The Publishing Performance Show

Dave Chesson - Cracking the Amazon Keyword Code with the Kindlepreneur

• Teddy Smith • Episode 15

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Dave Chesson, founder of Kindlepreneur and Publisher Rocket, shares his expertise on Amazon keyword optimization and book marketing. As the creator of one of the most popular keyword research tools for authors, Dave provides insights into how authors can better position their books for discovery on Amazon.

In this episode:

  • The story behind Publisher Rocket's development
  • Understanding Amazon's keyword system
  • How to optimize your seven KDP keyword boxes
  • Different approaches for fiction vs non-fiction keywords
  • Using the new reverse ASIN tool for research
  • Tips for analyzing competition and market potential
  • Best practices for keyword research and implementation


Resources mentioned:


Book recommendations:


Connect with Dave Chesson:


Connect with Teddy Smith:


Join our Facebook Community - https://www.facebook.com/groups/publishingperformance/



[00:00:00] Teddy: This week in The Publishing Performance Show, I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by the kinderpreneur himself, Dave Chesson, and in this episode, we're going to be talking all about how you can do great keyword research for your books. Now, it's a topic that is kind of overlooked for a lot of writers, you know, they've got this great idea and they want to get it out there.

[00:00:22] Teddy: But if you don't think about keywords at all, then you might find that your book just won't get found in the Amazon algorithm. And that is really important. If you are trying to make sales, which is what this show is all about. Now in the show today, we're talking all about publish rocket and the new tool, the reverse asyn tool.

[00:00:37] Teddy: Which I've been waiting to come out in the Kindle world for a very long time. It's something that I've used a lot in my Amazon products world, but in terms of looking at books on Amazon, it's really difficult to do that reverse ASIN search. So if you don't know what that is, today, you're going to find out, but it's the best tool around for finding out what keywords your competition's ranking for.

[00:00:57] Teddy: So this is a great conversation today. I'm really so happy to finally get a chance to speak to Dave Chester on the show. It's. And I think you're going to learn a lot all about keywords. So have fun Hi everyone. Welcome to the publishing performance show I'm, really happy today to be joined by dave cheson who is from who's the founder of kindlepreneur And he's also the founder of publisher rocket one of my absolute favorites self publishing, tools So thank you for joining me dave.

[00:01:20] Dave: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. 

[00:01:22] Teddy: No problem Well, as I mentioned publisher rocket is probably my favorite keyword research tool So thank you very much for making that I use it pretty much every day. Oh, that's awesome. 

[00:01:31] Dave: Yeah me too 

[00:01:35] Teddy: I probably, I think I maybe even use it more than you. So we'll see. What was it that inspired you to build it in the first place?

[00:01:42] Dave: Yeah, well, back when I started writing you know, I've grown up with dyslexia and so I've never thought of myself as dyslexic. Amazing writer, right? And I think one of the issues that I've run into is the fact that I couldn't just sit down and write any story I wanted. I wanted to actually research and better understand, hey, what is it that shoppers are looking for?

[00:02:04] Dave: And maybe I could write for that or I have some ideas and what I didn't want to do is I didn't want to sit down and spend all that time, energy and money writing, putting together and launching a book and find out that nobody wants to read it. Nobody's searching for that information or, you know, the genre that I'm looking at is like dying quickly.

[00:02:25] Dave: I wanted to have confidence in knowing that there's a hungry market for what I'm doing. I also want ideas on ways to take what I want to do and ship. Well, at that time, there's really nothing out there that helped us. Now, publishing companies have had that information for years. They've always known the trend.

[00:02:43] Dave: They've known what to look for. They understand what people want. They understand what sells well. They have all this data to help them make good financial decisions when it comes to the book world. We sell publishers just didn't have that. We were just left to our own device of, Hey, write something. Get, throw it up there, you know, and see if it works.

[00:03:02] Dave: It was like throwing spaghetti on the wall. And for me, I was in the military. I didn't have a lot of time. It's not like I could spend, you know, 10 hours a day writing. My time was very particular. And I really wanted to say that if I was, you know, going downstairs to my office to write my book, I really wanted something for me.

[00:03:20] Dave: I wanted kind of that confidence of knowing that, hey, I looked at the business side of this and that not only do I get to write this fun book, but that I can also expect that all of this time, energy and money invested into this has a really good chance of working. And so from that point on, I started studying Amazon.

[00:03:41] Dave: I started looking at the market. I kind of, I come from an engineering and math background. So I was very analytical. I started creating these crazy Google sheets, you know, and calculations that helps it to kind of demystify. And finally, I said to myself, man, wouldn't it be nice if, because, you know, if you try to tell authors, hey, here's a giant, you know, Excel sheet and you got to fill out all these blocks and all these things come out, it's not going to help.

[00:04:05] Dave: Most people are not like crazy number nerds like myself. They're not good. A lot of authors would look at that and run the other way and don't, you know, I'll go back to throwing spaghetti on the wall. So I actually, I found some programming, a programming team. And I was like, Hey guys, look, here's what we've created.

