As promised, I’d like to tell you a bit about the experiment I’m trying on Amazon to see if it increases my sales (as touted by the free video series by Nick Stephenson that I watched – more details and sign up here).

Amazon is basically a huge search engine. In fact, it is the second largest search engine on the internet next to Google. To increase your sales on Amazon, beside having lots of helpful (as determined by Amazon users that read the reviews and mark them as helpful) positive reviews, you need your book to filter to the top of search results so that people can actually find and buy your book. And that’s the hard part.

The trick is to figure out what category and keywords that result in a smaller search results base best fit your book. For example, I orignally placed Dead and Kicking in the category “Science Fiction & Fantasy -> Fanatasy -> Paranormal & Urban”, a category that yields almost 39,000 results. Talk about a needle in a haystack!

So after watching the webinar, I spent an hour or so exploring categories on Amazon to try and find a better fit, i.e. a category that still applies to my book but that has less competitors. I finally settled on “Mystery & Thrillers -> Suspense -> Paranormal” which only has about 3000 books listed. Much better! What makes it even better still, is this happens to be a category on Amazon that will then use your keywords to further filter the genre. So, by adding Vampires as a keyword, suddenly the results set is 730 titles. Use the keywords Werewovles & Shifters and it’s reduced even more to a much more manageable 509 titles. The chances of a reader finding my book just got a lot better.

Will this have a noticeable result on my sales?  I sure hope so.  It’s too early to tell right now, but I will definitely keep you posted.