I’ve spoken about the long tail when marketing your Amazon book. I talked about the importance of discovering your niche, mapping out your keywords, and building keywords into your title and subtitle.

Here’s how you can manually select useful Amazon keywords for your book.

1. Use Incognito Mode on your browser. This is so previous information doesn't affect what Amazon shows you.
   

2. Select “Kindle Store” or “Books” as the Amazon category to focus on the area of Amazon you’re interested in.
   

3. Start by typing in a word. Amazon immediately pre-populates in the search box. Think like a reader. Imagine how you’d search if you were a customer.
   

4. Once you've found a phrase that interests you, add each letter of the alphabet at the end of your word/phrase, and see what comes up. “High fantasy a”…, “High fantasy b”…, “High fantasy c”…

Make a list of phrases a reader will most likely look up. Mix and match the phrases in different combinations.

Amazon is showing you what it thinks to be the highest-ranking term in descending order, so it’s already showing you the demand for the full keyword.

Choose up to seven keywords or phrases, up to 2500 characters per keyword or phrase.

These will be the keywords you’d use to set up the ebook.

You can refine the keywords later by editing the book.

In fact, editing an ebook re-indexes the book, making it more relevant to A9 (Amazon’s search algorithm). The more up-to-date a book and its metadata is, the better.

R