[00:04:19] Dave: Find better ways. And from that, from the day that Publisher Rocket has been created, it's been this constant evolution of, Hey, what if. What if we did this, you know, and me as an author constantly saying, okay, Amazon changed this, let's do that, man. What I'll want most as an author is to know this. Hey guys, let's figure this out.

[00:04:38] Dave: And so it's just been a really fun wild ride. 

[00:04:42] Teddy: Yeah, definitely. And one of my favorite things about publisher rocket is obviously is really easy to use, but if you are searching for an idea for your next book and you've maybe come up with some quite broad concepts, so say you're thinking about, Childcare or looking after your kids or something like that.

[00:04:58] Teddy: You can type in quite a broad keyword and it will give you further keywords that you can then go and research and find more information about such as like how many people are searching for them. 

[00:05:07] Dave: Absolutely. Like a great example of that was a long while ago when I was looking at books you know, Evernote was really hot.

[00:05:14] Dave: A lot of people were writing books on how to use Evernote. And there was like, I think 42 books. Out at the time, and I could either a because I used Evernote heavily and I had for years. So this is 1 of the things I'm like, man, I could really teach. I could either try to sit down, and I'd have to write the best book out of the 42, the best cover, the best blurb, the best marketing, in order to get above them all.

[00:05:40] Dave: Well, when I started, you know, using my process to search, I found that, hey, you know what, people aren't just typing Evernote. There are people that are searching for, like, Evernote for students. Evernote for authors. Evernote for project managers. Evernote for lawyers. And so now I had these really cool ideas of I still get to write my Evernote book if I want to, but I can now angle it for a hungry market that isn't being served.

[00:06:06] Dave: There was no other book at the time for any of those people. Now imagine if you're the person, you're that student, and you type in Evernote for students. And there's one book that's literally titled evernote for students. You're not only going to Click on it. You're probably gonna buy it because this one literally speaks to you and it's the only one And that's where I really enjoyed this model because then I could write that book and it would continue to sell every month Because there's always Students coming and looking that turn.

[00:06:38] Dave: But then while that's running and, you know, bringing an income, I could then go to the second book, which I could, if I wanted to, I could write Evernote for private managers and I can make these business decisions on where I want to invest my time. Knowing full well, these can stack as assets. It can continue to bring in new readers.

[00:06:56] Dave: It can build my platform, all of these things above. And it just gave me more confidence and excitement about getting downstairs, you know, and writing that book. It wasn't one of those things of like, Oh, I'll get to it. It's like, no, Hey, I see what can happen if I just put this together. And that for me was a really big game changer.

[00:07:16] Dave: It's what helped me to build my habit of writing every day. And being very intentional about my writing because I was able to do it with more confidence. 

[00:07:24] Teddy: Yeah, definitely. And it's such a good example. The, like you probably see behind me, there's these lonely planet travel books. You know, if I wrote a travel book about the USA, that'd be a crazy thing to do because I'd be competing directly with Lonely Planet.

[00:07:35] Teddy: But you know what? A walking guide of Wyoming might be much more easy for me to rank for and to try and make those sales. And, you know, it's still that idea of writing the travel books, but it's going niche down. 

[00:07:45] Dave: Or even, yeah, exactly. To niche down even further, what if you were to find out that, you know, it wasn't just a travel book to the US, but what if it was a travel book of the US?

[00:07:54] Dave: For a family, right? I mean, there are probably people that are looking like, hey, family activity and what if, what would you say if you didn't do your research and you found out that, hey, nobody's done that. Nobody's angled it from a family perspective. So it's not just go see these sites or go visit this.

[00:08:09] Dave: It's, hey, this is a really good family friendly thing. And now all of a sudden you have an angle to be able to write that travel book. But you know for a fact that there really are those people that are typing that in and that, like I said, that then gives you an angle to write the thing you want instead of being another loud voice in a giant room full of other loud voices.

[00:08:27] Dave: You can really identify your market. I think it makes writing so much easier. And like I said, it just gives more confidence. 

[00:08:34] Teddy: Yeah, definitely. I couldn't agree with you more. Now, a lot of people listening to this would be writers and authors who maybe come up with an idea first and they then write that book, which is the book they want to write.

[00:08:45] Teddy: And there's nothing wrong with that. And they might be thinking, okay, why are keywords important for authors? Because I'm writing a book that I want to write. So could you tell us a bit more about keywords and why they're important? 

[00:08:56] Dave: Yeah. So. What happens is we have to remember that Amazon is not the semen.

[00:09:01] Dave: They can't, you know, Amazon doesn't read every book and then figure it out and be like, you know, this looks like a mystery. But quite frankly, there was a couple of scenes in here that were scary. So we're not going to call it a mystery. We're going to call it a horror, you know. They're not doing that.

[00:09:18] Dave: What they're doing is they created this algorithm, multiple algorithms, but I'm just going to call it one algorithm for now. An algorithm is going through and it's looking at all the things about your book. We call it the metadata. And it's using that to make calculations on where the book should be seen.

