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Hank Marcacci: Frank.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Hello! Hello! Everyone! Welcome back to crime writers Week.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: If you can see and hear me, go ahead and drop your location in the chat so we can see where in the world you are joining us from.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome, everyone. If you can see and hear me, just drop your location in the chat.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: I see North Carolina, Michigan, Idaho, Canada, Serbia, Pennsylvania.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Ontario, British Columbia, Texas, Maryland, Kentucky, Virgin Islands, Canada. We love seeing everybody coming in from all parts of the globe. Welcome.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: I see a lot of familiar names this week.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Thank you for coming back and joining us for another live session. We will get started in just a moment. But 1st I just have a couple of housekeeping notes

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: as always.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: So your replays this week are being posted to the crime writers. Week. Hub! I'm gonna drop links in the chat for you now, and I will drop those intermittently today.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: But your hub link is there.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: You can go to the Hub refresh. Throughout the day we will keep adding the replays, any slides that we receive. Audio transcript files, any special links, and offers from our speakers. They're all there Monday through Thursday sessions.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: so make sure that you check that out, and then next week we will be posting all of these replays to our community page. In the event recordings space. So make sure you head over there, and you can view these replays as well as replays from previous writers week. So there's a lot of content there for you.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Tomorrow is premium day. So today is the last free day of Crime writers week. It's going so fast. Tomorrow is premium day. If you are a premium or premium pro user of pro writing aid, you will receive an email in your inbox tomorrow morning with instructions for how to access tomorrow's live session resources.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: If for some reason you do not receive that, please email us at hello at paradigm, and we will be happy to share that with you if you would like to upgrade before tomorrow morning, so that you can have access. We do have a special offer for you.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: which is 15% off your 1st year of premium or premium pro writing aid you will use a code. Cw. 2024, to get your discount, and that offer is good until July 6.th The link is on the hub. I'm going to post those links for you again there.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: And if you would like to keep talking us, we'd love to have you in our online community. This is a private community, free for prorating aid users, you log in using this link here, and it's also on the hub

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: you log in with your providing aid account information. It lets you right in. We have our live event check going right now with a lot of fun discussions with fellow attendees about the week, and we all that is also where the event recordings Page is. So join us in our community. We'd love to have you

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: reminders for this session today. Please use the QA. Box. If you have any questions for our speaker, you can use the chat to talk amongst yourselves, but we wanna make sure all of the questions are coming directly to the QA. So we don't miss them, and if you would like to chat during the session today, make sure in the dropdown menu next to 2. You select everyone, because by default your messages will just come to the host and panelists to make sure you adjust that if you want everybody to be able to view

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: your messages, and yes, I see about the presentation. We do. We will have the presentation slides on the Hub, you'll be able to access them there.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: And I also have another link in the chat about sharing your feedback on Crime Writers Week. We have a short survey. We would really appreciate it if you could spend a couple of minutes to give your feedback on how this week has gone, what what you liked what you would think we could improve. This really helps us to plan and improve future writing events. So if you could take a minute to do that, we would greatly appreciate it.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: And with that being said, we are ready to begin. So today we are joined by Hank Mercchi, data engineer turned Amazon best selling author. Hank writes in several genres on Amazon, Kbp. As product manager of publisher, Rocket. He's always on the lookout for how authors can better connect with readers who will love their work.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome, Hank, we're so happy to have you here.

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Hank Marcacci: Thank you so much. I'm going ahead and bringing up my presentation now.

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Hank Marcacci: and just let me know if you're able to see that Michelle, and everything is good there.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Yes, looks great.

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Hank Marcacci: Wonder if that

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Hank Marcacci: well, we are super excited to hear and want to just thank you all again approating aid for including us and everyone here for that is joining as well. Today we'll be jumping into the art of crime keywords and categories. So we'll be talking about keywords and categories with a focus on crime today for all you crime authors out there, and the idea of this presentation is understanding how to use keywords and categories to get discovered on Amazon, and when I say the word discovered.

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Hank Marcacci: What I mean is people that have never heard of you. They don't know who you are. They're not your friends and family. They're not people on your email list. These aren't people that you know have heard of your book title. These are shoppers that are going through Amazon, seeing your book for the 1st time, because Amazon has shown it to them and then deciding to go on and buy. So we're gonna learn about the power, the arm Amazon algorithm, and how we can harness that with keywords and categories to make sure people find you organically on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: So with that key, or with that word discovered, we had to ask again what it means. And we talked again about how this is about. If you're looking for, or if you're trying to find people who don't know who you are, they discover you. And the question we get is, why get discovered on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: And the answer here is that every month over a hundred 97 million people around the world shop on Amazon. And that's why we have this big focus upon that one marketplace. So if you think about all the other places that peekbone can find you, for example, Facebook.

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Hank Marcacci: well, people on Facebook might not be interested in buying a book at the moment, but if they come over to Amazon, we know they're interested and ready to purchase a book. So that's 1 of the reasons that we focus on Amazon as well as it just being this huge, enormous marketplace of hungry readers that are looking to pick up their next title.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, when we talk about Amazon, one of the important things about them is how they say they make money, and this comes from Jeff Bezos himself.

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Hank Marcacci: and Jeff says we don't make money when we sell things we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.

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Hank Marcacci: and the reason that this is important is that when we're talking about getting your book shown in front of people on Amazon, we're focusing on how to help Amazon give our book as an option to readers, so that the reader can make the best possible purchase decision for them.

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Hank Marcacci: And the reason Amazon cares about this so much is all about the Amazon customer experience. Amazon wants people to come to Amaz or Amazon wants people to come over and shop. They want them to find a book that they love, and they remember that they got it from Amazon, so that when they want to find their next book in the future. They come back to Amazon time and time and time again with very high customer satisfaction, and knowing that Amazon can always help them find the next book.

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Hank Marcacci: So the reason why that's important to us is we need to help Amazon pair our book with the right pair our book with the right reader to make sure that that match is great. Readers leave loving our book satisfied, and leaving great reviews, so Amazon knows, to promote us further in the future.

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Hank Marcacci: So the question we really get to is, how does Amazon help bookshoppers find the right book? And we want to take advantage of that system to make sure the right readers are being paired with our right books, so they're very satisfied. They love our content. They come back time and time again, and tell all our friends about us as authors.

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Hank Marcacci: Now this presentation was developed by Dave Chesson and Dave is someone that never actually thought he was going to be an author. So he had dyslexia. Never thought he's gonna be a writer. English class really wasn't his strong suit. When he was growing up, however, Dave was abroad and actually deployed, and he wanted to be back home with his family. So he wanted a way to come back to the United States, be able to support his family and stop working abroad.

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Hank Marcacci: So Dave went on to publish 9 international bestselling books to help him be able to return the U.S.A. And support his family with the income from those books. Now, when Dave was going through that process.

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Hank Marcacci: something he realizes there's a lot of really good authors out there that don't know how to promote their material or market their books. They might have an incredible plot, great characters, really quality fantastic books, but they don't know how to get in front of the right type of reader, and they have issues convincing people to go ahead, pick up their book and read it for the 1st time. And so what Dave did

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Hank Marcacci: is he created a website called Kindlepreneur, as well as a software campaign called Publisher Rocket, to help. People can connect with the right readers that authors can find their readership market their books, and help. People find these amazing books that they never do existed. Now, in order to talk, or in order to find out some of the tactics that we're gonna talk about today as well as the publish kindlepreneur.

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Hank Marcacci: Dave went and consulted multiple large publishing companies as well as New York time, best selling authors and fiction and nonfiction to find out what really works out there. The best ways to get in contact with those readers have them read their books and the best ways that they can be found on Amazon, and discovered organically time and time again, and don't just take it from us, but take it from Amazon themselves.

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Hank Marcacci: because Amazon has stated, learn from Kendall Premier on how to optimize your book for more sales. So again, our goal today is to optimize our book for more sales. To make sure Amazon is showing it to that right, reader who's gonna love it and signal to Amazon that they need to show it to even more.

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Hank Marcacci: Now I'm your host today I'm Hank Mercen. I'm the manager of publisher Rocket, and something about me is unlike Dave. I knew I always wanted to be an author, so, ever since I was 10 years old, read my 1st couple of books I knew. This is the fate that I wanted to choose.

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Hank Marcacci: but I always heard that you can't make it as an author that you can't become a bestseller. You can't support a family that there's no way that you can write a book and expect to live off of it. So I went. I followed my second love, which is engineering. So I became an engineer, but I never let that dream die, and in college I continue writing books and continue publishing. I tuned into kindle Premier, watched a lot of their sessions and marketing strategies and use a lot of the tactics that we're gonna talk about today.

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Hank Marcacci: Okay? And using those and continuing to write, I was able to become a best selling author and kindle and reach Top 50 on the kindle store, which is one of my proudest moments of my life.

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Hank Marcacci: and it's something I hope all of you can share in as well and do with your books as well, using these tips and tricks that we're gonna talk about today. Now from there

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Hank Marcacci: I realized that even though I had a pass of working in data, my passion is over on the author side, and I wanted to combine these worlds. So again, I'm a data addict. I have the passion for machine learning analytics. I'm the type of person that spends their Saturdays enjoying excel. And I want to take this to the author world and figure out, how can we use this data to really help people out with selling books in an easy digest way that they can use and boil down to simple strategies.

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Hank Marcacci: And so what I did is I've met up a Dave became the publish or a manager, a publisher rocket, and the last few years we've been working together to continue to drive more and more steps and tactics that authors can take to improve their book sales online.

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Hank Marcacci: And what really drives me forward from that data perspective is asking the question of what makes a best selling book a best seller. How come? There's books that are really good out there that don't take off. And there's other books that are good as well, that do take off. And what's the difference between them. And how can we use data to understand that? So with that, we're gonna jump into the crux of our presentation today, which is steps that you can take to increase the number of shoppers that discover your book.

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Hank Marcacci: And there are 2 ways on Amazon that shoppers discover your book. The 1st one is Amazon categories. Amazon categories are like bookshelves and actual stores. Where a reader comes in. They look at their genre that they're interested in. So let's say, Science fiction, for example, and they go, and they can look through all the different books on that shelf. They can see that that sellers they can see the ones that are recommended, and they're just browsing and trying to figure out what they might want to enjoy.

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Hank Marcacci: And then Amazon search Bar is the second place that people can actually find books on Amazon. And this is where someone knows what they're trying to find. They type in a keyword, and Amazon shows them all the different books that are resulting for that keyword. So today we're talking all about the Amazon category system as well as the Amazon search bar, so that your book can be shown in these 2 different areas on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, we're going to start off with Amazon search. And the way this works is someone types in a keyword in Amazon search.

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Hank Marcacci: And then Amazon comes over and they show all the different books that someone might enjoy that are related to that keyword. So again, if you type in sci fi military Amazon's gonna show the reader a list that readers gonna go down that list. Hope they find what they enjoy click on it and buy it. And the reason why this is so important is that 2 thirds or 66% of bookshoppers begin looking for a book through Amazon. Search. So 2 thirds of these people are coming in people that are actively eager, ready to buy and ready to read a book. They're hungry for their next story that they're gonna have.

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Hank Marcacci: They come through type in their keyword up here and see what Amazon recommends. So it's really important if we can, to optimize this. And what determines if you show up in this search or not, are the 7 kindle keywords that you choose when you publish your book, Amazon, ask you the spot for each of those keywords. That's what determines if you come up in the search. So sci fi military is one of your keywords. That means you will show up somewhere within the search for Sci Fi military. Where you show up is what we'll talk about today to make sure you can show up towards the top. But you will be somewhere in this list on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, Amazon categories again, are the second area that we're focusing on and within Amazon categories. It's just like that bookshelf again, you can see that we're looking at Science Fiction, and we can see all the top books in Science Fiction Amazon publish or Amazon ranks these based upon the number of sales per day. So they get on this front page of Science Fiction. You need to have the top sales and Science Fiction for that day. They show the top 20 books in that category, and if you become a bestseller. They give you this beautiful orange bestseller tag here as well. So if you're able to reach Number one.

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Hank Marcacci: we get this beautiful orange tag which tells every reader in the Amazon store that you're a bestseller, and they might want to take a second look at your book. Read your description, considering buying it because many other people have done so as well.

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Hank Marcacci: Now the combination of these 2 keywords or Amazon search as well as categories lead to better discoverability. So we want to optimize both of these areas to drive more discoverability of our book.

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Hank Marcacci: And when we're going through this, we have 3 secrets for you today that are gonna help you along this path. And the 1st secret we have is that everyone can have a bestseller without spending thousands of dollars and ads are working 18 HA day, and if you told me this at the beginning of my path to become an author, I always said, you're crazy. There's no possible way you can do this. However, it is possible. And we're gonna talk today all about how you can actually do it.

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Hank Marcacci: and the ways to do it again are going and finding profitable keywords and selecting best selling categories, because those are what add and drive discoverability for our book on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: And what we'll focus on enough 1st is Amazon book keywords.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, when we talk about keywords today, we're referring to these 7 boxes in Kdp that when you publish your book they pop up, and Amazon asked for 7 search keywords that describe your book. Now you might see the word optional here, and really it's I mean as an author it shouldn't be optional. This is something that you absolutely should do, because this is your chance to show Amazon exactly what your book is about. So you wanna make sure for each one of these boxes here that we have the best possible keyword that describes your book and helps readers find it on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: And as a recap, if you have one of those keywords to just sci fi military and someone types in sci-fi military here. That means your book will show up somewhere within this list, which means a reader is seeing it. They have that chance to actually go on and click on it, and then they're deciding if they want to buy it or not. So again, we want to optimize that keyword. So more people can find it in search.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, we already said that 66% of bookshoppers start their shopping using Amazon search. However, 89% of these end in a purchase. So almost everyone that uses that search bar goes on and actually buys something on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: And the reason this is is because when people are searching and looking for something on Amazon. They're hungry, readers, and a great analogy here is. It's just like if you walk into a gas station or a grocery store, and you're hungry, and you know you're not leaving until you find a snack.

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Hank Marcacci: You're gonna go through that grocery store. You're gonna look for snacks, and you're not leaving until you have one in hand which snack you have is up for debate. However, you absolutely are going to buy one, and Amazon's the same way. We want to get our book in front of people on Amazon because they're ready to buy, and they're not leaving until they find a book that they want to purchase. So so important here, we can optimize search because people have their wallets out and they're ready to buy.

