Ep 138: How to Choose Best Kindle Keywords for Your Book (Guide for Indie Authors) (2025)

There are more than 42 million books on Amazon right now. So how in the world do you help your book stand out? One word: keywords.

Think of keywords as Amazon’s GPS. They tell the algorithm exactly where your book belongs and who should see it. However, Amazon only gives you seven keyword boxes to work with. Seven! Which means every slot has to pull its weight.

In this episode, I walk you through how to make those keywords work harder for you. We cover:

• Why those “optional” keyword boxes are actually non-negotiable if you want readers to find you.
• The difference between broad, hopelessly crowded terms (like romance or personal growth) and the kind of long-tail keywords that actually connect you to the right readers.
• Simple (and sometimes free) ways to research what your audience is really typing into Amazon.
• Paid (but not ghastly expensive) tools that can save you time if you want to dig deeper.
• How to maximize all 50 characters in each slot.
• The big no-nos: other authors’ names, book titles, quotation marks (all off-limits).

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Book Keywords
• 4:30 Why Keywords Matter for Discovery
• 8:19 How to Research Effective Keywords
• 14:19 Common Keyword Mistakes to Avoid
• 20:54 Aligning Keywords Across Platforms
• 29:25 Free Resources and Next Steps

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:00

Hello and welcome to the Write the Damn Book Already podcast. My name is Elizabeth Lyons. I'm an author and book editor, and I help people write and publish thought-provoking, wildly entertaining books without any more overthinking, second-guessing or overwhelm than absolutely necessary. Because, let's face it, some overthinking, second-guessing and overwhelm is going to come with the territory if you're anything like me guessing, and overwhelm is going to come with the territory if you're anything like me. In short, I love books and I believe that story and shared perspective are two of the most impactful ways we connect with one another. A few things. I don't believe in gimmicks, magic bullets and swoon worthy results without context, as in. Be sure to reveal that a result took eight years or required a $30,000 investment in ads, because those details are just as important. What I believe in most as an author, the long game is the shortcut For more book writing and publishing. Tips and solutions. Visit publishaprofitablebookcom or visit me over on Instagram at Elizabeth Lyons Author.

Speaker 1: 2:03

Hi everybody and welcome to today's episode of Write the Damn Book Already. Today we are going to talk about a topic that is all over Reddit, youtube, the Facebook groups, really anywhere you look when it comes to indie authors, and that is keywords. So how do I choose the right keywords for my book when I'm listing it on Amazon to help it be discovered, help it be more visible? Having your book be discovered organically is not an easy thing. There are more than 42 million titles on Amazon right now just book titles. So it happens absolutely. But your book will be discovered organically more once your book starts getting traction, because that's when Amazon starts working with you to get your book in front of more of the right people. So when we first load our books up to Amazon, it's really important that we get those keywords not perfect, but close and there are a couple of ways to do this. So first of all, I want to. I'm going to spend some time during this episode helping you understand the best ways to do this, based on my experience, having loaded six of my own books, more than 50 for others. And again, there's no magic bullet here. There's no magic bullet with pretty much anything, but there are some ways right out of the gate to help your book be in the right spot and therefore get better visibility to the right readers. So the first thing I want to clarify is that there is a difference between your seven keywords that you can select when you first upload your paperback or your ebook or both, but you'll select keywords for each version. I tend to do the same seven keywords for each version and the keywords that you'd use if you were running Amazon ads that you'd use if you were running Amazon ads. So with Amazon ads, we still want to be very dialed in and intentional and strategic about the keywords that we are using in our ads, but we have a little more flexibility than we do when we're uploading our book, because when we're uploading our book, we only have seven and there are some rules and there are some guidelines that are very helpful to follow. The first is that when you load your book and if you've already done this, perhaps you noticed this it says that your seven keywords are optional, which I think is a humongous disservice. I can appreciate that Amazon doesn't require that you add in keywords in order for them to list and publish your book. However, what I feel it should say is optional, but extremely strongly recommended. We need two superlatives there, because I'll give you the analogy that I use a lot when I'm explaining to people why keywords are so important.

Speaker 1: 5:05

If you go into a big box store any big box store. It could be a home improvement, it can be like home, whatever. And you're looking for toothpaste and there are no categories in the store. Or let's say there are categories, so we've got what. I don't need to lay this out for you. We've got beauty. We've got home. We't need to lay this out for you. You know, we've got beauty, we've got home. We've got clothing. We have cleaning supplies. You have that, that's fine, but we're going to keep those at the highest possible level.