[00:09:35] Dave: So us as authors, and one of the most important ones of all is the seven KDP keyword boxes. So when you go to publish your book on KDP, they're going to ask you, Hey, fill in seven boxes with keywords that you want your book to show up for. What they're really doing here is they're saying hey, please help us to figure out where we should put this book So you as the author know that well, no, we're not a mystery book.

[00:09:58] Dave: We are a Psychological thriller with elements of horror now, I want to put in I want to put these words in here I want to help your algorithm to better understand my book and this is my opportunity This is my one chance that say hey amazon. I want you to show me In this section of the store, but the second thing that's really important about this is it's not just coming up with descriptive words to help algorithm It's you really want to make sure that the descriptive words you use are the word shoppers use when searching for the book So, you know people constantly go to amazon and you know non fiction and fiction keywords are very different Okay But people shop using descriptive phrases.

[00:10:44] Dave: Matter of fact, Amazon came out with a statistic saying that 73 percent of shoppers start by searching through describing the thing they're looking for and end up on a sale. Um, and so the big thing for us is that it's great if you came up with some really cool ways to describe your book, or what your book does, or what it covers, but everyone's like, okay, great, we'll put you over here.

[00:11:07] Dave: But what they could have put you in is a dark alley, a dead end. But instead there's ways that the shoppers are describing the book. And now if you know, What they're saying, and you know, that fits your book, you can then have your book in front of the right people. So getting your keywords is a very important step.

[00:11:25] Dave: To ensuring that not only your book is put in the right spot But it's the right spot where people are looking for your kind of book This helps not only increase your sales across the board But it really gets your foot in the door with having a good relationship with amazon A lot of authors will just kind of sit down and just kind of guess and throw some words up there Like this is you know, not preparing for a test You know, you don't just walk in on a test and just start circling, you know Some random answers you prepare for it and try frankly You Making sure that you have those phrases is setting yourself up for, you know, being able to pass that test with flying colors, 

[00:11:59] Teddy: right?

[00:11:59] Teddy: Okay, that makes perfect sense. I mean, I always thought of keywords, especially is with nonfiction books. You know, people generally searching for a problem that they want to fix. So finding those keywords is what are people looking for? And what's the Results you're going to give them in order to fix their problem.

[00:12:16] Teddy: But for fiction books, it's probably slightly different because I used this example in a previous episode, but people don't necessarily search for story about dogs. They might search for something different and the book just happens to include dogs. So how do the keywords work a bit more with the fiction books?

[00:12:31] Dave: Well, let's let me start by going back to nonfiction and fiction for the types of keywords. Let me break that out just a little bit more for the listeners. And then what I want to do is kind of talk about the path by which shopper shop. And I think this will give us a better understanding of the entire process.

[00:12:45] Dave: So the 1st thing is that nonfiction isn't just about the problem. It is definitely how shoppers describe the problem, but it's also how they describe the solution It also includes what I call agitators and it includes like the demographic. Okay, so Sometimes it's all four things. Sometimes it's one thing.

[00:13:03] Dave: Sometimes it's a combination So for example the pain point or you know, how you describe the problem? Oh, man, I need to you know Like i'm overweight or oh my gut is huge, right? You So it's, you know, large, you know, large gut or, you know, my problem is lose weight. Now let's go to solution. The solution is look great.

[00:13:27] Dave: You know, beach body is what is the solution I want? It's not that I'm mad that I've gained weight because I eat too much at Edna's, the rice crispy treats that she keeps sending over for the kids and dad just keeps eating them. Okay. But it's the, well, why am I working out? You know, am I working out?

[00:13:45] Dave: Am I trying to lose weight because I want to look good? Am I going on a date? Am I going to the beach and I want to look great for the summer? You know, like all these things. How do you describe a solution? So again, problem, how you describe the problem. Hey, describe the solution. What I call an agitator is an agitator is something that kind of like increases the hype of it.

[00:14:01] Dave: Okay. So, like, for example, lose weight fast, you know, beach body in 10 days you know, six minute abs. It's the 6 minute. It's not the abs. It's the fast. It's not the nothing. And so you can look at ways that people can advocate or increase the state by putting in a word or 2. Okay. And then finally is demographics.

[00:14:22] Dave: We've talked about this a little bit. Like, for example, we talked about everything, right? The problem is people want to learn Evernote, okay? Their solution is they want a more efficient and effective writing manner, you know, using Evernote. Their agitators learn Evernote fast. But when it comes to the demographic, we said for students, for lawyers, for project managers, it's where you can have this 1 final moment of you've discovered a really cool topic and then you can specifically angle it to 1 specific market.

[00:14:53] Dave: And so you can have again, like I said, a combination of the 4 or a single, but that's the nonfiction. And again. It's those words. With fiction, on the other hand, it comes down to how we describe the story. Okay, so the fiction keywords include time periods and settings. Okay, so that's like, you know, is this Victorian?

[00:15:12] Dave: Is this ancient? Is this modern? You know, the word we use for the setting, right? Okay. Is really key in the visual moment that it gives so, you know, and, or excuse me, time periods. I said there for settings, it's like, you know, Caribbean, or is it Alaskan? Is it wilderness? Is it, you know, a concrete jungle?

