**This post originally appeared on dvmulligan.com on 7/10/15**
In this post, news about 2 tools I've just learned about to help you maximize discoverability of your book within the Amazon ecosystem.
If you've read The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing, you know that my advice to sell more books is to maximize discoverability of your book work in the Kindle store, a task that sounds specific until you try to do it.
In trying to learn how to boost my book's visibility, I have read a lot of advice about researching book categories and keywords, using Google Adwords, and search engine optimization (SEO), and I have honestly not found any of that research useful. I consider myself pretty smart, but trying to figure out the exact categories and keywords for my books made me feel like I was back in calculus all over again, and let's just say calculus wasn't my best subject.
Enter two interesting and helpful tools:
1. Kindle Samuri
2. Kindle Spy
Both of these tools are designed to cull data about bestselling books and provide you with all sorts of data you can use to improve your own book category, keywords, and visibility. Not only does each give you lists of categories and keywords, but they use handy, color-coded systems to show you what topics and keywords can most benefit you. They consider the popularity, potential, and competition in categories, all of which is fascinating and useful.
The downsides: These are not free products. They cost $27 and $47, respectively. Also, Kindle Spy seems to me to be more helpful for those in the book planning phase than for those who already have books available for sale.
The upsides: Way cheaper than paying an SEO expert. Once you buy the tools you can use them over and over. You'll get all kinds of hard data to be better informed about the book selling marketplace.
When I used Kindle Spy to look into my competition for The Latecomers Fan Club, what I learned is that to be a bestseller in women's fiction, you need to compete with 50 Shades of Grey, and the books doing so with the most success have the following words either in their titles or keywords:
