Marketing to Avoid
The Cyber Search; Hunting for Books to Read and How
Do you read a specific book niche (i.e. cozy mystery, space opera, urban fantasy)? Do you have to sift through tons of books to find your next great specific read?
How do you find books you’d like to read? Do you see something on Twitter and jump to that ad? Or are you floating around in Amazon-land and checking out one book after another?
How many author platforms have you signed up on?
I’m here to tell you a few shortcuts to avoid marketing strategies meant to distract you and to give you a few specific tools or places to look where you can identify really good books based on your specific preferences. Whether it’s cozy mysteries written by women, or Space Opera Galactic series, these tools and steps you can take may help find exactly what you are looking to read.
Marketing strategies you need to avoid.
Did you know the techniques for booksellers are meant to distract you? Some schemes are obvious—cover art that’s animated, banner ads, and paid promotions to get their book at the top of the list. They feed you eye candy and perhaps you don’t care, but maybe you click on it. A book cover is a really potent buying tool. And unless that author is an author you know and read or a really good writer, the fatal click of their link may keep you from finding the right books, the preferred books, the books you are actually hunting.
But how would you know? It’s not like you’ve read everything out there. The marketer will do much more to make you click on their ‘book’. Authors spend tons of money trying to one-up their competitors and expand their brands. The more you know about them, the less they have to spend to attract your attention. So, it’s down the rabbit hole of book hunting you fall. And marketing means to stop you in your cyber-searching tracks.
Let’s learn two marketing techniques being used so you can avoid that rabbit hole and continue seeking out the right book(s).
Keywords
1. Refine your Keywords and Categories search.
Keywords and categories are the descriptive tags an author adds to their book to help readers find it on Amazon and other retailers. If you put Mystery in the search bar, you get every mystery ever written, good, bad, and ugly. To avoid this, find the right keywords. Using a tool like Wordstream.com Free Keyword Search you can begin to understand how people search for specific phrases to improve their search. For example, with this tool I searched “cozy mysteries” and found 8100 monthly Google searches…but the list continued to expand on other searches that were more specific showing me “cozy murder mysteries” had only 170 searches, and “cozy mysteries 2023” only 20 searches.
So if I want to check amazon with those keywords I found:
- “Space opera” with >6600 searches per month
- “Space epic” with 70 searches per month
- “space opera romance” with 20 searches per month
Also, understand the Keywords you refine can be used in combination with the categories Amazon or Google have embedded.
A quick list of categories would be fairly broad areas, similar to the library shelves we once used to visit. Examples would be Fiction, Non-Fiction, Children’s Books, Comics/Graphic/Manga, Education, Food or Wine, History, Science, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance, or Young Adult. From this list, there are sub-categories such as Science Fiction. You can find the full list on Amazon>ALL> Books>Books (find the department selection on the left side of the page). Using the combining term of AND (in all caps) to combine two search areas you can see the results reduce with the specific search.
- Search for “Space opera” AND “galaxy” had 4000 books
- “Space epic” AND “galaxy” had >400 books
- “space opera romance” AND “galaxy” had >1000 books
Book Advertisements
2. Avoid the strategy of market penetration through paid advertisement.
First, you should know the existence of product ranking for Amazon and Google are for monetary gain. If an author wants to sell more books they have to get their book in front of you the reader. Various means such as advertisements, word-of-mouth, or product rankings are methods of madness. Every author should work on word-of-mouth using Twitter or Social Media platforms. Depending on the commitment of the author, they may use paid and non-paid advertising. Product ranking, however, means the author has to find ways to rank higher than other books on the search engines (i.e., Google or Amazon) This is done by both using hits and reviews—how many times has a book been purchased and how many reviews are listed. The review rankings are also important, how high (1 star vs 5 stars). For Google, authors can buy the ranking by paying Adwords.com to list it higher than others or using SEO campaigns like pay-per-click. And Amazon uses different formulas/algorithms that may automatically boost the visibility of any product after 50 reviews or more by boosting visibility for ranking in the top 100, 500, 1000 genre groups. Many authors feel some level of success if they remain in the top 1000 books in their genre for any length of time. But suffice it to say, ranking can be gained through other means than just the readers.
That said, you may need to move beyond ranking to find the books in your reading area. And try to stay out of the paid searches by using fan-based tools.
Fan-based tools, you say? Yes. There are tools on the web that help you search for books in your preferences by using searches not primarily associated with paid advertising. Here are three, but there are many, many more.
Goodreads.com features a social network of readers and themed lists. Once you create an account you can scan the reading lists of other users and friends to find book recommendations or check the themed lists which you can use to discover your next read. Check some lists out here: https://www.goodreads.com/list?ref=nav_brws_lists Even I’ve got one on there for Lesbian Books with Music Themes. Enjoy.
ALLReaders.com is a plain jane interface that allows you to specify your interest in the specific plot, settings, or protagonist characteristics (i.e., Setting>Takes place in a spaceship AND Planet outside the solar system – gave me links to over 30 books that have been reviewed with a Detailed plot synopsis and protagonist and subject, along with a list of other books that are similar.