[00:15:32] Dave: Again, where's the story on the prairie, you know, in the West, in the desert, like all these things really add to the story. So again, time settings and periods, the next thing, or the next thing is the main character, okay? Character roles. So, who is your main character? There's something about them, right?

[00:15:50] Dave: Are they a lonely gamer? Are they a single mother? You know, are they a maiden in distress? But, again, we're adding to the element of the story. The next is the what I call the excuse me. I call it the Catalyst, right? So what kickstarts the story? Is it, you know, like, if we go to the single mother, like, what is it that the Catalyst is?

[00:16:16] Dave: That it was an abusive, you know, spouse? And, you know, and it was one final moment where that particular person was hospitalized and came to realization? If it's an apocalypse, you know, with a Catalyst, a zombie apocalypse, a disease, Was it, you know, again, what started it, the story might not be about the catalyst, but it's important to know, was it a plane crash that caused them to be stranded on an island, right?

[00:16:43] Dave: Or was it a sunken ship, right? These all play into that. And then one of the next ones is what I call the tone of genre. Okay, this is super important when it comes to fiction books. Like, for example, in romance, there is 50 Shades of Romance, okay? Little bit of a joke there, but there's a lot of different versions of romance.

[00:17:02] Dave: We can go all the way on the, on one side, which is wholesome Christian romance to all the way to like erotica, bondage, et cetera. And there's a lot of ways to describe romance in between. Okay. The kind of romance that there's there is going to be incredibly important to that reader. There are Christian wholesome people that don't ever want to read anything saucy whatsoever.

[00:17:23] Dave: Let me tell you, when they're looking for the next romance read, they're going to put words in there to make sure that they don't get shown. Okay. The half naked men, you know, dripping with sweat. All right. They want to cut that out. So they're going to describe the type of genre that they're looking for and put that tone in there.

[00:17:38] Dave: Okay. Now there are a couple of other things, but I think those are some of the main ones now to come back to your question. What we end up seeing is that shoppers will start. With putting one term in, looking at the results, realizing it didn't give them what they wanted, add more words to it, looking, and they'll just keep adding words to the original phrase until they finally get what they want.

[00:17:59] Dave: So for example, we find that a lot of people will type in like fantasy book and they're like I mean, what are the chances that Amazon is going to figure out exactly what fantasy book you're thinking of? So then the person would be like, okay epic, you know, dragons. So it'll be fantasy book, epic, dragons.

[00:18:15] Dave: And then they'll see a whole bunch of dragons. Then they'll be like, ah, crikey, this is a whole bunch of young adult. I don't want young adult. I want, you know, and so they keep augmenting their term. They keep adding to it, you know, to go back with romance, right? A great one here. Is the lady, you know, or the guy, whoever's looking for this book and literally say to themselves, All right, I love second chance romance.

[00:18:37] Dave: So they might type in second chance romance Then all of a sudden they're going to see a whole bunch of you know, scantily clothed, you know people, provocative Hold on. No, I don't want that. So they'll keep in second chance romance Then they'll add in there, you know, wholesome Christian.

[00:18:53] Dave: Now, all of a sudden they get a whole bunch of like, you know, Hallmark books, you know, kind of thing. They're like, Oh, well. You know, I'm really, I just watched like Abington out or, you know, one of these shows or something like that. And man, I love one that elk. So let me put like Victorian. So all of a sudden the search phrase ends up being something like second chance romance, wholesome, Christian, Victorian.

[00:19:14] Dave: And now they're actually seeing the list of books they're looking for, and then they engage in it. And so really when we, as authors are looking at keywords, we have to realize that when we're looking, when they're in nonfiction or fiction. These shoppers are augmenting and putting these words and phrases together to create something really interesting and if you know what it is They're typing if I were to tell you that there are 1200 people a month typing in a victorian wholesome christian second chance romance that would be great because now, you know That should be one of your phrases and one of your seven kdp boxes instead of sitting down and saying romance love you know, and what a lot of authors do is they start picking these very broad words that technically describe the book, but they don't truly do it justice. 

[00:20:02] Teddy: So talk about those back end seven keywords. With the, is it matter what order you put them in or which box you put them in? Or if you put them in a particular phrase, because I've kind of heard a bit of conflicting arguments about that. 

[00:20:12] Dave: So we did a full experiment.

[00:20:14] Dave: We use a whole bunch of data to kind of prove the best method for this. For any of the listeners, I'll go over that pretty briefly, but there's an article, if you type in seven QDP keywords into Google it'll not only show you the experiment and exactly how we kind of prove this method, but then it will break out the method.

[00:20:31] Dave: Okay. And just to do it to quickly go over it, because that could honestly be its own entire episode, but we found that. So let's talk about what happens inside those boxes. Okay. 1st off is that inside the box, you were allowed 50 characters. Okay. And then characters, a letter space, you know, punctuation, et cetera.

[00:20:50] Dave: Okay, so you could stuff as many words into each box. And when we did this experiment on that, we did find that you do show up more for more things on Amazon. Can you just show up more on the store? But what we also found was you don't rank as well. Okay, as you could, if the, if certain words or phrases were just succinctly in one box.

