Best Series Tip No. 5: Get Lots of Tags

The Best Series is based on a presentation by Wheatmark author James D. Best, author of The Shopkeeper, The Shut Mouth Society, and the upcoming release Leadville. Best has offered 10 tips on how to use Amazon to sell your book and we'll look at each tip in depth in a series of blog posts.

Tip No. 5: Get Lots of Tags

• Customer Tags--Determines Hierarchy in Searches
• Add every relevant tag, but only relevant tags
• Get friends and relatives to vote for all your tags
• Amazon Tags--Submit Relevant Tag Requests
• Write a top-notch description

A tag is a way for Amazon to categorize your book. Adding tags that will help--and then getting several votes for those tags--will add weight to your book for Amazon searches.

When a book browser goes on Amazon and searches for "Western fiction," they're tapping into the power of tags. When your book, if it is a Western fiction book, is tagged with those same words and multiple people have agreed those were adequate descriptions, your book will begin to come up when customers search those keywords.


The tag list is viewable if you scroll down the page. You can add tags, vote for tags, and search for tags here.

When you add tags, make sure they are relevant to your book. If your book is about pirates, you may not want to have a tag for gardening. For example, on the Amazon page for The Shopkeeper the tags include adventure, cowboys, historical fiction, Western fiction, Nevada, etc. These are all searchable terms a book buyer can use to find it on Amazon.

Ask friends and family members to go on your book pages and vote for your tags to help validate them. The more votes, the better!

You can also submit relevant tag requests to Amazon Tags to help you have even more street credibility.

One of the things that you should also keep in mind is your book description. By having a top-notch description that includes many of the words you've used for tags, you'll make it easier for the virtual Amazon path to lead to your book's door.

Your goal is to help people find your excellent book, tags are the breadcrumbs you leave for them to find you!

Next in the Best series: Tip No. 6: Publish a Blog on Amazon

"Dialogue bookisms interrupt the reader," she harped.

I was hanging out on http://bloodredpencil.blogspot.com, one of the many book-oriented blogs I visit throughout the day, and was reading their post about "bookisms" and whether they should be used.

It touched a nerve with me as a reader, writer, and occasional editor.

The "bookism" in this case is referring to the use of emotional tags in dialogue attribution to tell the reader how the speaker is feeling. Here's an example:

"You are standing on my foot," she exclaimed angrily.

You, the writer, do not need to tell your reader that your character is upset that someone is on their foot. This is a common experience most of us have been thorugh many, many times. Feet have nerve endings and pressing upon them excessivley causes pain that will raise anger and irritability on the stepped-on party's emotional thermomenter rather quickly.

In this particular dialogue scenario, the magic of the exclamation point could be employed.

It would look like this:

"You are standing on my foot!" she said.

Another option, if you're really are determined to use the phrase "she exclaimed angrily" you could do this:

She exclaimed angrily, "You are on my foot!"

The best option, in my opinion, is to let the dialogue carry itself.

"You are standing on my foot!"

"I am so sorry, I didn't see you there."

"That's OK. It just surprised me. Wow. You have really big feet."

"Well, I'm 6'4". Tall people generally have the big feet. Short people with big feet kind of look like Weebles. Don't you think?

"Get away from me, you weirdo."

See? Successful dialogue that required nary a speaker ID.

Here's the bottomline:

By using bookisms, you slow the reader of your words down. The content is what is important and the story cannot continue for your reader if they are consistently popped out of the story to decide what "exclaiming" feels like.

Keep the dialogue flowing. If you need to use an ID, use a simple "she said" and you'll keep your reader clear on the speaker and keep their eyes moving across the page.

5 Tips for the Short Story Writer

• Know what constitutes a short story. A short story is about 10,000 words. Much longer and it becomes a different animal. You may be asking, “How many page is that?” The answer is, use your word count. When your story goes to layout, it could be just about any amount of page numbers depending on the interior layout style.
  
  
• Limit your scope of time or character. A short story is not a lazy novel. In fact, a short story is often harder to write because it is a small package that must remain within its own confines. You shouldn’t try to tell someone’s life story in a short story unless it is about a fruitfly.
  
  
• Try to keep your short story time frame as a snippet. Need some back story? Great! But make sure it doesn’t go on and on and on. Another way to limit your scope is through character selection. If you have too many characters actively involved in the story, you may want to reconsider whether you are writing a short story or a novel written in character sections that intertwine.
  
  
• Cut the fat. Again. A short story is not a lazy novel. It requires a deliberateness and sparity of language. Make sure you ruthlessly edit your sentences to distill them down to the most important of words that still grab the essence of the character. This doesn’t mean you need to write simplistic sentences fit for a young reader. It means you need to be selective. Ask yourself, “Does this sentence further the story or give some sense of character or plot?” Because if the answer is no, then cut it. If you find yourself explaining every gesture and action of your character, your writing needs tightening up. Recently I read a story that involved tons of dialogue. In each phrase the speaking character said the name of the character they were talking to. It read something like this (names have been changed):

“Jeffrey, will you take the garbage under the sink in the kitchen up to the Dumpster at the top of the hill?”

“Yes, Kathryn, I will take the garbage under the sink in the kitchen up to the Dumpster at the top of the hill?"

Snore! Not only does it take up a ton of space, it is really boring and makes your characters sound like they have been taken over by an alien robot race that has become self-aware.

• Point of view. Authors often try to switch voices within novels. It doesn’t work well there. It definitely won’t work in a short story. Keep your point of view (or POV for the cool kids) limited to one. Either a narrator or a character. It keeps the story clean, the reader focused, and the story easier to tell.

• Is it a short story? As you write, you may find out that your short story is kind of long. With potential to be even longer. Revisit points 1-4 and if you find that your writing is tight, your time frame is fair, and you’ve written excellent deliberate sentences then what you have on your hands is not a short story. It’s a novel. So you the writer needs to make a decision. Fish or cut bait. If you are committed to the short form, rework the story so that it is an excerpt that can stand alone as a short story. You can always expand on it later. Or, go for it. Write that blasted novel you’ve been thinking about!