My self-publishing journey goes back to year 2018 when I decided to get my first book published. Needless to say, I was quite a naive. My first book was a guided publishing and I paid through my nose owing to my inexperience and lack of research. Once in the process I have learnt a lot, of course the harder way. The aim of this post is to help the fledgling authors to help in their respective publishing journeys.
Here I am including a few TIPS that one must know while publishing a book. My views are based upon Kindle self publishing as I have published majorly on that platform.
Selecting Categories
The category and keywords selection plays an important role in increasing your book’s visibility on Amazon. During the publishing process on Kindle there is an option of keywords selection. You can give as many as seven keywords. You can even use complex keywords too. These keywords help kindle to assign categories to your book. But that is just the basic thing and that almost everyone does.
The TIP is that you can even change these categories and for that you just need to send a mail to kdp.
Each marketplace on Amazon has a different set of categories. So your task gets more tedious here as you will have to write separate mails to kdp for different marketplaces. Kdp’s response and actions are very prompt and they mostly revert within few hours with a positive news and within 72 hours the categories are updated and so is the ranking.
You can find the list of these categories on the Amazon site. You can get an idea about these categories by checking category path of various other book of similar genre on Amazon in various market places.
Here marketplaces mean Amazon.com, Amazon.in, Amazon.uk etc.
How can this be helpful?
You can choose as many as ten categories for a book in one marketplaces, although on Amazon page of the book it shows only three top ranking categories. If your book manages to be in top 50 in any category it will appear on the first page when someone searches for books of that particular category or genre and that adds to the visibility of your book.
After all the more it is seen, more are the chances of book being picked up.
If you don’t trust me you can check my books’ Amazon page. As I write this post two of my books are in top10 in their respective categories and other two in top 20. Though this ranking keeps changing on hourly basis (Amazon has its algorithm for calculating those rankings which is based on book sales, KU reads and several other parameters).
That reminds me of one more thing. Don’t forget to opt for kdp select program if you are a bookpreneur like me and don’t forget to check my next post about importance of kdp select option.
So as I was saying, my books managed to stay on the first page and I am immensely indebted to my readers for that.
I have added link of one of my books for you to check what I claimed and this is my debut book that means it is the oldest of my books.
Another tip is that you can add these categories to your book even if your book was released years back. You just have to contact kdp help.
Stay tuned for more tips.
You can also read: Aspiring to be an author
Coming Soon: Kdp Enrolment: Yes or No?
Happy Reading
Bibliomaniac_shal 