[00:21:10] Dave: And what we call that is kind of like keyword density. You dilute the density of your intentionality by putting too much in there. Okay. The other thing that we discovered from this. Is that Amazon doesn't just look at the phrase, they do the combinations of all the words. So let's say you have Victorian, second chance you know, wholesome, Christian, single family.

[00:21:33] Dave: They will take all these words and mix and match them, okay, inside the one box. We did a second experiment to see if they go from box to box and they tend to use other words inside the box. But what they're looking for isn't made up words. Okay. So, for example, if their system knows that nobody has ever typed in, you know, let's say.

[00:21:55] Dave: Abington, Victorian you know, Romantic, like then that entire phrase will not work. Like they'll say, okay, yeah, we get it. That's cool. We understand what the book is, but you're not going to all of a sudden start ranking for something. I've had a couple of people put in their seven KTP keyword boxes, like one of the names of their characters, like, and I mean, we're talking like a sci fi name.

[00:22:17] Dave: So it's like, you know, had your bro job, you know, and then they go to type into, to Amazon, had your bro to, and they're like, it didn't listen. They like, it didn't put it. It's like, no, they're not going to create a search for something they know doesn't exist. Okay. So we also disproved that as well. So just putting in random words or crazy words, ain't going to do anything.

[00:22:36] Dave: But what they look at is they look at all the combinations of the words and then they say, okay, these are phrases that we've seen together that actually have a market and so they'll use it now with all of that information right there, you might be led to say, well, jeez, we should put as many phrases and words in each of the boxes, you know, as possible, but like I said, I wanted to come down to it is the more words and phrases to put in there.

[00:22:56] Dave: The You know, like the density is thrown off. You will show up for more combinations of things. You will show up for more things, but your rankings won't be as good. So what I tell people is the best of both worlds is I like to take three or four of the boxes and I like to put the best phrase all by itself.

[00:23:15] Dave: So if I know, let's say using publisher rocket, that there's 1200 people a month that type in Victorian second chance, you know, wholesome Christian, then guess what, that one gets its own box. I'm not putting another word in there to fill up my 50 characters. I'm just putting that and then I'm going to the next box and I'm doing it 3 to 4 times.

[00:23:33] Dave: Now, on the rest of the boxes, I will absolutely take the other phrases where it's like, okay, yeah, that was a good phrase, but, you know, didn't have the numbers or. That was, you know, that I like that phrase, but I don't love it. Like I do, I shove all those in the rest of the boxes. And we found that when authors do that, not only do they expand the reach on the Amazon store, but on the ones they care about most, they have a lot more intentionality and they have better rankings on those, which, and by the way, rankings are really important because you can index as we call it, show up for a keyword phrase, but if you're number 1, 200, Nobody keeps clicking next, next, next.

[00:24:07] Dave: And it gets all the way there. It's really important to be on that first page because that's where the shoppers really will see. So you get kind of the best of both worlds where you show up more and you show up higher. 

[00:24:18] Teddy: Great. I mean, that's really interesting. I hadn't, I haven't read the articles. I'm definitely going to check on that afterwards because I've been kind of just messing around with those seven books, I think, and just putting as many words in as I can.

[00:24:27] Teddy: Yeah. And to give you kind 

[00:24:28] Dave: of a heads up on, on it, the way that we were able to do it was we actually had over a hundred and 31, I think it was authors. That allowed us to experiment with their seven KDP boxes. So what we did was we actually had a crawler go through Amazon, search all of Amazon for wherever they were showing up for and then once that was done, we would change the words inside of their KDP and see what happened.

[00:24:52] Dave: And again, crawl through, change the words, see what happened. And then what we did was as a thank you to them, We gave them the most optimized keyword components, you know, because they let us play with their dashboard. And then, like I said, we were able to see exactly what happened, you know, which phrases, how these combined, where it showed up, where the rankings were, and we had enough data points to be able to really create a significant, extrapolation from the information.

[00:25:15] Teddy: Amazing. That's very interesting. I mean, Yes, with the with those backend seven keywords, I think it is a really confusing topic for anyone. I'm, Amazon, I feel like should just tell you what you need to be doing. And so they just keep it a bit of a secret. 

[00:25:27] Dave: You want to hear the funniest thing ever?

[00:25:28] Dave: It's almost like, it's my favorite thing is that, so I wrote this article on, well, I wrote two articles. One was on keyword fiction keywords, right? And that whole time settings and period. And, you know, guess what, two weeks after I published that article, Amazon promoted that article specifically on their KTP page on Facebook, you know, saying, Hey, learn, go here to learn about optimizing for your keywords.

[00:25:53] Dave: Then about one week later, they changed their FAQ to adopt the same exact thing that just told you, which it was hilarious. I actually have the timestamp of when mine was produced and when theirs, their updates were produced. But it was like. Okay. I mean, flattery. I'll call it that. Well, they've done a lot of that.

[00:26:11] Dave: It's it's funny is that if you go to read their FAQ now, a lot of the information they're putting in there is stuff that we actually published first and then they have, I think what they did was they've read it and they're like, yeah, actually, that's a good way to explain it. We should do that. And so then they put it in there.

[00:26:26] Dave: The other thing that they've done as well Yeah. That's kind of funny. Is there one of the things I proved heavily in this experiment was do not do quotation marks. Do not do commas if the words if you want to separate the words is separated with a space. When you do that, you affect the bully and search criteria that Amazon uses to combine phrases.

[00:26:48] Dave: If you put things in quote, you're telling Amazon. Only this word, no, you know, pluralization, no augmentation, just this exact word. And that's it. And so it's funny is after we after we made that very clear, Amazon then really made it clear on KDP. That do not use x men like do not use quotation marks.

[00:27:08] Dave: They're like very adamant about it I was like, yeah, you shouldn't have told people that so anyway 

[00:27:13] Teddy: Yeah, definitely because if you do that on google, it does just search that exact phrase doesn't it? It's exactly the same way and people forget that amazon is basically a search engine just like google 

[00:27:22] Dave: Exactly and the other thing too is the commas weren't serving any particular purpose and actually we saw that it was diluting because it was almost like A hint and a nod to Amazon is hey, I want these individualized.

[00:27:33] Dave: I don't want them combined. And Amazon's system is trying to combine and look for the best optimal pairs. You're almost centering yourself if you're doing that. 

[00:27:42] Teddy: Yeah, definitely. Now with the keyword, finding those keywords in the first place, because especially if you're new, you might think, okay, I know how to describe my book, but how do I know that's what people are searching for in order to find them?

[00:27:53] Teddy: Now, Publisher Rocket obviously has the keyword search, which is The original tool, your first one. So that's how you can go and search them. So could you just give us a few tips about how to use that effectively for fiction, nonfiction? 

[00:28:04] Dave: Yeah, well, I mean, so the keyword features is great because it's like an idea generator.

[00:28:09] Dave: You start by putting in an initial description and then the keyword feature of a published rocket will go through and it has ways of kind of pulling more ideas from Amazon itself. Like, Hey, here are other phrases that are like your phrase. But have been, you know, people have typed into Amazon. And so all of a sudden you can start with, you know, dog training.

[00:28:30] Dave: And then all of a sudden you're given a list of dog training with again, pain points or dog training with solutions or dog training with demographics you know, and advocate like all of a sudden you're being listed out with these and you can start to look at them and see which ones pertain to you and your idea.

[00:28:46] Dave: Or maybe you're just saying, you know, I want to write about dog training. But I want an angle. I want to be able to, you know, do this. And so as you're analyzing, you're seeing all the searches, you're also seeing the competition. And so we help you with that kind of decision of, Hey, this is great search, and this is low competition.

[00:29:02] Dave: This is an opportunity. So you might end up writing a dog training for Shih Tzus because you found out that currently many people have written about the Shih Tzu and the poor Shih Tzu, you know, owners are like constantly looking for. They're you know, a training book just to deal with the Shih Tzu's personality.

[00:29:18] Dave: And that could be your opportunity that you get to write what you want, but now you have that angle really in there. Or maybe, you know, one of the, one of the examples I love bringing up too, is that there was somebody that I worked with and this particular person, Was writing a book on how to sell art.

[00:29:35] Dave: I do not have permission to use their name in this particular thing, but then again, if you just Amazon search how to sell art, I'm pretty sure I'll figure out which one we're talking about. This book, when I was talking to the author was actually getting a lot of like negative reviews and this author was kind of missed about that.

[00:29:50] Dave: Like I, I don't get what's going on. Well, when I did the keyword research, I found out that there were more people on Amazon typing in how to sell art online than just the phrase, how to sell art. And the thing is that this author wasn't covering online. And so people were buying the book, thinking that clearly the author is thinking about how to sell art online, reading it and finding out it's not there.

[00:30:14] Dave: And then they were getting really mad, you know, and they were coming back. And, but when I brought that up, all of a sudden the light bulb clicked that particular person updated, create an entire section on the online component. And. The book itself has taken off like crazy. You know, if you go Amazon search, you'll figure out which book I'm talking about.

[00:30:33] Dave: But anyways, but it's a really important thing for authors to understand that it's, you know, it's really seeing that big picture and understanding that, you know, this author wouldn't have thought to look for Online sales, but using rocket, they would have seen, wow, online's pretty, maybe I should at least cover that, you know, inside the book and that would have made it a much better thing.

[00:30:55] Dave: So it could be a great research tool as well. 

[00:30:57] Teddy: Yeah, definitely. Sometimes when I'm doing the keyword research on publisher rocket, I'll see a keyword, which might have, Not amazing searches, but then if it's got the word book after it, it's got great searches. If it, if that does happen, do you think I need to put the word book as a keyword like in there or is the book going to come up anyway?

[00:31:14] Dave: Yeah. So you don't have to publish a rocket. We'll show you exactly what people type in. Um, and so there are people definitely typing in the word book. Now, Amazon knows that your book is a book. And so generally speaking, You don't need to put that in there for the words before the word book.

[00:31:29] Dave: Absolutely. Put that in your keywords. Um, what ends up happening though, is that. The Amazon, like sometimes they'll actually stop you from putting the word book. What I found is technically if you have the word book twice, then they'll definitely stop you. Sometimes you can get away with just one book in five years, KDP keywords.

[00:31:48] Dave: But I tell people don't try that. Just keep the word book out of there or Kindle. They'll definitely kind of Kindle because that's a trademark term. Um, and that sort of thing. 

[00:31:57] Teddy: Right. Okay, good. Because that that answers the question that a lot of people have been asking me now. Okay. What one thing that you've just released recently is the reverse acing tool.

[00:32:06] Teddy: Now, this is something I've been wanting for books for ages because it's something I've used in my other business, which is more of a product business. And there hasn't really been anything like this for booksellers and people and authors. So do you want to tell us a bit what the reverse acing tool is and how authors can use it?

[00:32:21] Dave: Yeah, this is a thing I've been working on for years because, okay, coming up with ideas and searching around is great. And it's really cool if you really have a targeted idea, but I've always wanted to be able to say, well, wouldn't it be nice if I could just see which keywords are working for this book?

[00:32:37] Dave: And so that's exactly what we did. So what authors can now do is they can look at either competitor books or similar books and they can put that ASAN number. So that's the number assigned to the book by Amazon, put it into Rocket and Rocket will tell you all the keyword phrases that book is ranked for on Amazon.

[00:32:54] Dave: Now what's really cool about this is you're not only seeing, you not only do you find some really cool ideas you might not have thought about, but every one of these phrases is something that Amazon thought would pertain to this book that would help to get it in front of people and to make sales. And now you can see, okay, you can go to similar books and you can start looking and seeing phrases.

[00:33:14] Dave: You know analyzing seeing their searches and then writing them down and just putting them into yours I mean it cuts out a lot of research time and you're really seeing what's working for the others 

[00:33:26] Teddy: So do you think this tool is best for research or is it more for finding keywords that you can use in things like your ads?

[00:33:32] Dave: I think it can be both honestly Um, I think that first off, if you're doing KTP, if you're filling in your 7 KTP keyword boxes, you 100 percent should use that feature. I mean, just go, just save yourself time, energy start looking at what's really working and then a lot more confidence. Okay. That's one key part with regards to your ads.

[00:33:50] Dave: We incorporate the reverse ASAN inside of the ads feature on publisher rocket. So when you put in your book, so when you go to publish your book, what rocket does in the ads feature. So again, we talked about the keyword feature and the ASAN feature. Now we're going to kind of jump into the Amazon ads feature.

[00:34:05] Dave: What it does is you put in information about your book. And then our system approaches your book like it's Amazon, like, okay, this is what Amazon's thinking now. And now, based off of what we think your book is about, here's similar books, here's their keywords, here's their categories, here's their you know, targets.

[00:34:21] Dave: These are the things we most recommend for you to use. And so then all of a sudden that list is created there as well. So it's kind of, if you want to approach it from Amazon ads, I recommend using the Amazon ads feature. 

[00:34:31] Teddy: Brilliant. Yeah. The way I've been using the ASIN tool is if I've got an idea for a book, then I find who my main competitors are, put those into the reverse ASIN tool to see what keywords they've been ranking for, as you mentioned, and then do the research on those keywords so I can see whether I think my book would stand out, whether I can make something that's a bit different.

[00:34:49] Teddy: And it's such a quick way of just getting those keywords and working out exactly where to rank. 

[00:34:54] Dave: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:34:55] Teddy: so just for the last thing, so when authors are doing the research of these keywords and looking at their competitors, are there any particular key metrics that they should be paying attention to when trying to make a decision whether a book is worth pursuing or not?

[00:35:08] Dave: Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing the first thing that they should do, I mean, let's put it this way. If you're looking at similar books or competitive books and they're doing really well in sales, That kind of helps you, right? Because you know that they're getting in front of a hungry market. So that gives you a little bit more understanding of, hey, I should really look at the keyword, keywords that are working for them.

[00:35:25] Dave: Okay. So that's the first thing. Second off is make sure that those phrases really do describe your book. I'll get to this in a second, but one of the things I find authors do is they find a phrase maybe in the past or whatever, or they wrote a phrase and it was really too broad. So Amazon doesn't know what to do, or they figured, Oh, that's kind of like my book.

[00:35:43] Dave: And then Amazon takes and runs with it and they put their book in the wrong spots. So what you really should do is look for those phrases and say, yes, that's my book, like that works. And knowing what your similar books are doing makes that process a lot easier. So again, verify that it really describes your book and that you're not trying to stretch the truth.

[00:36:01] Dave: Then after that, I would definitely look to make sure that there are at least two to three hundred searches per month. Now you may say to yourself, wait a second, that's pretty low, Dave. Well, I'm like, but yeah, you got the seven KDP boxes and you can put other phrases inside of there. So three hundred times, like seven, eight, nine, ten times, now you're getting out there.

[00:36:19] Dave: And you're getting in front of the right market. And so those things really stack. Then on top of that, with competition score, that's the last factor I use and what I'm trying to generate is, okay, how much do I love this phrase? How much does it really fit my book? How much are people searching? And then, okay, am I willing to really do that competition score?

