Picking Categories & Keywords For Your Book

GUEST BLOG

by Jo Linsdell

Jo Linsdell is the author and illustrator of the rhyming children's picture book OUT AND ABOUT AT THE ZOO. Find out more about her at file:///C:/Users/feinblumb/Downloads/www.JoLinsdell.com Here is what she has to say about keywords:

In order to have your book found by the book selling industry and potential customers it's important to optimise your books purchasing page so it that it's easy to find. Two simple ways to do this are to pick the right categories and keywords for your book.

Book categories

When a book is published it is placed into certain categories known as 'Book industry Standards and communication' or BISAC categories. These categories are used by the book selling industry to help identify and group books by their subject matter. It is therefore important to pick the BISAC category that best fits your book.

On Amazon you can pick two categories for your book. For my latest book, Out and About at the Zoo I choose 'Juvenile Fiction/ Stories in verse' as it's a rhyming children's picture book.

For all books in the Juvenile categories (fiction and non-fiction) you need to specify the target reading level of the book. In my case I picked 'Preschool'.

It's also listed under the 'Large print/ Children's book' category where it's quickly made it into the top 100 (currently ranked #59).

Keywords

Keywords help your book show up in search and so it's essential that you pick words and phrases that you think customers are likely to use when either searching for your book directly or when shopping for books that may be similar in subject matter.

A few examples of keywords I used for  Out and About at the Zoo are "rhyming children's book", "zoo animals" and "Children's picture book".

If your book is on sale via sites like Amazon.com you, and the general public, can add extra tags to your book page. The more tags you have the better your book will show up in on site search results.

TV Ain’t Done Yet

The news media landscape, with all of the challenges posed by digital media, still appears to be secure when looking at television. The recent “upfront” sale, where television stations sell chunks of advertising times for the following year, recently concluded with an increase in revenue for the TV outlets.

However, pace of growth was slow for the four major networks – an increase of just 1% from last year – to 9.16 billion dollars. Cable increased by 4.3%, to 9.69 billion bucks. Interestingly, cable, with a zillion channels, collectively barely surpasses four diminished networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox).

On-demand and streaming TV online to our sets will no doubt continue to alter the TV landscape and one day it may dominate, but for now, TV is still alive and well.

Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person.