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Hank Marcacci: Now we're going to go through a little bit of data science here on how to optimize your keyword searches. Don't worry. If you boil these down into strategies. I know that word data. Science can be a little scary at times, but we're going to give you the tactics that you can use to take advantage of these principles.

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Hank Marcacci: And the 1st one we have here is, how kindle keywords affect your book's discoverability, which is depending upon where your book appears in search, affects how many people actually go on and click on it. So, for example, here, if your book shows up in the 1st position in search, so say if I typed in Sci-fi Military and Amazon. My book shows up position number one. That means 27% of the people search that term are going to click on your book.

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Hank Marcacci: If it shows up in second, that means 12 shows up in 3, rd that means 9, and it continues to drop and drop the further you go down the page. So the important thing here is, the farther you show up, down and search the less people that click on your book, and if you can show up in position number one, you get the line, share the clicks. And here's an example that illustrates this.

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Hank Marcacci: So, for example, let's say we typed in sci-fi. Let's say we typed in space marines right here. And we can see that the book in position number one is getting 27% of the clicks. The book in position number 2 will get 12, 9, 8, 7, and so on and so forth. As you drop down the rankings. So it is incredible.

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Hank Marcacci: important that we try to get our book in this number one position. And the reason why is that the book in position number one gets over 2 times more clicks than the book in position number 2. So again, it's really important to get your book in position number one, or at least in the 1st couple of books that are showing up for this search. T, or keyword.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, here's an example again of why that matters. So if you rank it. Number 5. So say you show up down here at Position number 5. That means you get 7% of the clicks for that book or for that search term. So if there are 1,000 searches per month that people actually going in and typing in space brings, that means you get 7% of them, or you get 70 clicks per month for people searching for the term space brings. However.

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Hank Marcacci: if you show up at position number one, you get 27% of the clicks for that search term. So if a thousand people are searching per month, you get 270 clicks per month organically to your book. That's a huge number that's 200 extra clicks every single month of people searching for that term that are eager. They have their Waller out, walled out, and they're ready to buy and are clicking on your book because it's in position number one. And again, that's 200 extra organically, coming all the time as you sleep, and you're not having to pay extra for these

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Hank Marcacci: now, you might say, Hank, 200 clicks a month. Isn't that much. I could send it out to my email list. I'll get 200 clicks. I could run ads, and I give it 200 clicks. And you're right. But remember again, these are free clicks that you're getting every single month and not just that. But these are people who don't know about you. They don't know about your email list. This is the 1st time they're discovering you on Amazon, and they're ready to buy

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Hank Marcacci: now something else important as well is, even though that one keyword only brought us 200 clicks. All of our keywords add up, and you will remember we have 7 of them. So when we start off with our 1st keyword, you might get 270 clicks per month.

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Hank Marcacci: With your second keyword you might get 1 22 with your 3rd one you might get 87. With your 4th one you could get 1 12. With your 5th one, you get 66. With your 6, one you get 211, and with your 7th one you could get 1 67, and all of those together combined together as individual funnels that are pointing to your book from different places across Amazon. So that's why this is so powerful, is it? Isn't just one keyword. But all 7 of these combined together, and point towards your book.

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Hank Marcacci: and you can imagine with keyword number one. For example, we got 270 clicks, but keyboard number 5, we only got 66. So if we can improve keyboard number 5, we can continue adding to this massive pile of clicks coming to our book from all these different funnels across Amazon. And that's why it's so important to optimize these keywords.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, in order to optimize keywords, we have to know what they are

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Hank Marcacci: and what keywords are is that keywords are the words your target shopper uses to find the book you want, because, remember, we want to pair up with that right, reader, that right target shopper to make sure that they love our book. They see it on Amazon. They click and they click, buy. So those are the words that we use in order to find our target shopper.

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Hank Marcacci: And when we talk about fiction keywords describe the type of story that your book is about. So when you're coming up and you're brainstorming keywords, you want to focus upon the type of story that you're writing and use those to come up with a list of keywords. Now, brainstorming keywords can be pretty hard. So we have a way to help you all out to think about keywords. That's great for your book that you can brainstorm. And then later, you can do more research on to find out if they're good or not, and how you optimize them. And here's what we recommend doing for crime and fiction in general.

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Hank Marcacci: So there are 5 different types of kitchen keywords that you can use to brainstorm for your book. The 1st is setting in time periods, second is character types and roles, 3rd is plot them. 4th is events and situations, and the 5th is the story tone. And we're going to go through each of these, and how you can use these to come up with great keywords that you can use because people are actively searching for these on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: So the 1st one of these is settings and time periods. And when we look into the settings and time periods. We're asking when and where a book took place. And the reason we do this is that there are readers that will go out and read a book just because it happened at a certain place or a certain point in time. And so we want to look at our book and include keywords that describe again when and where I book took place.

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Hank Marcacci: and some great examples here on the right, we have some covers to just display keywords that we could potentially use for these books. But some great examples here is, we can see a cowboy hat on the very front of this cover that tells me right away. It has something to do with the West, so likely a Western taking place in there, and it's likely probably in the past.

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Hank Marcacci: Here we have a marriage of lies, and we can see right there. That is something that likely takes place in suburbia. It looks more modern day. I can see lights that are occurring on there. So you might want to use something like contemporary suburbia when we're describing this book

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Hank Marcacci: on the right here we have murdered an Irish chipper, and immediately I can tell that takes place in Ireland, and there are people that are out there that read Irish murder mysteries, and that is a genre that they love. So if you have a type of country within your book, that's not if you just have a specific type of country that is pertinent to your book. You wanna make sure you include that as well, because people love reading about certain locations.

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Hank Marcacci: And then here on the far right. We can see that this is a cityscape. It takes place in New Orleans in the past as well. So if you have things within settings and time periods that apply that say when or where your book play takes place. You want to make sure you include them. Personally, I write a lot of Science Fiction. And there's a lot of techno thriller books that cross over into crime. And one of the things that we would talk about in those scenarios is you may want to include that your book is about the future. It's something that science fiction. It's in the future, even if it has those crime elements. So again, with settings and time periods talk about when and where that book took place.

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Hank Marcacci: Next, we have character, types and roles, and with this there are people that read books just specifically because they have one type of archetype within them. So an example here we could see an amateur sleuth on the cover, and someone might want to try to read a crime book about something that's solving mysteries or kind of like a Sherlock Holmes type character.

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Hank Marcacci: Here we see someone that's a lone man on the cover. He's probably a vigilante, maybe a lone cop, Lone Wolf, and those are things that can describe that type of character. In the middle we have a mafia romance, so we can immediately see that someone that is involved in the mafia, and we can see that's more of a sex appeal type book. And that's the type of character that'd be present. Those and a lot of people would potentially read those mafia romance books, and that's what they're searching for on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: And then on the right, we have the inmate, and we can immediately tell right away what type of characters in there. It's gonna take place in a prison. And you're dealing with an inmate in this type of book. So again, if you have a certain type of character, a certain type of roles. People will go to Amazon and type those in. And you want your book to show, if that is obvious that you have it within there.

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Hank Marcacci: Next, we have the plot theme, and when we talk about the plot theme, we want to include that, there's something that goes across the entire book, and that theme that applies that we include those in our keywords because people search for that as well. So a great example here is misjudged, and we can see it's a legal thriller. So something like that immediately I know legal thriller. This has to do. The courthouse has to do the court case. I know that type of plot theme

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Hank Marcacci: over here. We have the 5th or 5th victim that tells me, has to do with serial killers. So I know that's a major theme in the book. We have the cobra event, which is all about a medical crime book. So we know that there's some corner or sort of strong medical theme that's going to be occurring in there and on the far right. We actually have Christmas crime, which is something that tells me it's gonna be Christmas type story, or something that's involved in there.

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Hank Marcacci: And the important thing here is that people search for books just because they have that plot theme. Again. There's people that read tons of Christmas books, and they might find your book, because that's what they're typing into Amazon or people that love legal thrillers, and they're trying to pick up their next one, because that's a theme that they truly enjoy.

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Hank Marcacci: Next, we have events and situations, and this applies especially to historical events or things that are well known that may have occurred in the past or at present. So great example, here is Devil in the White City, which took place at the World Fair. This is a historical book about a serial killer, and people might be looking about the world fair things around that time, and this might really interest them because they love to read about all those types of things.

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Hank Marcacci: Next, we have never trust a husband, which is all about a situation that a wife has been put in where there's an untrustworthy husband that may or may not be the good guy, and that's type of situation with an unreliable character that we may want to call in our book.

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Hank Marcacci: We also have Target Church Hill, and that's talking again about historical character which we want to include in our in our keywords. And then we also have on the far right stalker, which is one of characters put in a very in that type of situation which is something that people are reading more and more books about. If they really enjoy that type of genre. So again, if you have a specific event or situation, you want to make sure you include that in your book or in your keywords because people search for those.

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Hank Marcacci: And last and really, importantly, we have story tone. And this is all about how a book feels so great example, here is apple pie and arsenic, we can tell. It's probably a little lighter when we're looking at the cover, and something might be a little more humorous. But again, if you were to open that book up, the middle, chances are you might be reading a joke or laughing. There on the right. We have the cases that haunt us so we can know, or we can tell right away. This is more of a horror tone.

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Hank Marcacci: We have one right here that's an or so we can tell the type of tone that's going on in that book. And we also see one here called what she knew. And looking at that we can immediately tell it's a twist thriller. And if you're to pick it up, you're gonna have that page Turner type aspect. And that's what people look for in those twists thrillers. So if your book has a specific type of tone, if it's happy, if it's humorous, if it's sad, if it's dark. Those are all things that you want to include again when you're brainstorming those awesome keywords.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, the second secret we have for you today is not all keywords are created equal. Some are way better than others, and we'll talk about how to differentiate them.

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Hank Marcacci: And the question there is, what makes for good keywords.

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Hank Marcacci: and there are 3 steps that we use to find out if the keywords that we just brainstormed are good keywords.

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Hank Marcacci: 1st is, we need to make sure that there are words that shoppers really use. So shoppers actually using this on the Amazon store. That's great. If shoppers aren't using it, it doesn't really matter, because it doesn't help your book. And people aren't actually finding your book based on that keyword.

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Hank Marcacci: Next is, we need to make sure that people actually buy with these keywords. So words that shoppers used to buy. Because, remember, the goal here is to actually drive sales forever. And people aren't buying based upon the keyword that we've used. It isn't helping us.

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Hank Marcacci: And 3rd is, we need to make sure we have keywords that aren't too competitive, because if a big name author or someone else is using it. Chances are our book is not going to be able to compete with them. If we're someone smaller or Indy based. So we have to make sure again, they're not too competitive keywords, because we want to show up in the number one spot.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, the way that we tell this is first, st when we're looking for words that shoppers actually use in search is we go to the Amazon search bar and we start typing in our keyword. And if we see that Amazon auto completes our keyword, that means that hundreds of people have searched for this before, and it's something that people are actively typing in Amazon, and it's an active, well used keyword. So that's a great sign for us, because we want to use keywords that people are typing. In.

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Hank Marcacci: In addition, we can see all these recommendations from Amazon, and we can use those to brainstorm for more keywords. And if we change our word just a little bit. So, for example, here, you see, we're typing in Space Marines, and we'll make it plural here. So one second, we make it plural. All these keywords are gonna change up. And so we can do little variations there to find potentially even more keywords that we can use for our book.

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Hank Marcacci: Second is, we want words as shoppers used to buy, and the way we can tell how well a keyword is selling is if we go to. If we type in a keyword in Amazon, and we click on the 1st book, we can tell how many sales are occurring for the book

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Hank Marcacci: and the way that we can tell. That is, we go, and we look at the Amazon bestseller rank, which is found way down in the description, and it'll tell you the rank on Amazon for that book, and you can type that rank into the kindle best seller calculator, and they'll tell you how many sales per day are occurring for that book. So that's 1 way that you can tell if the keywords being successful, and if it's driving sales to a book.

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Hank Marcacci: And then, 3rd is, we want to make sure our keywords aren't too competitive. And these are some questions that help you decide. If the keyword is way too competitive or not. So that 1st one is, is the author famous. So if you're competing against a famous author, chances are, especially if you're new, and you're starting out that they're going to win for that keyword. And you're going to show up farther down. The page

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Hank Marcacci: next is, let's look at the book itself. Does it have a beautiful cover, or they're great reviews on there, or it's the book description so good that you want to read it? And if you're answering? Yes, these questions. It's probably a competitive keyword, because there's already a fantastic book that is taking that spot.

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Hank Marcacci: And then we also want to go down, and we want to look at things about the author themselves. So, for example, if the keyword is in the title of book, or if the author has a blog or other online assets that are strong, or they have strong knowledge of marketing skills, or they're running a lot of paid ads. We know that's a strong author marketer, and they're gonna fight to keep that keyword. So again, we want one that isn't too competitive because it is too competitive. You won't actually show up for that book on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, what you would do with this is, you would build a spreadsheet and repeat this process over and over and over again until you find the right keywords. Because if you find the right keywords that'll optimize your book, you're gonna get way. More clicks. And people actually gonna buy it on Amazon, and that can take hours.

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Hank Marcacci: However, we also have the easy button for getting this done in minutes rather than hours, and that easy button is publisher Rocket. And the way that publisher rocket works, which is that software developed by Dave is, if you click on keyword search here.

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Hank Marcacci: You can immediately type in a specific keyword and get tons of recommendations for that keyword that other people have typed in on Amazon. You can see an estimated number of searches per month that are occurring on Amazon, as well as the S. Are the average earnings for books that are using that keyword, and also the competitive score. So how hard it is to actually rank for that keyword. So the benefit here again is, instead of spending hours trying to search and find these keywords. You get all that information right off the bat. You can tell if it's being searched for if people are buying it, and if it's too competitive for you to use.

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Hank Marcacci: and what we can do to publish a rocket is we can go through and pull additional data that can help us decide if a keyword is good, or if it's not really gonna help our book. And here's a great example using crime keywords. So say, for example, you wrote a cozy mystery book.

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Hank Marcacci: and you're trying to decide which keyword you want to use. Now, all these keywords look pretty similar to the human eye. But to Amazon they're extremely different. And the amount of people typing these into Amazon is also extremely different. So, for example, we have the keyword, cozy mystery. That is a competition score of 96 is really really hard to rank for that. So you're gonna want to avoid that keyword.

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Hank Marcacci: So you might go, and you might get more specific and say something like cozy mystery. Small town versus cozy mystery in a small town. And if we compare these 2 keywords, even though they're almost the exact same cozy mystery. Small town brings in $223 a month, whereas cozy mystery in a small town only brings in 29. In addition, cozy mystery. Small town brings in 537 searches, whereas the second one brings in less than 100. So there's a huge difference between these keywords in terms of dollars and searches per month just by adding the 2 words in a

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Hank Marcacci: in addition, we have other keywords, such as cozy mystery, amateur sleuth versus cozy mystery amateur detective. And if we look at the difference between this amateur sleuth brings in $491 per month, whereas amateur detected only brings in 7. So there's a huge difference there, just by changing out one word. And if you're not looking the data, you probably don't know which one is doing better on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: Not only that, but notice. The amateur sleuth actually has less competition. So you can rank higher while also earning more money for that keyword. So again, when you're looking through these keywords, it's really important to do your research, because otherwise you don't know whether or not you're finding a keyword that's good, or one that maybe no one is searching for.

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Hank Marcacci: Now here's another example, and shows the importance of niching down on a keyword on Amazon. So if we start out with a very broad keyword, let's say crime, for example. Well, 70,000 other authors also show on to show up for the keyword crime. It's a very popular keyword, and everyone wants to show up at the top cause. That's a incredible amount of sales that you'll be getting. So remember, if you use a keyword like crime, you're competing against 70,000 other authors. That's a huge number.

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Hank Marcacci: so you might say, let's go ahead and niche down, and we'll niche from crime to true crime. And if we niche down we go from 70,000 competitors down to 50,000 competitors. So we lose 20,000 competitors just by getting a little more specific. And we can see our competition score drops as well.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, if you get even more specific and go from true crime to nonfiction crime case, we can see we go from 50,000 down to 10,000. So that's 5 times less competitors. And then, if we get way more specific all the way down to nonfiction, please, cold case, we see, there's only 154 other competitors on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: And this is the type of keyword that you want to use, because this is something that you can actually show up for on Amazon search, and you only have to compete against 150 people versus 70,000 other people that you're trying to compete for. So the competition is way less. And we can see that in the con competition score that's a 13 versus a 98 and 98, one of the hardest ones out there, because it maxes out of the 100.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, you might say, Hank, hold on a second nonfiction, please. Cold case only makes $420 a month. Why would I want to use that keyword where crime brings in 11,000?

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Hank Marcacci: And you're right. But the problem here is, if you use a keyword like crime, you're probably showing up on page 50 of Amazon. So you're not seeing a single dollar of this $11,000 that are coming in for those books

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Hank Marcacci: because you're so far down that no one's actually gonna find you. But if you use nonfiction, please, cold case, you'll likely get that entire $420 if you're able to rank close to the top, because the competition is so much less for that keyword.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, here are some other interesting keywords out there. These ones are more romance related, but a really good examples that drive these points home. So I wanted to include them today. And this has to do with the psychology of a reader on Amazon. If someone goes to Amazon, they type in a keyword such as romance. They might look and say, Hey, that's not really what I was looking for. Those books aren't what I, you know, intended to read, I'm looking for something else. I'm actually looking for romance

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Hank Marcacci: and sex, and what they'll do is they'll append additional words on the end of their keyword to help describe more to Amazon what they're looking for. And what happens is you can get some really weird, strange scenarios out of this. So, for example, someone might be looking for a second chance romance which is really someone's second chance at love.

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Hank Marcacci: and they might have a baby, and they might be looking for someone in their family that also has a baby. So they might type in second chance romance might not find what they're looking for. And then they're gonna type in second chance romance with baby. Now, that's a really strange keyword. And we know that connotation is not what they're looking for. However, tons of people type this in Amazon because they're just trying to find that second chance romance a second chance of love with someone who has a baby.

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Hank Marcacci: So it's important here, because second chance romance only brings in $390 per month, whereas second chance romance with baby brings in $23,000. And that's all about the psychology, and about how people think about this, and how when you take advantage of these weird things that people type into Amazon, you can actually find a gold line of the keyword.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, next, we have a great example. How change your keyword just by a little bit can have big results. So a great example here is abusing keyword, billionaire romance, you'll see that is a high competition, our competition score of 80. So it's really hard to rank towards the top for billionaire romance.

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Hank Marcacci: But just by changing one ladder going from billionaire to millionaire. So just changing the Bdn M, we go from an 80 all the way down to 55. So just by changing our keyword up a little bit, we can have way. Less competition on the Amazon score, and almost 10 time less competitors, which makes it much easier for our book to show up towards the top.

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Hank Marcacci: Another great example here is that we get more descriptive, and we go from Alpha, male romance to possess. About Alpha male romance. We can immediately see our competent, our competition score drop as well, and there are far less competitors that show up on the Amazon store as well. So it's really important again, when you type in keywords, and you think of them. And this is something a publisher rocket can help you out with doing, or you can go the Amazon search bar and type in all those different variations, that there are really strange connotations, that people might have

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Hank Marcacci: their keywords, but they might be really successful on the store, and just by changing up your keyword a little bit, you can get way. More successful results.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, here's an example. If you do this manually versus if you do this, so publish a rocket, and if you do this manually and find all your keywords, you'll get some information on whether or not people search for it as well as the average earnings that you would actually earn if you were to use that keyword and rank towards the top. And the important thing about this is, if you're going through these keyword lists, you'll see that pandemic is the one that earns the absolute most out of this list. And you probably think to yourself, hey? That is a great keyword that I would love to use.

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Hank Marcacci: However, with publisher rocket you get way. More information, such as the searches per month, their earnings and the competition score. And if I look at pandemic, the keyword we're just about to use. When we did this manually, we can see, publisher Rocket that the competition is 100. It's the hardest one out there to get. So it's really important again, to get the full picture, to look at all the data before you choose your keywords, because there are traps in here that if you choose the wrong one, it might be incredibly competitive, and you might not show up at all around Amazon for that keyword.

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Hank Marcacci: So again, we would use this information to go through and select the keywords that we want for our book.

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Hank Marcacci: Now as a recap, there are 3 steps to getting your keywords, or 3 ways to get your keywords

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Hank Marcacci: 1st is that you can guess, and if you guess you have no idea whether or not your keywords going to help you or even hurt you on the Amazon store. You don't even know if people are searching for it.

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Hank Marcacci: Second is, you can go manually, and if you go manually you'll be a lot better off than you guessed, and you'll be able to go through. It's gonna take you hours and hours of time, and you might find and are falling to one of the pitfalls like pandemic. But you'll be way better off.

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Hank Marcacci: And then, 3rd is you can use publish rocket. You can get the full picture here and make sure your keyword is one that's gonna help your book and ensure that you make more sales your book in the future. So again, that's how you find your keywords. Is that the 3 ways you can go through is Guest manual or publish rocket.

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Hank Marcacci: Now that again, is our keyword section, and how you actually find those on Amazon. Now we're going to talk all about categories, because that's our second part of discoverability and how to use data science to improve our book categories on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: And as a recap with categories. We're talking about the genre section on Amazon, where you can click in, you can see the top books that are showing up for a genre on Amazon. Amazon shows us the books that are selling within the top 20 within that category. So again, if you're looking at this category. These are the ones that are selling the best on Amazon within Science Fiction, and if you get position one get that beautiful orange bestseller Tag, which tells everyone they may want to go. Read your book because you're a bestseller. So again, if you have that beautiful

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Hank Marcacci: tag is a huge amount of clout, and it tells people go check out this book because tons of other people have read it, and it's great social credit.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, in order to become a bestseller, we have to find best seller categories. And the question is, how do we find the best best seller categories that help sell your book as opposed to potentially hindering it and hiding it on Amazon. So again, we want to find these categories that are out there that can help your book rise to the top and get in position number one. So you get that beautiful orange bestseller tag.

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Hank Marcacci: And to do this we have to understand the Amazon system of categories. Now, if any of you out there have been publishing for a couple of years, you're probably used to the old system of Amazon categories, and this is how it used to work. So when you go through Amazon, you look at their old system. They used to give you around 5,000 or 4,700 categories that were really really broad. And what Amazon would do? Is it actually have 12,000 categories on the Amazon store?

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Hank Marcacci: And to get your book actually put into these 12,000 categories like ones that are more specific and more niche, you would actually have to email into Amazon and specifically ask them to put you within these categories. It was a very complex system it was hard to use unless you're in the know. You didn't even know about it, and it's something that Amazon has fortunately revamped recently in the past. And they brought out now the new system categories as way easier for others.

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Hank Marcacci: And with this new system of categories, you're actually able to select any of the book that shows up on, or any of the categories that show up on Amazon. So you don't have to go back and forth and email with Amazon reps to be put in the category that you want. So this is far more beneficial because you can go all the way from a very broad category to something very specific, and put your book in that specific category, and that will line up to the categories on the Amazon store. Now.

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Hank Marcacci: basically, with this it sounds easy. There's some benefits here, but there's also some traps, and I want to talk about those real quick.

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Hank Marcacci: and the 1st thing, or the not really chats, but the 1st what do we call them?

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Hank Marcacci: Some things that you should keep in mind before you do. This 1st is in the old system. You're able to choose up to 10 categories. And now Amazon is saying, you're only allowed to choose 3. So Amazon has changed that over the last year where you used to be able to put your book in 10 different categories we show up in all 10. Now, Amazon only allows you to put them in 3, and they've limited to that.

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Hank Marcacci: In addition, Amazon doesn't have to accept which ones you choose. Amazon could see that you chose one category. They could say, We don't believe that this book really fits in there, and they could pull it out. In addition, Amazon could actually add you to more categories in that 3 limitation. If they believe your book belongs in that category. So that's something really powerful, that if your book belongs strongly in another category, Amazon might actually add you to that one as well which can help your sales.

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Hank Marcacci: Now this seems really simple, this new system that Amazon has put together. But there are 2 pitfalls that we need to be aware of before we start using it.

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Hank Marcacci: And the 1st is that 54% of all the categories the Amazon let you choose from are duplicates of each other. And what this means is that if you're out there and you're doing your category research over half of the categories that you're seeing are duplicates. They're showing up multiple times in that picker, and you might waste a lot of time trying to investigate these categories and find out which ones are actually independent. And what I mean by that is, if you go to 2 of the different categories in the picker that you think are separate in the Kdb picker, you click on them. You'll see they really go to the same page on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: A great example. Here is a 17th century civil war category or 17th century category, which is listed over 20 times on Amazon in totally different spots. And if you're trying to publish a book in that category, you might think that you found these awesome categories, but at the same time, not really, if it's only one, and spend a lot of research and a lot of time trying to find the best one that overall was wasted.

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Hank Marcacci: And the second pitfall

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Hank Marcacci: is that 27% of categories are ghost categories and ghost categories, just like the name are scary. And here is the problem with ghost categories.

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Hank Marcacci: So ghost categories are ones that you can actually get placed in. But they're pages that can't be found by shoppers on Amazon, and you can't get a best seller tag on them, either. So if you think about shelves in a bookstore, a ghost categories like a shelf that they went took out of the bookstore and hit it in the back closet. You actually can't find down Amazon. And if you put your book into that category. It doesn't help you out on the Amazon store. So this is a huge issue, because if you put your book into this because you only

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Hank Marcacci: you can get 3 categories to choose from. You're wasting one of your chances at becoming a best seller, and even if you reach position number one in that category. Amazon won't award you that best seller tag.

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Hank Marcacci: So you really wanna avoid these, if possible, cause they can harm your book where you're not being found on Amazon, and you're not being recognized as a bestseller, even if you reach the top of the category.

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Hank Marcacci: Now here's an example how to find a ghost category. So if you happen to find one of these pages on Amazon, or you click on the actual category link to get to the specific category you're looking for. You can see that a real category here has this category tree on the left, and it also has a description of what the category is up here.

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Hank Marcacci: But if it's a ghost category, this is a page again. You can't normally find on Amazon where there is no category tree, and it just says, Best sellers at the top, and there's no description at all. So again, what that means is that people actually can't find this category on Amazon, and you don't get that best hard tag if you reach position number one.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, this is dangerous, because there's 27% of the categories on the Amazon store or these categories, you have a high chance of selecting a ghost unless you know how to look out for them

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Hank Marcacci: now overall. Now that we know the pitfalls about duplicates and ghosts. Let's talk about how we find the best categories on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: and remember to become an Amazon best seller. All you need to do is sell more books in one day than any other book in that category. So again, to reach position number one, we just have to sell the most books for that one day within a category. And this is important, because different categories require very different amount of books to reach position number one.

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Hank Marcacci: and an example here is, say, category. One only takes 3 book sales to become a bestseller, but Category 2 takes 247 book sales to become best seller. Well, if your book fits well within category one, you want to put your book in there because you can much easier crime to the top of that page and be shown at the top of that page.

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Hank Marcacci: But if you put your book into Category 2, and you're making only let's say 10 sales a day. Chances are you're way down that page. You might not even show up on it. And even though you're making good sales. Amazon's not giving a recognition for that within a category. So it's really important again, to find categories that are smaller, that take less competition to reach the top, so you can put your books in there and be recognized as the best seller within that category and be viewed by more people.

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Hank Marcacci: Now I'm going to pause here and offer a warning to people as well, because in the past people used to put their books in categories where they didn't belong.

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Hank Marcacci: And that's something really important. You don't do. Make sure that the category fits your book. Fortunately, there's over 14,000 categories on Amazon to choose from, so I know that there's niche ones out there that describe your book, but make sure you're being honest and ethical when you do this, because otherwise what will happen is one Amazon's gonna get mad at you. They might be in your account. And 2 is that readers are. Gonna say, what is this book? This isn't what I expect in this category.

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Hank Marcacci: and they're gonna leave a really low review for you. So again, make sure these categories fit. But if it fits absolutely choose a niche category with less sales per day to reach position number one.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, here's how we actually go about and find best selling categories.

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Hank Marcacci: and there are 3 steps just like keywords.

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Hank Marcacci: First, st is you want to look at the categories of other, or we want to look at the categories of other books like your own. Second is, find the absr of the number one bestselling book, and put that in the kindle kindlepreneur calculator to understand how many sales per day that book makes. And then, 3, rd repeat this until you find 3 books that work for you, or 3 categories that work for you.

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Hank Marcacci: So with step one, for example, we click on a book like our own, and we can investigate and find these other categories that our book also might fit in. And if we click on one of them we can then find a book in position number one for that category.

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Hank Marcacci: and we'll take the bestseller rank of that book. Put it in a kindle best seller calculator, and that'll tell us how many sales per day it takes to actually reach position number one.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, when we have that we'll make a list of all our categories out and find the ones that are best for us, that we want to choose our top 3 from. And again, it's really important to list these out into review all these because we want to choose niche ones that are gonna help our book out on the Amazon store. So a great example here is, you're looking at different crime categories. You see, all these different true crime ones, and they have very different amount of sales to actually race position number one. And if we look at, for example, true crime serial killers.

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Hank Marcacci: we can see that every day you have to make 3,500 sales to reach position number one. However, true crime forensics only takes 14 sales a day to reach position number one. So if you wrote a forensic novel about serial killers, you really want to consider if your book fits in it, putting it into true crime forensics, because that means you can reach that top seller position far easier, whereas in true prime serial killers your book is likely being buried under tons of other bestselling authors, and having a really hard time being seen on the Amazon store.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, with publisher rocket, you can do all this with a click of a mouse as opposed to doing all that research time online.

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Hank Marcacci: And what you can do in rocket is you go to category search and you click on a parent category, and that'll show you all the child categories underneath that parent. So you see all the different categories on the Amazon store in this example, under self help.

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Hank Marcacci: and what you could do here is you can review all these categories and find the sales it takes to get position number one.

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Hank Marcacci: the sales it takes because you're number 10, which means that you're on the category page at least, and other helpful information, such as the percent of publishers within that category and the percent of ku within that category. In addition, we've low, or we label duplicate as well as ghost tags. So you can immediately tell within publisher Rocket. If something's a ghost category, so you can avoid it, because, remember, those categories will hurt your sales, and they don't let you become a best seller. So you really don't want to choose them, even though Amazon doesn't warn you about them. So it's a huge benefit of publish. Rocky is getting those ghost tags for categories.

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Hank Marcacci: And again, when you know which categories are duplicates and goes, you're the benefit that you're not going to waste any of your 3 category choices. Because those are your 3 chances of becoming a best seller in your 3 areas where you can be discovered on Amazon. You don't want to waste any of them. They're extremely valuable

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Hank Marcacci: now, as a recap. There are 3 ways to get your categories

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Hank Marcacci: 1st is, you can guess, and just like keywords. If you guess chances are you're not helping your discoverability because you're probably choosing a really competitive category that you're going to get buried in.

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Hank Marcacci: Second is you can find a manual way to do it, and you can go find them on your own. And while that works you're probably not going to find the best niche categories, because it can be a little hidden. And not only that, but you're going to spend a lot of time looking for categories when you should be writing your book.

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Hank Marcacci: And 3, rd you can just publish your rocket to get all that information and help you out with that category information to find best possible. 3 for you. But

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Hank Marcacci: now, at this point I bet you're wondering how you can get your hands on publisher rocket.

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Hank Marcacci: and with publisher Rocket, we are offering it for $97 today for unlimited access. That's not a subscription. It's a 1 time payment of $97, and with that you can find profitable keywords fast.

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Hank Marcacci: You can see all those different categories in the Amazon store and quickly find the ones that are niche for your book to help rank rank at position number one.

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Hank Marcacci: You can develop the fact that Amazon adds keywords. We didn't talk about that today, but it's a huge part of rocket, where you can generate up hundreds of ads keywords.

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Hank Marcacci: You can see how much other authors are making, which is one of my favorite things. I love to go spy in the competition and see who's being successful in the genre.

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Hank Marcacci: And then you can also find emerging and hot bookmarks. So things that are about to pop are about to take off in the Amazon store.

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Hank Marcacci: Now for $97 of that unlimited access. If rocket helps you sell 48 more books in your entire author life, or if Rocket helps you save 5 h of time in your entire author life, then it pays for itself.

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Hank Marcacci: And the reason here why is, if you sell 48 more books, the entire author life, and that could be over several years. That means that you pay back that $97 in royalties Amazon has given you, and for the 5 h, if you value your time roughly, $20 an hour. That means if you save 5 h of research by buying rocket. You actually make your money back on your investment that way through the Roi.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, just today or not today. But just for Crime Week we're offering in Dennis, or we're offering a special bonus as well. And we're giving away Dave's kindle keyword and category course absolutely free. Normally, $49 to actually purchase this course for people that purchase publisher Rocket this crime week.

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Hank Marcacci: And the benefit of this course is, Dave takes you through tons of examples on how to best use rocket and best apply the practices that we talked to today. So you can find out how to become more discoverable in Amazon. You can see the step by step process with real examples. On finding Ca, keywords and categories.

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Hank Marcacci: you can go and realize how to use those keywords and categories to make more sales. And there's far, far more that you can find within that course as well. It's an awesome course. It really takes you through the nitty gritty and seeing the best possible ways and examples that you can do it. And you get that again for free today. If you buy, publish a rocket during prime week.

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Hank Marcacci: And again, if you want this, you have to use this link at the bottom. So kindlepreneur.com slash crime Week. That is how you actually get that deal which should be posted in the chat.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, here's some testimonials for Publisher Rocket, and one of my favorite things about publisher Rocket is, it brings back books that have actually flatlined and are called dead books, and these are ones that on Amazon aren't getting traction. They're not making the sales they can. And if you go through a publisher rocket and prove the keywords and categories, it'll breathe life back at these books. In addition, publisher rocket should be viewed as an investment. It's something that should pay itself back over time through sales that you make. So it's something that's gonna help your author career and help more readers find your book.

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Hank Marcacci: So again, this offer is only available for limited time. That's $97 rocket, and you get that $49 course for free. If you buy within that special link down there for Crime Week. And in addition to this any features that we release in the future you get for free. So if we come up with an awesome new feature in the future, it automatically downloads. You get that for free. We have world class support which are real people and authors that are there to help you out. And we also have lessons, resources, and tutorials for you to check out as well.

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Hank Marcacci: In addition, we offer a 30 day money back guarantee. So if you aren't happy and rocket for any reason you can just return it. We don't ask questions. We don't ask whether you love or hate it again. Just return it. We'll give it back to you. No questions asked.

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Hank Marcacci: and that is it, for today, I wanna say, thank you all so much again for joining us. I hope you love the presentation. I hope you learned a ton about keywords and categories. Whether or not you have rocket, you should have tons that you can take. Now apply to your Amazon strategy and start making a difference right away, and we'll go ahead and pause here and accept any questions that you'll have, and we're more than happy to answer them, and thank you again so much for joining us in.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Thanks, Hank, that was great.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: To anyone who is raising their hand. Just I wanna direct you to the QA. If you have questions. Make sure you type your questions in there. We are not able to call on attendees with raised hands. So type your question in the QA, and we will try to go through as many as we can. Now.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Okay.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: sunny asks, are keywords, literally single words, or can key phrases.

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Hank Marcacci: Great question. So keywords can be a phrase. And when we say keyword, we refire, referred to anything. Someone types in with that search box on Amazon. So, for example, if you type in sci-fi military into that box, that whole phrase is the keyword.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Okay, Sue asks, how often does publisher rocket update stats.

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Hank Marcacci: Publisher rocket has several sections that are live. So those are immediate right over from data on the Amazon store. And then our category. Information is right about every 3 days. So it's very quick that information and data coming over from the store. So you get live and fresh information for you and the one that is from categories every 3 days. The reason we have it that way is it? Just

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Hank Marcacci: so? It doesn't jump all over. So you have a reliable thing that you can look at, understand, and get the trend out of it, as opposed to seeing every day go up and down a little bit. So again should be more than enough when you're picking your categories to find the best ones, because what you don't want to do is get lost in the weeds, in the numbers.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have a couple of questions regarding how often can you change your categories and or your keywords?

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Hank Marcacci: So with categories and keywords, you can change them as often as you want. However, Amazon recommends giving your book time to settle on the Amazon store. So, for example, if you're changing your keywords and categories like every other day, Amazon doesn't have any time to see how well your book is doing in those, and determine whether it wants to recommend your book for those keywords to shoppers.

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Hank Marcacci: So what I recommend is, if you change your keywords and categories. Let them sit for a week to 2 weeks or so. Cpc, that difference. And if you don't see it there, let's say, after 2 weeks, that's where you can potentially change it again. But you don't want to be going in there every single day and changing them up because you'll just confuse the Amazon algorithm.

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Hank Marcacci: Personally, what I do is I change mine around every 6 months because I go in. I make sure that they're still working well. Sometimes I'll leave them, and it's mainly keywords that I would change. But if there's any keywords that I notice are way more competitive than it used to be, I might switch those out. But again every 6 months is roughly when I go in and do it.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have another question, Kyomi. I apologies if I mispronounce that. Asks, would this work well for nonfiction as well like true crime?

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Hank Marcacci: It does work well for non fiction, and especially for true crime, because true crime still follows a lot of the story. Arcs and structures that are available in fiction. So when you're talking about true crime, I would use a lot of the ways that we talked about in the fiction keywords to apply to your book. Because again, you're ultimately you're telling a story, or you're talking about some historical event or talking about something that has marks.

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Hank Marcacci: Now, if you're writing a nonfiction book such as a calendar, or you have something as such as a how to guide, we recommend for that, using a different set of criteria which you can find on kindle for newer, and we have nonfiction keywords there highly recommend checking them out. But that more applies to like, what is the problem a reader has?

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Hank Marcacci: What are they trying to solve by reading your book? What are the demographics they are? So again, if you're writing nonfiction that's more like a how to guide, or something like that. Go over to kindle Premier and take a look at it. But if your book has a narrative and a story. It's like a biography or true crime. Don't use the fiction once, because that's people. Likely it's gonna resonate much better with them for true crime.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Valerie asks, can you talk about how the categories and keywords work with the kindle version versus the paperback.

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Hank Marcacci: Absolutely. So when we talk about categories and keywords, it's very similar across the 2. But Amazon does show books differently in different areas of the store. So all you really need to know is, you can set your keywords and categories for your kindle, and you can also set it for your paperback, and what publisher rocket does is it lets you put filters. So if you go in the upper right hand section, publish rocket, you'll see a filter where you can say Paperback or Kendall, and you can decide upon which one you're looking for.

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Hank Marcacci: And the reason why that's important is sometimes people use different keywords when searching for a paperback versus for a kindle. So they might type something in slightly different if they're looking for something again in that paperback section. Something else important is Amazon has completely different categories for kindle and paperback. So when you're going, you're looking for your categories, make sure you actually select paperback or kindle up in rocket. If you're looking there or on the Amazon store, you choose the dropdown that lets you choose between kind of our paperback, otherwise you won't be able to actually find those categories.

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Hank Marcacci: But the principles remain the same. Just how to find them as difference.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Jennifer asks, how many of those Amazon searchers are looking for specific books versus how many are searching with just general keywords.

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Hank Marcacci: So Amazon is a black box, so we can't specifically say exactly what's going on back there. I wish they gave us that data. Unfortunately, that's a piece of data that we can't quite get. That being said, though, is, there are a ton of people that are out there searching for those keywords, and those are the ones you want to take advantage of. So again, it doesn't really matter how many people are out there looking for specific books. What matters a lot is the people or people that you want to target are the people that are typing in those keywords, because those are the people that don't know what book they want to get. And you want your book to appear and search for someone that hasn't yet made their decision.

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Hank Marcacci: Something that's really important is that within your keywords you cannot use a competitor's book. So if you use a keyword that is competitors book Amazon will see that it's trying to basically full readers. And as a potential copyright issue. So they will actually take your book down or send you at least a letter. If you use a competitor book keyword there. So make sure again, you're using like genre keywords or using for search terms. You're not using competitor titles because that will get you in trouble. Amazon.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have a couple of questions regarding competitors. What's the sweet spot for the number of competitors.

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Hank Marcacci: We get this question a lot, and the answer is, I hate to say it, but it depends. It depends. If it's your 1st day as an author, and this is your 1st book, and no one's heard of you. Or if you're someone out there that's published 5 books before and has good traction on Amazon. If you're a 1st time author, and it's your 1st time publishing a book, you really wanna find very, very low competition, because you don't yet have a reader. Base people don't yet know who you are, and you wanna appear in those low competition numbers because Amazon still not sure about you.

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Hank Marcacci: However, if you're someone that's published, let's say 5 to 10 books already, or you've got a strong presence on Amazon.

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Hank Marcacci: Then you can start raising up into that yellow zone a competition score, and they are colored on Po, our Polish rockets so you can see them there, and you can start going for more competitive ones, because you hold more weight. So again, it depends upon where you are within your author lifetime. If you're very beginning, go for the easy ones. If you're starting to get clout and starting to get credit, go towards the ones that might be a little more competitive, because you can still show up to the top of search.

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Hank Marcacci: and if you still aren't sure, change your keywords. Wait a week. Search for it on Amazon, and see if you actually pop up within search on the front page, and if you don't, you might want to choose something a little less competitive.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Randy asks how long the offer is open. That offer is done on June 23, rd correct.

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Hank Marcacci: Yup. It is open for Crime Week. We left it open for one day extra. So up until June 23.rd

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have an anonymous question, the $97 purchase that is, for a lifetime not annual, correct.

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Hank Marcacci: That is correct, it is lifetime. You never get billed again. It's the one time we charge, and again you get all the feature features. So if you pay $97 and we release something awesome a year from now, you're gonna get it it automatically downloads. You don't pay extra in the future for it. So one time purchase.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have a couple of attendees who are already already own publisher, Rocket, but they're asking if they can get access to the special training you mentioned for new buyers.

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Hank Marcacci: Absolutely. So we're happy to take care of you all we want to say. Thank you for buying. Publish rocket. We hope you're loving it, and you can get access to this by writing into publisher, rocket support. So go to publisher, rocket.com slash support. Tell them Hank sent you, and we'll set you all up again. We really appreciate you guys coming this webinar and supporting us that way.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Alright, we are unfortunately out of time. But thank you all for attending this session, and thank you again, Hank, for being here. This is very informative, and we really enjoyed it a lot. So thank you.

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Hank Marcacci: Thanks so much we appreciate it. Thank you all for having us, and best of luck with everyone with their book sales. Thank you again.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have another session starting in an hour with Alex Segura. So please join us for that, and we will see you. Then bye, everybody.