BookBrowse.com is primarily what it’s called, an area to browse exceptional books that are being discussed or analyzed by the story or theme and may offer additional background on the author.
What these sites have in common, they are all built for the reader fans and by the reader fans of the book world. They provide search tools in an abstract way to find books or articles or blogs to read based on your preferences. Check them out. These fan-based tools are like having a wish fountain and it fessed up every dystopia science fiction book you ever wanted to read that was not written in first person. Can I get an amen?
Sparrows Legacy
Be sure to read and review my Kindle Vella serial book Sparrows Legacy, where I tell the adventure of Tara and Teng, siblings fleeing from hunters seeking to kill them to allow their usurper Uncle Endric to claim the Kingship of Flarentine. Using every trick their parents taught them this story contains survival, battles, and magic, all rolled into an adult novel. You can read the first three chapters free on Amazon by searching for “Sparrows Legacy Kindle Vella” or clicking here. The Kindle Vella link is also found on my science fiction home website, along with other Blog Beat articles I’ve written: www.jlnichauthor.com
Here is a snippet:
Snap! A twig cracked the silence behind her. She quickly twisted around to see a huge armor-clad man between two trees, drawing his bow on her figure. Diving sideways into a thick mound of bundle weed she heard the hiss of an arrow fly into the tree base where she had been. Her body reacting smoothly, she rolled to a crouched position and came up throwing. The knife left her hand a second before she returned to a concealed state. Ducking low she heard a grunt of pain and rolled further away through the underbrush beneath the taller plant life and aimed for a tree base nearby. Quickly pushing off the ground she flung herself upward. Using her upper body strength, developed from climbing to the upper lofts of the lattice of the canopy, she heaved herself up and over into the tree foliage. Loosening her bow and arrows she readied them for flight. Hidden behind the foliage of the tree, she gripped the limbs with her bare feet and ran along the intricate pattern of the inner heavier limbs as if she were part panther. Seeing an opening further down she noticed her new position three trees over as their intertwined branches had crossed.
Dropping silently down to the ground, she got her bearings and looked in the shadows of every bush and plant that she passed. Hearing a slight creak as if of metal, she paused. Her arrow shot into the air slicing through the streams of sunlight to fall into a possible enemy. To her right, 10 paces away, a shadow figure stepped into sight. Reaching to her waist, she drew a short sword. Dropping the bow, she turned to face the hulking figure and cursed silently at the unknown account of her last arrow. Rushing the ogre-like man, she dove under the high swing of his curved sword and stabbed into his chest. As his frame fell forward at the injury, his image disappeared into thin air.
“Very good, my daughter,” a voice came from the trees nearby. The hulking figure of a man stepped clear of a tree’s shadow aiming his drawn bow at her body. Tara sheathed her sword in silence and stared at her mother’s features clearly discernable over the face of the manly-shaped creature.
“What would you have said as you died?” her Matie asked dryly, arching an eyebrow. Tara felt a heated blush run up her face. She looked down to brush the dirt and leaves from her tunic as the bow and arrow relaxed its guard.
“Very humorous, Matie,” she said with chagrin. “I only wish these holograms smelled as bad as they looked. I wouldn’t have been in their vicinity, to begin with.”
Marketing Trap
In conclusion, you need to avoid marketing traps and learn a bit more about keyword searching. As well as find free search tools not based on monetizing books. Reading fans around the world are with you on this. The reviews are in and those books you really need to read are near the tips of your fingers.
Make sure to sign up with your email to follow future blogs and I’ll continue to give you readers’ advice. Possible topics coming up are How to get RSS setup and why. What are web feeds and why are they important for a reader?
Please read and review my serial publishing novel Sparrow’s Legacy on Kindle Vella. You can read the first three chapters free on Amazon by searching for “Sparrows Legacy Kindle Vella” or clicking here. I hope you enjoyed this blog. Please subscribe to my website if you want to be notified when I’ll be publishing or to get free samples of my work.
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JLNich, Science Fiction Fantasy Author
Bonus
Get an expanded list of online fan-based tools that use non-monetized search engines to find you books to read. Plus two more marketing strategies to avoid keeping you from being trapped in the marketing snare. Fill out the form to download your copy.
If you enjoy this article and want to check out other similar novels in the science fiction fantasy genre, check out these Amazon-offered books on my Affiliate links below. Note: Purchasing from these links at Amazon will enable me a small commission as an Amazon affiliate.
In Legend Rising (Galactic Guardians Book 1) by Jonathan Yanez we meet the Rowki, a fraternity of inter-galactic guardians, and Max Tyco who will become the most powerful.
In Banished (Street Rats of Aramoor: Book 1): A Coming of Age Fantasy Adventure by Michael Wisehart we meet young Ayrion, a Upakan, headed for the royal city of Aramoor. In hopes of making a name for himself, he will battle the deadly streets until his name is known.
