If you’re looking for some terrific articles on book marketing, here’s our top 5 list for this week! This week, we’re focused on “discoverability” — the ability of your book to be found by your readers. Obviously, you can’t sell your books if you can’t be found, so check out these resources and work on making your books more “findable”!
Is this how hard it is to find your book?
1) Discoverability: Key to the e-Bookstore (Joel Friedlander) — Joel lays out the revolutionary way that readers search for books in the e-bookstore…and why it makes it so important to pay attention to your keywording and metadata in your book description. This post really crystallized the concept of search for me…hopefully it will help you too!
2) The Importance of Keywords for MetaData and the Discoverability of Your Book (Joanna Penn) — Joanna’s Creative Penn blog is hands-down one of my favorite go-to sites for marketing information. In this post, Joanna uses her past experience in IT to help you learn how to research keywords for your book. It’s a terrific step-by-step plan to help you improve your book’s discoverability! As a bonus, just check out the URL for this post and note the brilliant way Joanna keywords the page for discoverability through Google keyword search.
3) Sell More Books by Optimizing Your Metadata (Joanna Penn for Jane Friedman) — Jane Friedman’s blog is another favorite of mine, and this post is actually an excerpt from Joanna Penn’s book How to Market a Book. This is another great explanation of metadata and how to use it effectively for your book.
4) Sell More Books on Amazon — Understanding Keywords, Categories, and Amazon’s Algorithms (Penny Sansevieri) — This is another post that emphasizes what Joel Friedlander reveals in #1 above: that Amazon is really nothing more than a search engine…a search engine that readers use to build a virtual bookshelf. She talks about Amazon’s keyword tools and how to improve your search rankings. It’s a great resource — and check out the great videos at the end of the post too!
5) Secrets of Amazon MetaData from #1 Amazon Bestseller Mark Edwards (Podcast interview with Mark Edwards by Joanna Penn) — Mark Edwards credits an outstanding book description to skyrocketing his book to the top of the charts…and he’s willing to let you in on the way to do it for your own work. There are also some other great tips in this interview for making your book marketable (including making sure that your book cover is outstanding).
Do you have some great go-to resources for helping authors understand crafting book descriptions and using metadata to drive sales on e-pub platforms? We’d love to hear about them! Please leave a note and link to them in the comments!
Happy writing (and marketing)!
Photo credit: A Train / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)
