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Information for UKBookWorld booksellers: Increasing your book sales with keywords Provide lots of different keywords when cataloguing old books When cataloguing non-fiction books, use the Keywords field in whichever desktop database you have to increase your internet sales. Do this by providing as many keywords as possible for every book. And use keywords which others might use, not just the main keyword which you think applies to the book. This helps in two ways: Helping you actively promote and publicise your own books; helping your customers find your books. Helping you actively promote your own books
By providing keywords for your books, you can then promote individual subject-area selections from your books in email hyperlinks such as
I've written a special report for UKBookWorld subscribers on how and why to use hyperlinks in their emails. You can see this report at http://oldbooknews.com/hyperlinks.htm. You can also use start linking to special selections of your books on your own website, in similar fashion to the subject areas in the left hand column at Jeffry Stern's website at UKBookWorld. Even when cataloguing books of literature or fiction by well-known authors, also consider using appropriate keywords as some collectors will be looking for genre books such as crime or science fiction without particular reference to specific authors. Helping your customers find your books
The reason for this is simple. With most books in any non-fiction subject area, the chances of anyone searching for any particular book by author and title are small - most potential buyers either won't know the book exists or aren't interested in spending time searching individually for scores of titles in which they might be interested. Keywords enable potential customers to search your database, or any internet database to which you have transferred your books, for books in subject-areas in which they are interested. If book-buyers are interested in books on Cattle, that'll be the search word they will type in. If you've got an interesting book on farming which has much about cattle in it, those potential customers are never going to know that your book exists unless you put Cattle as one of your keywords. You may think it's primarily a farming or agriculture title. However, as far as those particular customers are concerned, providing the book with the keywords Farming or Agriculture would be useless - those are not search words they're going to use. They’re interested in cattle so that’s the word they are going to search for. So, help would-be customers find your book by providing a range of different subject areas which they might look for, not what single subject category you yourself would place the book in. Using the example above, provide your "farming" book with such keywords as farming, agriculture, land-management, cattle, sheep, livestock, husbandry, countryside, farm buildings (assuming all those to be relevant to the book in question). In the same way, be prepared to use likely synonyms to satisfy different searchers who might not use the same words you yourself would use. For example, whilst you would look for aviation, others might search for flying or aeroplanes. If a likely keyword for a book already appears in the title of the book, repeat it in the keywords field. Different online databases operate in different ways; some by searching every field when the user uses a keyword search, others by looking through data in the keywords field alone. To sum up ...
If they never appear on screen in front of potential customers, they'll never be sold. Looking at it the other way, the more screens they appear on, the more likely they are to sell. It's as simple as that. How about some examples?
Do your books appear here in the appropriate sections? If not, increase the number of keywords you provide when cataloguing. Finally, is there anything you think I should add to this report on the use of keywords either to improve understanding or improve the advice? If so, . © 2008: Michael Cole: UKBookWorld.com: cole@clique.co.uk |