...maybe my brain is too busy on last minute Christmas stuff, but what did you mean by the 'tags in section 3'?

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    1. At KDP's bookshelf you choose the book and then "edit book details" and then you fill some details. They are numbered and at number 3 it asks to "Target Your Book to Customers" and then it has categories to fill. We put tags there or this is soemthing else?
      I don't know if I am explaining this right. :/

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  4. Ohhh...I see what you're saying. I thought you were questioning the way I'd posted this article or something :)

    You're in the categories section, which is a little different from what meant by tagging. Tagging is something you do at the bottom of your Amazon sales page (the page people buy your book from), not on the KDP edit pages. There should be a section entitled "Tags Customers Associate with this Product". In that section, you can add tags, view the most popular tags on Amazon currently, and search tags to see what books other people have assigned to a given tag

    The first thing I did was to check what the most popular tags were that are also relevant to my book, and then I added those. Then I used the search box to check some other tag ideas I came up with on my own -- if those ideas had several thousand books already tagged to them, I used those too.

    In about two hours, I had 23 tweets about my book, all of which had to do with one or more of the "newly assigned" tags to my book.

    I think I just wore out the T, A, and G keys on my keyboard typing that...does it make better sense now? If not please let me know, Maybe I could do a youtube video on it or something :)

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    1. Yes, that makes sense now. Thanks a lot for spending time to explain me this. I have never noticed this on Amazon's page. I will search it too. Thanks, thanks, thanks again. :D

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  5. No problem. Let me know if you get some good exposure on Twitter as a result!

    I actually am planning to make a video of this to really show people the ins and outs of it. I'll post it here when I'm done :)

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