When a book is listed on Amazon’s site, keywords are chosen to let prospective readers find books. For Members of the Cast, I chose the following keywords:
As an author, I am already off to a shaky start. The keywords I chose are what I “think” someone would type in if they wanted a book like mine. I call Members of the Cast coming of age, but the classic coming of age books like Perks of Being a Wallflower have a different perspective than Members of the Cast. Classic coming of age are often told after the fact, in 1st person, and from a point of greater understanding than when the events were happening.
I included Historical as a keyword because I have discovered that my childhood years are considered historical. It is hard to consider something “historical” that could have happened “just the other day.”
Do my readers find Members of the Cast by searching for YA, Historical? I will never know. I suspect that word of mouth helps more than keywords. Many readers buy books they have been told about. (So tell your friends about Members of the Cast. Give them a link: Buy The Book)
One review on GoodReads said, in part, “I appreciated that the story was told without foul language or violence.” I do not know the reviewer and can hope that she searched for a Clean and Wholesome book.
I tend to read Clean and Wholesome YA books because I got tired of having the “F” word used as often as end punctuation in books for kids, and I didn’t want the first paragraph to be about a girl losing her virginity. Some of these books are great, but after a while, I felt like Sam Elliot in The Big Lebowski, “Do you have to use so many cuss words?”
I found several authors by searching for Clean and Wholesome. The “Other authors like this” suggestion on Amazon probably moved me toward other books more than a search. Some of these authors do a very nice job. The books may not make it to the bestseller list, but I noticed that the self-published Curvy Girls Can’t Date Quarterbacks by Kelsie Stelting is #1 in Teen & Young Adult Clean & Wholesome Romance eBooks. The book is #5,705 in the whole Kindle store, for crying out loud:
It beats out the marvelous Sun Is Also a Star (Nicola Yoon) by a factor of seven:
I found Curvy Girls Can’t Date Quarterbacks by searching for Clean and Wholesome. I have to give credit to Kelsie Stelting for writing book after book with great success. She is quite prolific.
Not knowing if anyone ever searches for your book by your keywords is frustrating. However, it is possible to get a glimpse. I have an Amazon ad (Blog) that I run from time to time. I lose money on the ad but run it a few days at a time. It is running now because I hope weekends are times when readers may be looking for a book.
To run a campaign, you choose keywords, and Amazon Ads break them into Exact, Phrase, or Broad. The interesting part is you can see how many clicks a phrase got. Amazon watches the keywords that bring your book into the list. If someone clicks on the book, that click is assigned to the keyword.
The following image shows who is clicking on what. The date range is from the first of June, but I paused the ad from time to time.
I spent $9.31 to sell one book for $3.99. (One book from the ad; Members of the Cast continues to sell.) I paused the references to Mystery because Members of the Cast is not a true mystery. These were keywords were costing me money and probably disappointing to the searcher.
The one sale on the days I selected was the result of Historical Fiction to be used in a phrase, as I noted in my earlier blog. Now we analyze the ad in more depth.
The number of impressions indicates what keyword was used to make the book appear on a page. (Impressions are free. You only pay for clicks.) It is impossible to know how far down a searcher had to scroll before the Members of the Cast ad appeared. The ratio of impressions to clicks may provide some information. It is also possible that my ad appeared, and the reader thought, “Meh.” I want to tweak my ad, but Amazon Ads wants me to create a new ad. (See the blog page referenced above.)
A click means the ad appeared, caught the reader’s eye, and the user clicked on the image. At this point, they on the book’s page on Amazon and decide whether to purchase or not.
Noting the 10:1 click to purchase ratio, I can only conclude that when the user clicks on my ad—looks at the cover, and reads my blurb, Members of the Cast “don’t shine for them.” (Quote from the movie Winter’s Bone)
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