Amazon Decoded, Decoded

 I've never been a big fan of how-to books, especially how-to marketing books.  I have read a few and they mostly seem like a lot of empty vamping that can usually be summarized into a blog post--which is what I do after I read them.  But I have read some of David Gaughran's stuff on Facebook, especially involving scammers and the like, so when it was on sale, I got a copy of his Amazon Decoded book for how-to market in the Kindle store.

And it was pretty typical.  A lot of vamping and extraneous stuff.  Most every section included an entreaty to go to his website for more, to the point I thought, "Why did I bother buying a book when I could have found everything on the website?"

I suppose there are some newbs who would enjoy hearing the entire history of the Kindle store or maybe even the entire history of Amazon itself, but I'd prefer to just get down to brass tacks.  What should I do and how should I do it?

In the end a lot of it is:  use Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, and BookBub Ads.  The latter two more than Amazon.  Except that for someone like me who's into a super-tight niche, Amazon Ads would probably be better because you can narrow the focus more.  People in more traditional markets would get more bang for their buck with the other two.  But of course you have to have some bucks, which I really don't, so that part of the book doesn't have tons of relevance for me.

Since this came out in 2019 some of it is outdated, like the stuff about series and how important it is to have all the same name and stuff.  You no longer really have to worry about that with the series managing tool KDP added last year.  Now you can put books into a series even if they weren't really intended that way, like how I put all of my holiday-themed gender swap stories into one series.

The section on metadata was disappointing.  It all boiled down to:  either spend $97 on a program called KDP Rocket or just brute force it by searching keywords to see what comes up and if that would apply to your book.  The former is too expensive and the latter too time-consuming.  Probably the only helpful part of that was the reminder that your keywords don't have to be just one word.  I don't usually use more than two or three words in a keyword but you can use a bunch of words if you want.

There was one really interesting and potentially useful thing, though.  You know how fast food places sometimes have a "secret menu" of things not on the menu but available if you ask for them?  I think it's In-n-Out Burger out west that's especially famous for that but even McDonald's and Taco Bell in certain places will have stuff available if you know to ask them.   Anyway, KDP has a sorta secret menu item.  It's not exactly secret, but you have to know where to look.

When you set up your book, Amazon only lets you put in 2 categories (unlike B&N or Draft2Digital that give you 5 or Smashwords I think had more than that) but there are over 13,000 sub-categories on Amazon.  It turns out you can expand your categories up to 10--if you know how to ask.

You can just send a help email to KDP, but the better way is to go to your Author Central page and find the "Contact Us" link down at the bottom.  Then you can find the link where it will give you a sort of template on how to ask to add additional categories for your book.

This is what my email looked like for my book Swapnado:

I would like to add some categories to Swapnado by Eric Filler, ASIN B097SR4X84

Categories to be added (list each category as a separate line item):

1. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Romance>LGBTQ+>Bisexual Romance

2. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Romance>LGBTQ+>Gay Romance

3. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Romance>LGBTQ+>Lesbian Romance

4. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Romance>LGBTQ+>Transgender Romance

5. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Genre Fiction>LGBTQ+

6. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Genre Fiction>Psychological

7. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Horror>Dark Fantasy

8. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Horror>LGBTQ+

9. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Genre Fiction>LGBTQ+>Lesbian Fiction

10. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Genre Fiction>LGBTQ+>Transgender Fiction

The only problem with it was I didn't do my math correctly.  You get up to 10 TOTAL, so you can only add 8.  The person at Amazon sent me back an email saying they would only add enough to make it 10 total.  But otherwise it worked the way it was supposed to.

The obvious problem is you have to do this for each and every book, so for me I'd have to send like 200 emails, which I think would really piss them off.  But if you just have a couple of books, it's a good idea.  The caveat is you have to know which categories exactly that you want and they won't give you a list.  So the best idea is to go to other books, like ones it suggests you buy if you bought your own book or what people looked at after reading yours, and see what categories those are in and then copy and paste those into your email.

To get the full category I clicked the link on the book's page to take me to the chart and on the left side you see where it has the complete tree for that chart.  That's where I got a couple of my categories from; under the Genre LGBTQ+ I saw Lesbian and Transgender and so decided to add it to both along with the regular LGBTQ+.

You'd think Amazon could just make this part of the process when you're loading your book instead of making authors bother their low-paid minions in India about this.  But it's just part of what I've said all along:  Amazon is your frenemy.  They really don't want to make it too easy for small authors to succeed.  That would interfere with their plans for world domination.  But those plans need money, so they're happy yet to take a cut of our sales to fund their machine.  If you start taking sales away from their books, though, you might wind up floating upside-down in the Ganges.  (How much of that was tongue-in-cheek?  Hurm...)

There's also another thing sorta hidden, which is the chart of Most Popular books, which is different from Bestselling.  For most of us this won't really matter a lot because we're never going to be on that list.  It's really more for big traditionally-published authors.  Still, it's good to understand some of the different types of information Amazon uses.

Another good piece of advice is that when you're advertising your book, it's best not to have friends, family, and a bunch of random people buy it and/or review it.  The reason is that if those people don't traditionally read or buy in that category, it can throw off Amazon's marketing algorithms, so it would be telling people who don't read books like yours to buy your book and then they won't like it and give you a bad review.  

There's some other stuff, but really that was what jumped out at me as important.  As you can see, it didn't take that long to go through it.  That's why how-to books are usually so irritating.  Really unless you can get it free I'd say to just go to the guy's website and check out the stuff there and save yourself 200 pages of vamping.