The other day I came across a wonderful article http://www.examiner.com/writing-careers-in-seattle/categories-key-words-and-tags-oh-my-why-should-an-author-care about the usage of tagging for our books and more importantly, our ebooks.
This information comes at a good time for me because Night Bird is scheduled to release soon. Shopping in the Kindle store or on a Nook isn’t the same as perusing a stunning array of books in a store where you could it pick up and skim through to see if you were interested. Obviously the trick to selling an ebook is guiding potential readers to your novel. How else are they going to find you?
When using an electronic reading device, you’re probably searching for a certain author name you’ve typed in, or you followed the suggestions that appear from previous purchases that send you on your way. Tagging cuts the search into smaller, doable chunks.
Like: *taken from above article:
Fiction [324,671]
Fiction–Mystery&Thriller [43,629]
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery [9,700]
Fiction—Mystery&Thriller—Mystery—Historical [73]
Okay, so I would tag Night Bird as paranormal, because I don’t want to upset or disappoint anyone when they discover my heroine is an angel and my hero is…deceased!
Another good tag word I think I might choose is redemption. I had considered faith but again, I don’t want to give the wrong category selection and end up with an unsatisfied reader.
Some other tags I might try: sea captain, whaling & sailors.
If you've got time, I highly recommend reading the article by Jennifer Conner in Seattle Writing Careers Examiner. There’s so much excellent information for a newbie like myself that I've bookmarked the story so I can absorb it in small doses. Coming up with the right tags will most likely require practice. I’m not sure if you can fine tune a tag once it’s been submitted or not. But undoubtedly it’s a very important part of marketing that needs to be learned.
And like anything else, the more we do it, the easier it will become. (I hope.)