Speaker 1: 5:34

So let's say toothpaste was new to the market. No one's ever really used toothpaste before, so it's a new product or it's a new type of toothpaste. It could be inferred by the big box store that it's toothpaste, or it could be inferred that it's a cleaning product, or it could be inferred that it's not toothpaste at all and it's in fact glue and it should go in home improvement, depending on what the name of the toothpaste is. And, to quote a line from New Girl, I may get very upset that I've hitched my wagon to toothpaste in a second, but let's stay with it. If the manufacturers of this brand new toothpaste that is not called toothpaste, that does not say toothpaste on the packaging, doesn't specify with what we're going to call keywords where this thing should go. The store has no idea where to put it.

Speaker 1: 6:28

So someone who's looking for a new healthy, low-tox toothpaste might find it in the glue section and be like what is this? Or they might not even know it exists in the toothpaste section because maybe it's like off to the side somewhere and they're just going for their. What they've heard works. Well, they're going for the Crest or the Colgate or whatever. This is what keywords do for you via Amazon. They tell Amazon or, in the case of my toothpaste analogy, the big box store, where does this thing go in the store? Which categories also do? That's a separate conversation. But basically, where does it go and to whom should you show my book as an option when they're looking for certain things?

Speaker 1: 7:17

So if we take the toothpaste analogy again and someone walks into the store and says I'm looking for toothpaste, somebody, god willing, will say that's an aisle 17. Cool, once you get to aisle 17,. If they know that they want something healthy, it's like where do I find the healthy gluten-free, which, frankly, probably exists? I saw gluten-free shampoo. I don't understand. But anyway, I'm looking for healthy, low toxicity, no fluoride toothpaste. And then the store.

Speaker 1: 7:55

People know that it's still in aisle 17, but they knew to put it with. I'm going to just say, some brands of which I know Dr Tom's no endorsement here I'm just saying, like the low, the healthier versions, arm, hammer, whoever makes the toothpaste that is supposedly lower toxicity. So therefore, right, not only do they know to put it there, which we can look at in terms of categories, but when a user we're going to go back to Amazon and we're actually going to pretend that on Amazon they're searching for toothpaste, if they know they want Crest, they're just typing Crest toothpaste and then it's showing up all the different varieties of Crest toothpaste If they don't know exactly what they want. But they know they want a healthy, low-tox. I don't even know what you would call it toothpaste. That is what they are searching. So when this person loads their toothpaste onto Amazon, they don't want their keyword to be toothpaste, they want it to be low-tox toothpaste or environmentally conscious toothpaste. What is their specific customer searching on Amazon, where you'd want that to return as an answer, as an opportunity?

Speaker 1: 9:13

It's no different with books. So with books, again, you just have seven. So if you use those for things like really high-level categories personal growth, women's fiction, contemporary romance, business books, money management, health improvement, those sorts of things it's going to do. That thing has 2 million books in it, and so when someone goes out and searches personal growth, what it's going to return is the best selling books in personal growth, of which there are a lot. So your book might show up on page 47, but no one's ever going to get there.

Speaker 1: 10:02

A lot of people skip over this keyword selection process because it feels super overwhelming, so they just want to check the box and they just put stuff in there, like those high level categories and keywords I just mentioned. And lots of times when authors are working with self-publishing service providers or hybrid publishers, it's a question to really ask and maybe do some of the legwork yourself, if they're not doing it to make sure that they're being more specific in their identification and insertion of keywords into your seven keywords, because, honestly, you might as well leave them blank if you're going to put super high level categories like romance, personal growth, self-help, money, business. One of the first questions people have is well, how do I know what people are searching and how do I know what my ideal reader is searching? And regardless of your genre. There are ways to figure this out.

Speaker 1: 11:01

So the one I talk about all the time is Publisher Rocket. That's the software I use. The one I talk about all the time is Publisher Rocket. That's the software I use. There's another one that can be used. That's the Amazon search bar, which is an add-on to. It's a extension. It's a Chrome extension, to the best of my knowledge. Maybe it's another extension too, but it's an extension.

Speaker 1: 11:19

And what happens is when you're on Amazon and you're searching, it will auto fill the before and the after of the search term based on competition levels, like what are people searching? And then there's a paid version of that that helps you drill that data down even more so that you can see what are people searching regularly, how competitive is that search, that sort of thing. So what we do is have some fun and get some coffee or tea or whatever you want no judgment here and sit down and either use a service or a tool like Publisher Rocket or just sit down, in an incognito window preferably, which means that it's not tracking your search history, which has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with the fact that the search bar will auto-return what it thinks you want, based on your search history, and you want a completely unbiased search. So if you've written romance and you put up into that category, just start with women's romance and see what the software, what the Amazon search software pops up underneath as oh, these are all the things that are being searched. Or use a tool like Publisher Rocket to drill down even further, because, believe me when I tell you you want your search term to be more like women's romance, holiday, or rom-com set in Italy, or World War II thriller.

Speaker 1: 12:56

You want to find out exactly what people who would love your book are searching on Amazon in order to identify what those keywords should be. And you want to make the absolute most of those seven slots. So, within each of those seven slots, you have a 50 character limit, which includes spaces. You don't want to include quotes, you don't want to include misspellings, and I'll get to that in the don'ts, but you got 50 characters. So in some cases, maybe for one or two or even three of your keywords, maybe you just put something like World War II Romance, italy If you can fit other keywords in there, however, to take up more, they're called long tail keywords, to fill up more of those 50 characters where if you rearrange those keywords, they'll create new keywords that are frequently searched.

Speaker 1: 13:52

That's even better and that's a little bit more of an advanced topic. I talk about that a good bit in Amazon ads for indie authors and how to do that specifically. Another great resource for that is Dave Chesson over at Kindlepreneur. He talks a lot about how to do that, has a lot of articles on it, et cetera. But you really want to spend some time identifying what is your ideal reader searching for, and you can have some that are a little higher level not as high level as self-help or personal growth, but perhaps self-help women, midlife or money management for kids or money management retirement. But to get even more specific on those will help you tremendously.

Speaker 1: 14:39

As Amazon goes okay, you want me to show your book to people who are searching for X, and then what happens is when your keywords match up with your book description on Amazon and that matches up with what the user is searching for and then buying, amazon's system kind of goes oh, okay, all these things dovetail. So therefore, I know now, as Amazon, to show this book more to people like this person, to people who are purchasing books like this, and it actually, if you think of it in terms of the big box stores, it helps Amazon know, like when to again, there's a difference between categories and keywords but to whom to show it. So I don't know if you've ever you know back in the day, and like the department stores, when the people would walk around with the perfumes, I swear that sometimes they would some of them would not approach me with their perfume sample because maybe I just didn't appear to be the right air quote demo, like demographic, for that. I probably wasn't carrying a Birkin or something I don't know. But at any rate, that is the same sort of thing where Amazon wants to do as little lifting as possible, like they want to know, oh, if I show this book. That's why the also bots work well, because it helps over time and it does take time. It takes time and it takes consistent sales, because just a one week big rush in sales I mean that's great. It doesn't help Amazon over the long term know what kind of person is buying this book.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Who do I put this in front of? And it's no different from any other algorithm. So if I go to Amazon or if I go to Instagram or anywhere else and I start looking at and this happens all the time DIY stuff. That's all that shows up, because those systems are starting to understand this girl likes DIY, so let's show her all the latest and greatest DIY stuff and make sure that she gets no work done today. So it's the same with books. If the system sees, this person buys thrillers all the time, and now this new book has come out and it's been identified in the keywords as I'm making this a World War II thriller and that's also correlated with the book's description and the cover and all these things. It doesn't look like they're trying to game the system. This looks legit, so let's show them this book and then, if the person buys that book, it's further validation. We're showing this to the right people and they'll keep doing it more and more and more.

Speaker 1: 17:50

So that is why keywords are important and how they help so tremendously when you are first trying among other things, by the way, including reviews and your categories and your book description and word of mouth, like sharing it wherever you choose email, social media, street corners, whatever work together and you don't have to have all or any of them, but the more that you choose to have, the more easily everything starts to work for you, you'll still have to do some work. It's not like you're just going to wake up one day and all of a sudden. I mean, it has happened to people, but I don't count on exceptions. In my own life I just go out and do the thing that needs to be done and pray. So there are some rules for keywords and this is where we get into some situations in the past where authors have tried to game the system. It doesn't work.

Speaker 1: 18:42

I promise you cannot outsmart the Amazon system. You just cannot, maybe for an hour, but it has not good ramifications on the back end when you do that, for all the reasons I've just mentioned. If you try to trick Amazon into thinking that your book about gardening is actually about historical romance, it might do something for an hour, but then the whole system's confused and people who are searching for books on gardening are very like why am I being shown books about World War II romance or historical romance? So there are no clicks on it. The book just isn't getting any traction and Amazon like lessens its showing of it. So, number one, let me remind you that your ad keywords and your listing keywords are two separate things. So right now, your ad keywords and your listing keywords are two separate things. So right now we're talking about your listing keywords.

Speaker 1: 19:39

So in your listing keywords there are a few things you don't want to do. Number one you do not want to use the title of another book if it is not an absolutely appropriate keyword for your book, meaning that you would use that keyword even if it were not the title of another book. So an example of that might be for Write the Damn Book Already, which is my most recent book. An example could be this is not one that I use, by the way, but Book Writing for Dummies. That, I think, is actually the title of another book, but it could be argued that maybe people who are looking to write their very first book would type in Book Writing for Dummies. I don't use that for a lot of different reasons, but I'm saying that in that instance, if I wanted to, I could use it, because I'm not using it to try to ride the coattails of another book titled Book Writing for Dummies and mislead readers into thinking this is that book.

Speaker 1: 20:41

On the same level, you don't want to use other authors' names. So if you've written romance, you do not want to use Emily Henry or Abby Jimenez or anyone like Neely Two-Body Alexander. You do not want to use any of those names in your keywords. You could use them later in your ads in different ways, but in your seven keywords, no, do not do it. You don't want to have quotes in there. And then, as of somewhat recently, meaning the quotes like I'm doing air quotes here, but I mean literally the quotation marks as of recently, they've also said to not have the word book or books in your keywords because you're listing in the book section of Amazon.

Speaker 1: 21:29

So it's a given that your keywords are for a book. It's a given that your keywords are for a book. Now again, when you run Amazon ads, you can include those and you probably want to include those, because in that case you're putting that ad out to everybody who's on Amazon for any reason at all. But when you're listing your book in the Amazon bookstore, it knows it's a book. You're telling it, put it in the bookstore. And it's not clear to what degree this impacts authors good or bad. But the current guidance is if possible, don't put the word book in.

Speaker 1: 22:04

Now, here's an exception. My last book is about how to write a book, so I can use the keywords how to write a nonfiction book and it won't penalize me in any way because it is a book about how to write a book. So that's a little bit different, but that's something. These are things that you want to not do when you are putting your seven keywords in, because you're just wasting space and you're possibly penalizing yourself without even realizing it. So another question is once I've identified my seven keywords that I'm going to go in with and you can change these, I recommend going back and re-looking at your keywords every six to 12 months, because people's search terms and habits have likely changed and you can probably amend yours slightly. You've possibly gotten a little clearer on what your ideal reader is actually searching, so you can change them up in your seven keywords. But at the beginning and when you're, you know, keeping it, trying to keep it all consistent for some period of time you don't want to change it with any level of regularity or just confuses the system.

Speaker 1: 23:14

I like to make sure that there's correlation between my seven keywords, my Amazon book description, my categories, if at all possible, and my A-plus content. So I don't know why they named A-plus content. A-plus content because because it's not. It's confusing, but if you're wondering what the hell is A Plus Content, if you are on a books listing, go to any traditionally published book like any major bestseller. I can almost guarantee they're going to have A Plus Content.

Speaker 1: 23:47

And if you scroll down, you'll see graphics, big graphics that either um, like it's some sort of an illustration, or perhaps there's a blurb, a quote, a testimonial, some like if you read this, you will discover blank. It's a visual depiction of why you should want to buy this book and it is something that is now available to indie authors. And because they are JPEGs or PNG files the spiders, as they say, like whatever is searching for all these keywords they can scrape the images for those words. So if you have a graphic that says, say, it's a blurb and it's like this is the best book I've read this year on self-development for women in their mid fifties, year on self-development for women in their mid-50s, the keyword self-development for women in their mid-50s is now sort of an automatic keyword for you, but the more it's reinforced the better, because the more you're willing to tell Amazon this is what this book is about, the more Amazon believes this is what this book is about and that you're not trying to keyword stuff things, so you don't need your name as the author in any of your seven keywords. That's an automatic keyword. Your book's title is an automatic keyword. Your book's subtitle is an automatic keyword, so you don't need to use those in your seven keywords. It's already taken care of for you.

