I've heard a bunch of scuttlebutt from writers who claim that the best sales strategy at the Zon is to select keywords that are in Amazon subcategory list for romance. As writers know, for certain categories - Romance and Erotica among them - Amazon has a list of words that describe certain subcategories of romance; i.e. - for books about Kings, and Princes if you use those terms as keywords they'll appear in a "royalty" subcategory.
I've been putting up keywords that are most specific to my books. If someone is over the top enough to hunt for something the crazy duck lady has written as Mary Anne Graham or Olivia Outlaw, then by the quack - I wanted them to find my stuff. But given the scuttlebutt, I went in and changed all the keywords for several books - including my entire Sultan's Toy series - to fit in the generic mold that should have gotten them listed in several subcategories of romance and erotica.
Did I get listed in those subcategories? I don't know, but if I did, it surely didn't help sales, which have been down in April. So you know what I did today? Can you guess?
Yep. I went back to my me-words - my crazy duck lady terms that describe my stories. I've just changed them, but sales have already started trending back up.
That can only mean one thing --- there are more crazy duck lads and ladies out there than I ever suspected. Maybe one day we crazy duck people will take over and turn the world into a much more interesting place.
In the meantime, the results of my little experiment make me feel a little bit warm and cozy and a lot less lonely. I'm hoping that all my fellow quackers keep on finding my books. We'll let the rest of the world worry about where we're holding our secret meetings.......