Browser Categories and SEO

If a book garners lots of clicks, then it will rise in—or maintain—its ranking in Amazon. Pure logic. I’ve written my book. Finally. Its published. Phew. Now what?

I’ve been studying browser categories and SEO (search engine optimization). My book was ‘missing in action’ when I searched on ‘mysteries’ and ‘women sleuths’. I was the classic invisible person.

---

From Amazon.com: Enjoyable, December 20, 2014 By  C. Becker – (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Beware the Sleeping Dog (A Professor Mavis Walker Mystery) (Kindle Edition)

Really liked the character development as well as the writer’s descriptions of scenery, conflicted emotions, and untangling of old business.

---

I tried a different approach. I searched on ‘Maine mysteries’. My book came up as #21 out of the listing of 1,200 hits. I searched on ‘professor mysteries’. It was #12 out of 1,200. Then I searched on retribution and it came up as #504 out of 1,200 hits. That’s pretty far into the search results but at least it’s there!

Those results validate what I have read, in that fledgling authors fare better with very specific searches than with the larger, general searches—which, of course, is quite intuitive.

I would love to hear how you manage your browser categories and your SEO. To do so, please enter your comments in the Leave a Reply box at the bottom of this page. Take me out of the realm of ‘sounds of silence’. Please!

Wishing you and yours joy and peace.

A Novel’s Theme

A theme in fiction sums up the essence of a story and projects the gist of what you’re writing. It’s a few words that describe the concept to someone else, perhaps an agent. Samantha Stone’s “Top 10 Types of Story Themes” resonated with me. It helped me define my theme.

One of my readers commented on www.amazon.com that: “I enjoyed the subject matter very much, as psychological abuse is not addressed very often. The author (k.a. libby) is very good at describing her surroundings and soon you are knee deep in suspense and intrigue.” So it seems that “Beware the Sleeping Dog” fits the criteria for a mystery, at least as far as one reader is concerned! (Thank you, S. Ande.) But beyond that it is the story of a woman seeking atonement for a past mistake … her journey from guilt to retribution to forgiveness.

Professor Mavis Walker addressed her feelings of guilt thusly:
Perhaps I should focus on my own psyche before I tried to solve another’s problems. Therein lay the conundrum for me: how could I even consider giving advice to someone else as long as I was struggling to find my own peace? Yet, it was the work I did with my students that helped me believe in my own worthiness.

As to retribution, she said:
I’d earned my way back into my own good graces by standing up to him. I’d confronted my fear and walked away with my pride intact.

And:
I’d faced my nemesis and gained strength and confidence in the process. I thought with satisfaction that no one could take that away from me.

And lastly, she embraced forgiveness:
Alice asked, “Do you feel better now?”
I said, “I do. I can finally forgive him.”
“And yourself? Can you forgive yourself?”
I thought about this for a moment. I wasn’t sure it was as much about forgiving myself as it was about accepting that it was a part of my past. I was ready to put it all behind me and move on. I said, “Yes.”

The Science of Browser Categories and SEO

If a book garners lots of clicks, then it will rise in—or maintain—its ranking in Amazon. I’ve been studying browser categories and SEO (search engine optimization). My book “Beware the Sleeping Dog” with my author name of k.a. libby was missing in action when I searched on ‘mysteries’ and ‘women sleuths’. I was the classic invisible person.

However when I searched on ‘Maine mysteries’, my book came up as the 21st result out of the listing of 1,200 hits. And when I searched on ‘professor mysteries’, it was the 12th result out of 1,200. Then when I searched on retribution, it came up as #504 out of 1,200 hits. That’s pretty far into the search results but at least it’s there!

Those results validate what I have read, in that fledgling authors fare better with very specific searches than with the larger, general searches—which of course is quite intuitive.

I would love to hear how you manage your browser categories and your SEO. To do so, please enter your comments in the Leave a Reply box below. Thank you!

Kindle is software!

An ‘aha’ moment for me was when I discovered Kindle is software not just an e-reader. Probably everyone else in the world–especially YOU!–were almost born knowing this.  Despite my best efforts to avoid any thoughts about the nuances of software, my role as publicist and entrepreneur is pushing me into it, once again with much gnashing of my teeth. I now understand that anyone can download a “free Kindle reading app” by searching on that phrase and then executing and running the program on a PC or Mac; through Kindle Cloud; or for an iPad or an Android or Windows 8. Once again you probably already knew that. But me, with my Comp Sci degree and 7 years’ experience as a programmer in my previous life, hadn’t a clue. It’s a good thing for me that my husband Wayne Reidinger has the patience of Job! Writing my Maine mystery–despite the years’ of effort–apparently was the easy part. Marketing is not just a chapter in the process … it’s a whole book unto itself.