Amazon wants you to “Select seven search key phrases.”

What is your book about? Who is it for? What words or phrases will be people use to search for and find your book?

Forget your book for a moment. What are “seven search key phrases” you’d use to describe:

• Your book series
• You as an author
• Your main character
• Your business
• Yourself!

It’s not easy! You don’t want to get it wrong. How can you possibly get this right when you have so much information you want to get across! It’s not a matter to take lightly and even for your book, it’s something to take seriously.

So, how do you do it? Do you use terms that are:

• in the book (kite, hill, dog, ball) or
• about the characters (young, 9-year old, boys, silly, funny) or
• about the benefit to the reader (adventure, local, hang out with your kids, being young) or
• will sell more books (fantasy, adventure, growing up, parenting) or
• something else and/or all of the above? Some of the above?

Maybe you as the author are too close to it and you’d benefit from someone else reading your book and letting you know what they think the keywords are. Maybe you need to read your own book again and think of keywords. Do you then base them on what you think the book is about? What you’d like people to get out of it? How do you know?

I’m in the process of (trying to) make my first book (The Secret of Kite Hill) “permafree,” which means it’ll cost $0 forever, not just for a five-day promotion. The way to do that is to publish it on properties that are not Amazon, then tell Amazon and Amazon will price match it to $0. Weird, I know.

Let’s have a quick look around and see how others are doing the keywords:

• Five Little-Known Facts About Keywords and Amazon Product Listings That Could Hinder Your Success
• Make Your Book More Discoverable with Keywords (Amazon’s own guide)
• The Definitive Guide to Selling on Amazon (Big Commerce)
• Sell More on Amazon.com: Understanding Keywords, Categories, and Amazon’s Algorithm’s (Huffington Post)
• Choosing Keywords on Amazon (discussion on Goodreads)
• How to Rank Well in Amazon, the US’s Largest Product Search Engine (from Moz, a search engine optimization company)

So what to do? What do we always need to do?

1. Educate
2. Execute
3. Iterate

What’s in your seven key phrases?