[00:36:37] Dave: We have the score from 1 to 100 with 1B. Super easy and a hundred being incredibly hard. And so I make those decisions. 

[00:36:43] Teddy: That's really helpful. I use that competition score a bit to just give me a first level view of whether I think something's too competitive, but you can't then don't just take it as written that like, if it's one, you can a hundred percent go for it.

[00:36:53] Teddy: You still got to go in and check to make sure that your book would stand out on those searches. 

[00:36:57] Dave: Absolutely. 

[00:36:58] Teddy: Yeah, brilliant. I mean, this has been a great conversation. I've really loved it. And I'm really enjoying using the reverse asin tool. So thank you very much for building that. It's saved me a lot of time.

[00:37:06] Dave: Yeah, it's been, I mean, people have just been sending in emails and just, I mean, just super jazzed about me as an author. I'm super jazzed about it. I can now start looking at the other book and be like, Oh, I didn't think about that. Hey, One last thing that I will definitely say to for this is that one of the things I love to do with this feature is I love to put my own books through it.

[00:37:29] Dave: Now, it's not because I'm stealing my own keyword, but what I want to do is I want to see what's Amazon do with my book, right? So here I have this you know, I will go through all the keyword phrases that they put my book in. And sometimes I find a really glaring mistake, like, oh my goodness, I didn't realize Amazon misinterpreted that phrase.

[00:37:48] Dave: Uh and started putting my books in bad things a great example of this was the funny is when I released the feature I had somebody on facebook who kind of said hey, wait a second I put my book through and all i'm seeing is all these zombie phrases, but i'm not a zombie i'm a post apocalyptic book, but there's no zombies in my book.

[00:38:07] Dave: And so it was interesting I was like, oh, okay. Well something triggered amazon to think that you're a zombie book. So She posted the book and then it was You know funny not funny, but everybody went to read the book description And the response is back on that. I was like wait your book was in a zombie book And she was like, well, no, no.

[00:38:26] Dave: And it was like, well, you start with a joke about it being about zombies. She's like, well, because the young adults in the book are thinking, oh, it must be a zombie apocalypse. Yeah, it's definitely zombies. And then later on they say, well, where's the horde of zombies that we were expecting? I'm like that.

[00:38:41] Dave: And then when we looked at the keywords that she used. She had chosen ones that are very close to like, you know, zombie related terms. So Amazon was looking at the book description. They're looking at the seven KDP keywords. I'm like, ah, must be zombies. And so all of a sudden she was like, Oh my goodness.

[00:38:57] Dave: Like, no wonder I've had people, you know, comments about the zombies in the reviews. And no wonder I, my, it's very plain to me. I, my book was being put in the wrong spot. This is really hurt. And so then she made the appropriate changes to both the description to make sure it's not confusing. And in the KDP keywords and really saw some major improvements.

[00:39:16] Dave: So I tell people put your own book in there. It's like putting on the goggles of Amazon and seeing through their eyes, you know, what's going on. If you see a constant learning mistake, there's something that's triggering their algorithm to misinterpret your book.

[00:39:31] Teddy: That's really good advice. And I'm definitely gonna take on board. Thank you very much. Well, David, it's been great to chat to you. Thank you so much for joining. If people want to get in touch with you, where's the best place to do that? 

[00:39:40] Dave: You can do that at kinderpreneur. com. right at the bottom, I've got a link that will take you to the contact page.

[00:39:45] Dave: Click there. If there's any questions people have or so, or from something we said, or want clarification type it up and glad to respond.

[00:39:52] Teddy: Brilliant. Thank you very much. And just one last question before you go, what's one book that you're reading at moment that you recommend everyone should be reading? Oh, I'm a big fan of the dungeon crawling colonial series. Mary fat, Matt Denman, who's an amazing self publisher really grounded out and was really hard working.

[00:40:10] Dave: And all of a sudden that book is just taking off. Like he did incredibly well as a self publisher and then all now he's got the major publishing companies that are wanting to sign them. It's really cool to see from the ground up an author that was grinding from the beginning to hit this level of, shall we say, stardom and the books are so much fun.

[00:40:29] Dave: They're literary PG. They're hilarious, but they're serious. They're great. So I'm just going to push that because. I love seeing amazing author success stories, and his is just a real well deserved.

[00:40:43] Teddy: That's really good. I haven't actually heard that book before, so I'm really happy to put that one in there. It seems like LitRPG is the genre everyone's talking about at the moment. A lot of people have been recommending books in that genre, so. 

[00:40:53] Dave: Well, it's always been my favorite for years. 

[00:40:58] Teddy: Great. Well, thanks very much for joining Dave and we'll speak again soon.

[00:41:02] Dave: Absolutely. And thanks for having me. 

[00:41:05] Teddy: Thank you so much for tuning into the publishing performance podcast. I really hope you found today's episode inspiring. I love chatting to authors, writers, and people in the publishing world. Now, just before we wrap up, let me tell you about. Publishing Performance, the number one platform for authors who want to increase Amazon book sales, but I'm not really sure where to start.

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