How to Change Your Kindle Keywords, by Dave Chesson

Many authors don’t know that Kindle keywords aren’t something you should set and forget. In fact, there are tactics you can use to increase your sales that involve changing your Kindle keywords. In this article, we’ll go over those tactics — and why you should consider changing your Kindle keywords at least once every few months (or when you notice a drop off in conversions on your book). 

But first…

What Are Kindle Keywords? 

Kindle keywords are the keywords you enter into the 7 boxes in your KDP dashboard when uploading your book to the platform. They’re found just below the Publishing Rights section. 

New authors might be tempted to skip this step, but they definitely shouldn’t. These keywords are what Amazon uses to index your book in the Kindle Store. That means when a reader comes along and types in a particular phrase, searching for, say a ‘sci-fi military series’ Amazon will gather results for books they’ve indexed for that keyword. 

Then, Amazon will show that reader the most relevant books, so that they’ll be more likely to buy it. 

Amazon uses combinations of your keywords to index you for ones that fit your book the best and get the most attention. 

That means if the keyword you input in box 1 is: ‘military sci-fi series with aliens,’ they will try every combination of the separate words in that phrase to create more keywords for your book–that way you show up for more of them and there’s a higher chance your book will convert. 

And if Amazon discovers your book is relevant for a lot of those keywords, they’ll create even more and index you in those, casting a wider net for more sales and visibility. 

A few interesting notes about Kindle keywords: 

• Keywords in your book’s subtitle and title carry more weight with Amazon than those in the keyword boxes (but you should still use those Kindle keyword boxes!) 
• The more specific the keyword phrase is to your book, the higher your initial rank should be. 
• Amazon pluralizes all your keyword combinations to make even more phrases. 

So, you can see why Kindle keywords are important. 

But how do you fill those boxes in with the correct keywords? And if you’ve already got them full of keywords, how do you change them without messing up your book’s current rank and sales? 

Let’s dive right in and answer those questions. 

Step 1: Select the Correct Keywords 

To gather the correct keywords for your book, whether you’ve published it already or you’re heading back in to change those keywords (which you should–more about that later), you can use the following technique: 

1. Head over to Amazon with your browser in incognito mode (this is so your previous searches on Amazon won’t interfere with your results) and select ‘Kindle Store’ from the drop down menu.

2. Start typing your keyword. ‘Sci-fi military’ for instance, and add an ‘a’ at the end. So ‘sci-fi military a’. Then do the same with the rest of the letters of the alphabet, nothing down which keyword phrases appear in amazon. ‘Sci-fi military a’ might bring up ‘Sci-fi military aliens’ for example. 
3. Once you have this list of keywords, you need to check how competitive they are. You can do this by entering them and checking out the rankings of the first 3 books that appear in the results. Use the Kindlepreneur Amazon Sales Rank Calculator to work out how many books they’re selling. That way, you’ll know how many books you need to sell to rank effectively for these keywords. 
4. Pare down your list until you have seven keyword phrases. Make sure that everything on your list of keywords is allowed by Amazon–there are certain keywords you can’t use in your Kindle keyword boxes. You can find a list of them here. 

As you can tell, this is a pretty exhaustive method for gathering keywords–but the only thing it costs you is time. 

If you have some money to invest, I’ve created a piece of software called Publisher Rocket that enables you to grab all of the keyword results and see how competitive they are within seconds. 

Now that you have your keywords, you’re ready to input them into your boxes. BUT… before you do, read on to find out more about a special tactic that will save you a lot of headache and potentially make you a lot of sales. 

Step 2: Change Your Keywords with This Special Tactic 

First, let’s go over the step by step of how to get into your dashboard and change your keywords. (If you’d like to find out the special tactic and already know how to do this, feel free to skip ahead to the ‘Special Tactic’ section below). 

1. Head over to your KDP dashboard here. 
2. Click on the three dots next to your book to edit it.
3. Scroll down to the ‘Kindle keywords’ section. 
4. Input your keywords into the boxes BUT not before you read the section below. 

My Special Tactic for the Best Kindle Keyword Results 

Here’s the thing, by changing your Kindle keywords once every few months, you tell Amazon, “Hey, this book is still relevant, check it out!” Especially, if you select keywords that gain your book even more visibility. That’s why it’s important to change them. 

But you probably don’t want to go in and change all 7 of your keywords at once. If you do and you see either more or less book sales because of it, you won’t be able to tell which keyword it was that actually benefited your conversions. 

So what do you do? 

• Change your keywords in only TWO of the boxes at a time. 
• Before you change your keywords, write all of them down and keep them. This is a super important step. 
• Once you’ve changed your keywords in those TWO boxes, publish your book. 
• Check out the step below for more on what happens next. 

Step 3: Track Your Results 

Now that you’ve changed your keywords in TWO of the boxes (and saved your old keywords), you can employ the following strategy to ensure you get the best results: 

• Wait between 5 and 7 days to see whether you get more or less sales and borrows. If you’re in Kindle Unlimited, you’ll either notice more page reads, or that your bestseller rank changes. 
• My suggestion is that you write down your Bestseller Rank at the start of every day, as well as your sales and page readers at the end of every day, so that you have enough data to make an accurate comparison. 
• If your sales drop after those 5 to 7 days, change the keywords in those two Kindle keyword boxes back to the old ones that you saved. 
• If your sales increase after those 5 to 7 days, keep those keywords as beneficial and try changing another two keywords using the same tactic. 

Pro tip: Keep a master list of all the Kindle keywords that have worked for your books, especially if you’re writing books in a specific genre or in a series. You can use those same keywords that work on all your books in that particular series by placing the ones that work in the first 3-4 Kindle keyword boxes. The other keywords can be unique to each separate book. 

A Quick Note About Conversions 

If you’ve tried everything, and I mean everything to get your book to sell–including the special tactic mentioned above–and you aren’t budging the needle, it might be time to take another look at your book (and keywords). 

Books that don’t convert well might be falling prey to one of the following problems: 

• Poor cover (doesn’t fit genre)
• Poorly written blurb 
• The sales page doesn’t give the reader a clear idea of what the book is about 
• Bad reviews (or not enough of them)
• Using keywords that don’t match your book’s genre 
• Using broader keywords that don’t fit. 

Final Thoughts 

With the right Kindle keywords, you’ll find that your book performs really well–that means more sales, a higher rank, and a lot more time to write more great books to sell. Changing your Kindle keywords might be the difference between failure and success, so why not give it a shot with the strategies we discussed in this article? 

Cheers! 

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Dave Chesson is the creator of Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching advanced book Marketing which even Amazon KDP acknowledge as one of the best by telling users to “Gain insight from Kindlepreneur on how you can optimize marketing for your books.” Having worked with such authors as Orson Scott Card, Ted Dekker and more, his tactics help both Fiction and Nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers.