Get Found on Amazon. Discoverability is Key(word).

So how does Amazon choose what results to present, and how to present them? You may be surprised to learn that your book’s text or description don’t actually matter at all when it comes to Amazon search. The factors include:

• Title and author name: If your name and title are unique, your book will come up if a reader searches specifically for them. But this doesn’t help your book get discovered in the first place.
• Sales rank: Books that sell more generally appear higher in results.
• Search terms: When the book is published, authors and publishers can choose hidden search terms for each book. (These are also known as keywords.)

This last point is essential: choosing the right search terms can determine whether your book reaches its audience.

But choosing search terms is a challenge for new and seasoned authors alike. Even the big publishers don’t do it well. It requires you to think not just how to describe your book, but (much more importantly) what are your readers actually searching for?

At Pronoun, we wanted to help authors answer this very question, so we’ve been tracking thousands of real Amazon customer searches. Now, we’re making them available to authors to help them position their books for success.

You can use your Amazon category to see what search terms are popular in your chosen genre:

…and you can enter your own topics or keywords to find real popular Amazon searches to use as your book’s search terms.

We show you two ratings for every search term to help you make your decisions:

• Popularity: How frequently is this term searched? Closer to zero means very rarely, closer to 100 means extremely frequently.
• Attainability: How competitive are other books in the search results for this term? Closer to zero means the search is extremely competitive, closer to 100 means your book has a good chance of ranking highly in the results.

You can choose seven search terms for each book, and we recommend choosing some that are very popular and some that are more attainable as a start. If after publication you find that your book doesn’t rank highly in the searches you chose, experiment with new ones! You can change these search terms at any time.

Want to see what readers are searching for? Create a free account on Pronoun, set up your first book, and you can start exploring search terms immediately.