So my latest Fiverr purchases seem to be a slightly better deal. I got a very generic keyword list from one, but a couple of suggested categories to explore. And the other spent a while talking with me and helped me to nail down genre -- at least to the point where I can work on the series branding.
And my new Fiverr cover artist and I had a lot of fun brainstorming into the wee hours.
So, Amazon Keywords. It is a bit non-intuitive. They give you seven boxes and suggest that you use short phrases instead of single words for better targeting.
Well, that's only part of the story. I fired up PublisherRocket and "female archaeologist" ranked highly, and "archaeologist hat" ranked even better than that. Now you might think that using, say, "female archaeologist adventure hat" would only get a click once in a blue moon. But that's not what Amazon is actually doing.
I mean, we all know that Amazon ignores quotation marks and just gives you anything that matches one of the search terms.
So, courtesy of Dave Chesson at PublisherRocket, here's what Amazon actually used for its pattern matching on a test run he conducted:
Of course the Amazon bot is subtler than it might appear. If the phrase in your keyword box never pulled up a book before, then Amazon will ignore it and not index it. And even more; if it doesn't seem to have anything to do with your book they also seem to be able to discover that. Somehow.
So overloading the keywords isn't the smartest tactic. Fairly short phrases still seems the way to go.
The problem is, of course, as the writer trying to fill out your Kindle book setup you are staring at the wrong end of a black box. Nobody has built the box itself. All of the available analytical tools can return is what has been tried before. So, in a weird way, if your idea for a phrase FAILS the tests, it might be the one you should use!
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