As I mentioned previously, my debut novel, The Trouble With Being God, is now available for purchase in both paperback and kindle format on Amazon.com. Now that the book is up, I’m continuing my self-publishing marketing experiment, and trying out different methods of social viral marketing within Amazon itself, currently focusing on tagging.
As most of you are probably aware, tagging is the simple practice of adding relevant keywords to a product, similar to the way meta keywords were used in web pages. Instead of these tags being added by the creator, however, the tags are added by other members of the community, as it is assumed that tags from outsiders are much more relevant than those created by a self-serving advertiser/creator.
Amazon.com uses tags for their products as a way to easily filter what is relevant in a specific category. They are primarily used within different groups on the site, as well as community discussions and cross-sell opportunities (tags on their listmania lists are used quite a bit in this manner).
So, what I’m doing now is focusing on getting my reader base to tag The Trouble With Being God with appropriate tags, such as “murder,” “crime,” philosophy,” “thriller,” “suspense,” and other tags they find relevant for the book to help drive the book up in relevancy in Amazon’s rankings. Simply put: the more times a book (or other product) is tagged with a specific term, the more relevant it appears to be to that topic on the Amazon website.
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