Honest Indie Talk About Marketing

Hi! I’m going to talk today about ways to market your work that you might not have thought about. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the fact that Amazon has all these additional categories that your book can get placed in. I figured I would give that a try and let you know how that worked.

And so I did what they said. I went to the website and it said, call this number or arrange for a call because they won’t give you a number.

So I arranged for a call and asked about the categories and the guy said, “Oh, go back to where you were, and use the email option.” Even though the website itself said the phone call option was preferred.

So I wanted to say, “Oh, thanks a lot for telling me to do the exact opposite of what the website says.” But okay, whatever. I didn’t care. I just went back. I did the email option. They email you something that you’re supposed to use to submit your categories.

I don’t know how much effort to put into it, frankly, because I don’t know really what those categories do for me.

And, in point of fact, what they do is they email you advice on how to find the categories, how to set them up as a string and they say, submit them, but they don’t say where or how. I mean, they don’t give you an email address. And this is through an email that you can’t reply to. So I don’t know how that’s supposed to work, but I don’t know how much effort to put into it, frankly, because I don’t know really what those categories do for me.

And if there are nine or 10 categories that we can use, how come Amazon just doesn’t make them clear right up front, instead of making you hunt for them? They may be customer-centric, but they’re not very author-centric in that respect.

If there are nine or 10 categories that we can use, how come Amazon just doesn’t make them clear right up front, instead of making you hunt for them?

Anyway, that’s just one little story of many that I hope to give you as far as what I’m doing in terms of marketing. And this was what I hoped to be a relatively easy, cheap way of doing something and seeing if it made a difference.

And if I ever manage to get those categories to Amazon and get them to use them, I’ll let you know. And I’ll let you know if they make any difference that I can tell. That’s it then. I’ll talk to you later.