Speaker 1: 25:12

If whatever other keywords you identify, whether they're short or long tail keywords, if you can make sure as best as possible, it does not have to be a one-to-one ratio, but you can have them naturally show up in your book description, in your A-plus content and even, if possible, in your reviews. So, believe it or not, the reviews also count toward your keywords. So sometimes, when people say I really want to write a review for you but I don't know what to write, it's a great opportunity for you to say well, do you want me to throw something together for you and then I can send it to you and you can modify it and upload it. And when you throw that thing together, do your best to make sure that some of your key keywords are in there, even just one, if not two or three. Again, you want to make it natural, because the last thing we want to do is to give Amazon any idea that we're trying to keyword stuff because it does not work. It does not work and it looks terrible to the consumer when they go to your listing and they can tell In the subtitle you've just got a whole bunch of junk. Now that's not even really possible anymore, with the exception of eBooks, and that's a whole separate topic, but it does not look good. It's not something that I recommend and it's not something that I've heard anybody recommend who is interested in a long-term, sustainable, scalable career as an author. If someone's just looking to get bestseller status for five minutes, they might recommend such a thing, but that's not the crowd that I tend to run around with.

Speaker 1: 26:50

So the long and the short of it is this Make sure you use those seven keywords, even if I don't think it's going to help you too much. But it can't hurt, even if you just threw super broad keywords in there to start. Put something in those seven slots so that Amazon knows to whom to show your book From there. Take the time, truly, if you want to, to identify if you're listening to this, I'm assuming you do to identify either with a tool like Publisher Rocket or a tool like the Amazon Search. I can't remember exactly what it's called. I'll put it in the show notes, but it's like the Amazon Search Expand, I think that's what it is. It's the search expander tool, something like that. Either use the free version, where you don't even see what the competition and the searchability is, but it just gives you some ideas.

Speaker 1: 27:43

That's what so much of this is about is just jogging your thoughts as to like what might people be searching. Ask your ideal readers. If you were to go out on Amazon and search for a book like this, what would you put in the search field? You'll probably be surprised by what some people come back with. It's not always, it's rare the obvious stuff. So people are trying to niche down as much as humanly possible, especially with all of the books that are on Amazon.

Speaker 1: 28:12

Make sure, if and when possible, that your keywords, your book description, your A-plus content and, over whatever portion of it you have control your reviews also contain those pertinent keywords. And then again, as always, we are going for consistent sales. We are not going for, in my world, we are not going for a thousand sales in one week and then never again. Yes, during launch you're going to have a peak and then you're going to drop. That's just the nature of the beast. That's what every product does during its launch. It does really well. You're hitting your main audience, your family, your friends, your colleagues, coworkers, launch team, their friends and family, et cetera, and then that dies off and now you've got to go out to a cold audience.

Speaker 1: 29:02

So when we can get our keywords dialed in as well as possible, it only helps us to not be running up such a steep hill so that we can attract the right readers to be shown the listing and then to click on the listing and say, oh, I haven't even heard of this, but this sounds really good, I'm going to grab it. And there are so many other pieces of that that come into play besides keywords, as you know. I mean there's reviews and all the things. But this is just one piece and so often we need to take it one piece at a time. So if you would like even more detail on how to do this, again I go into this. I show you exactly how I use Publisher Rocket to identify my seven keywords, to hone them, to niche down on them. This is all contained in Amazon Ads for Indie Authors.

Speaker 1: 29:57

It's the first portion of the course and actually now you can access the first six modules of the course completely free. We are still in early bird pricing. We won't stay there forever, but even if you don't know me, even early bird pricing might not feel completely safe. So I want to give you an opportunity to hop in there, see what my teaching style is, see how simple, slash, overwhelming does it feel. Does it feel like the right thing for you? And if it does, then you can opt to hopefully hop into the full course. But within those first six modules we talk about reviews, we talk about keywords and we talk about A-plus content. In fact, I even give you my A-plus content templates, my Canva templates, that you can utilize to create your own A-plus content. So even if the course isn't right for you, you can use my templates to get your A-plus content generated and upload it and have your book looking even more professional. So I will put the link to that down in the episode notes or you can go to publishaprofitablebookcom.

Speaker 1: 30:58

Forward slash Amazon ads In order to do the first six modules for free. There's a separate link for that. It's not at the forward slash Amazon ads link. I will put the link, however, down in the show notes. If you're watching this on YouTube, it'll be down in the episode notes, and if you're listening to it anywhere, just click on the show notes and I'll have a link for it down there. So keep your questions about Amazon listings coming. I will do my very best to answer them and if I can't, I will do my very best to find someone who can. Thanks so much for joining and I'll talk to you again next week.