How does Liking or tagging a book help promote it?

[Stephen]

How does Liking or tagging a book help to promote your book? According to Amazons site, liking a book just helps them find similar books to put in your recommendations. Tagging just helps in jumbling your book in with other that have a similar tag. Is this really helping your sales any if at all?

[Olga]

Thank you for posting the question, I can't figure it either.

[Jean]

I would also like to know the answer to this question. Tagging seems to have nothing to do with the white large search box on the top of the page. Tagging does seem to unite your book with others with the same tag, but it is a bit vague how people follow the tag to get there.

[Paulette]

Good question and trust me I don't claim to know it all but what's I've seen is this: when I'm at a book that I like and I go down to the tags and click on any that describe that particular aspect I may want to find in another read it will bring up other books that have been tagged with same. That to me has some value.

The liking part? Maybe it's just a marketing tool? Are we attracted to what a lot of others Like? And, if one has the time to do the liking and tagging then my final Q here is, why not?

Wishing you all Happy Holidays.

[Stephen]

OK, so after I got off the phone with amazon.com Customer Service this is what I was told. Liking a book tells amazon what books you like and then help them deliver suggestions of other books you might like. It does not change a ranking for a book on their website. Tagging assigns keywords to your book. So when someone searches for say Dog training the results are books that have dog training in the list of tags. The more tags you have determines how high your book gets ranked in the search list. He didn't disclose exactly how many tags were required to move a book but I assume that you would need at least 1000 different people to tag your book with the same key word to move it up the list. This way Authors and publishers can't artificially inflate their listings. I would also assume that their algorithm takes into account whether you purchased the book or not.

[Jean]

Moving a book up the list on Amazon continues to be a great mystery to me. It doesn't seem to be because of the number of books sold (maybe if you click on to popularity) or reviews. Some internal device must get things moving. I have finally decided not to worry about what's happening on Amazon. It has almost taken the joy out of publishing a book. I have self-published this edition of "Chapter 29 Revisited" and this is the last time I will ever take this route. To try to market your own book is one of the most frustrating of all experiences. I find myself fighting a spirit of rejection when the book doesn't move as fast as I think that it should. Thanks Stephen for the information that you researched. I appreciate your effort. Discouraged over your speculation that you would need at least 1000 different people to tag to move a book up the list. That's a LOT of people!

[Stephen]

Jean,

I know what you mean about the spirit of rejection. We Spend a lot of time or as I call it(Blood, Sweat, and Tears) into this little book and think that it should just sell like fire. And then it doesn't. I believe that as Indie authors we are on the fringe and that often makes it hard to get published by a big house. So we resort to self publishing. I am no marketing Wiz so I seem to be struggling just as much as anyone else I'm willing to try anything that costs nothing and only requires a little time commitment. The problem is I also want to see results. As far as my speculation of a 1000 to make a move it's just that a speculation. Yes that is a lot of people but if you consider that Amazon claims to have over 1.2 Billion customers just in the US. that number is not that much the problem is that if your lucky only 10% probably use and understand how tags work. My intent was not to discourage you... I was just trying to figure out if this one little pellet in my shotgun approach to marketing was going to have any payoff. If you haven't read it Go get and Read "How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks - All for Free" http://www.amazon.com/Make-Market-Sel...

It has a lot of great Ideas that are starting to work for me.

[Jacqueline]

Hello

I have just joined this group and have read through some of the comments, and wondered if anyone has the same experience as I do when scrolling down the lists of books on Amazon kindle, the free ones as well as the ones for sale. I'll look for about five minutes and then find myself becoming so dispirited when I see how many thousands of books there are available that I sometimes want to just give up bothering to waste my time trying to get my books read. I hate to say it but to be honest the only books I'm interested in reading are the ones by authors I know-and those are all authors who've been promoted to the eyeballs by publishers and agents who know what they're doing.To me it seems like the chicken and the egg problem again: you're not going to become well-known until you become well-known.

[Paul]

I'd always assumed that the likes just guided the automatic recommendations, but it's got to look good to prospective readers if your novel has a higher like count.

To get over 1000 matching tags, wouldn't you need something like 100,000 visitors to your book's page to achieve that?

Amazon cannot have 1.2 billion customers in the US. Isn't that in the order of 3 to 4 times the total population? I suspect the figure is the number of worldwide customers that Amazon US has.

[Veronica]

Jacqueline wrote: "Hello

I have just joined this group and have read through some of the comments, and wondered if anyone has the same experience as I do when scrolling down the lists of books on Amazon kindle, the ..."

And again to become well-known we must give other authors a chance by checking out their work. I don't particularly have a fav author, I go with whether or not the story calls my attention. You'll be surprised how many good 'unknown' authors are out there, so why not give them a break? BTW love your name, my daughter's name is Jacqueline as well. I think is very elegant. Good day!

[Stephen]

Paul wrote: "I'd always assumed that the likes just guided the automatic recommendations..."

According to my contacts at Amazon. Likes are used in two ways first to market to customers books and authors that are similar to those that they have liked. So if I go and like a book about dog walking I will get suggestions from amazon for books about dog walking. If I like an author I will get suggestions for books from that author and authors similar to that author. Secondly Likes are used to show that a particular book or author has a following. Since anyone on amazon can see how many people have liked it (i.e. 245 people like this) or something similar but this is just a small part of the page and is easily missed unless you are specifically looking for it. Honestly I have never bought anything just because a few hundred people said they liked it. It has to have some value or interest to me.