What Emily Henry and Freida McFadden Have in Common When It Comes to Book Discovery Strategies and What You Can Learn From Them
Novelist Emily Henry gained rapid popularity, a near miracle in the crowded romance genre. Readers praise the writer for her witty banter, authentic characters, and relatable male love interests.
But was there something else that contributed to her meteoric rise? Something that has nothing to do with her storytelling chops?
Let’s take a peek at her titles: Beach Read, Book Lovers, People We Meet On Vacation, Funny Story and Happy Place.
I used to think they were a little general, even prosaic, but then, while I was learning Amazon ads to promote my latest novel, I realized something: Each one of her titles contains a frequently searched key word on Amazon.
Let’s imagine you’re planning a trip to the coast. When visiting Amazon you might type in “good beach read.” Or you may search for “vacation reads” or “book club fiction.”
Suppose you’re in a bit of a funk and want something funny or happy. You could find yourself searching for “happy books” or “funny books.”
In many or all of those cases, Henry’s book will likely be on the first page of the search results.
Amazon chooses to display certain books to customers based on the relevance of their metadata, and the strongest indicator of relevance is a book’s title.
Maybe most everyone in the book publishing world already knows this, but I didn’t. Curious, I decided to do a little more searching. As I write this, it’s June, and there are countless summer reading round-ups to peruse. So many of those titles contained the word “summer.” Last year, one was actually called Summer Reading.
Some authors include popular tropes in their titles. For example, one beloved trope in romance is “grumpy meets sunshine.” The title that shows up first for that trope is a novel called When Grumpy Met Sunshine by Charlotte Stein.
It’s rare to incorporate genre in a title, but it worked well for Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy. Other novels piggyback on a wildly popular book. After Gone Girl became a bestseller, the word “girl” popped up in dozens of books.
Subtitles That Sell Books
Subtitles also help book discoverability on Amazon. Recently I came across this keyword heavy title: Hate Mail: If you love The Hating Game and Icebreaker you’ll love this enemies to lovers romcom.
Does stuffing your subtitles with keywords actually work? You might ask Frieda McFadden, who has the number one Kindle book this week in the entire Amazon store. The title of her book? The Housemaid Is Watching: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller packed with twists.
You’ll likely see less of this in the future. Amazon is cracking down on this practice, terminating some accounts because of it. According to their metadata rules, if you have a long subtitle, it must also appear on the cover of the book. But many, many subtitles violate this rule.
Don’t Turn Your Nose Up on Metadata
Does all this sound sales-y and antithetical to art? Possibly but Amazon’s bots don’t care.
Your elegiac literary novel might as well be a boogie board to them, and since Amazon has 77 percent of the market, every author—trad or indie—should have a nodding knowledge of metadata. (Which includes not just titles and subtitles but blurbs, categories, and descriptions.)
If the metadata for a book isn’t carefully chosen, it can hurt sales. For instance, publishers sometimes place books in inappropriate Amazon categories (found in Amazon product details under bestseller rank).
I had a friend whose book was placed in a LGBTQ category because she had a lesbian character who’s introduced late in the narrative. Otherwise, her novel was a heartwarming beach read.
Readers who were looking for LGBTQ novels and bought her book were likely expecting a different tale, and her metadata wasn’t targeting readers of beach novels. It’s possible this misstep hurt her sales.
If you want to learn more about metadata, here’s a good start. With billions of books on Amazon, authors should learn to use every advantage to stand out in the marketplace.
I’ve made some tweaks to my descriptions and categories to give them better visibility. If you’re a trad author, you probably want to keep an eye on your metadata. Does your book description work as hard as it could? Are you in appropriate categories? What keywords did the publisher use to describe your book? (These aren’t visible to you on your Amazon page. Only your publisher has access to them.)
We’d all like to assume that Big 5 publishers optimize metadata but I suspect more attention is paid to lead titles. As for smaller publishers, it’s hard to say.
Way back in 2004, when I asked my editor questions about marketing and other concerns, she’d say, ‘You’re the author. You don’t have to worry about any of that.”
That is no longer true (if it ever was). As authors we have the most vested interest in our titles and our metadata is not something we can ignore.
News You Can Use
“Get Your Story Straight” challenge will have a new task on Tuesday. Hop on over. We’ll be working on week two.
More discussion about the downside of large book advances on Publishing Rodeo. Such an interesting quote from literary agent Edward Wilson:
“Part of the problem is that publishing always looks forward. Nobody ever goes back and has a look and says, Look, how did all of these books pan out? What percentage of them have even washed their face? How many of these authors are still in the industry?”
Very few if you read my take on this subject.
Book Biz Buzz
Lots of mud being flung on social media about a certain author who’s charging $500 for a query letter bootcamp.
People are mad because they think she’s promising something she can’t possibly deliver. (She got a six-figure deal for her novel, and she implies that if you use her methods, you can get one too… heh, heh.)
But, honestly, many people targeting writers make unrealistic promises and charge far more than she does.
But the discussion raises an interesting question: Who has helped you in your writing journey? What resources, person or method do you recommend?
Great post, Karin! Loved it!