Greetings culture lovers,
Okay, boys and girls, it’s Wednesday, and that means its audience participation day!!!!
No, this isn’t going to cost you anything, I am not going to ask you for money. I am, however, going to ask a little favor, and for any of you who have published a book, you will find this to be well worth reading.
The topic for today is tags. In this case, I’m talking about Amazon tags. Amazon has a wonderful thing on their site for every single book, including mine, called "tagging." If you go to my Real Men Don’t Rehearse Amazon page, if you scroll down and down you will eventually come to this part of the page:
Before continuing, NOTE THE "SUGGEST" LINK at the bottom. . .
Now, Amazon Tagging is sort of a cyber version of seeing a book next to the one you were originally looking for. Basically, if you tag a book as being somewhat similar to another book, when people search for that "another book," the book you tagged will come up in the search, in a sort of "you may also be interested in…" kind of way. For example, I tagged my book Real Men Don’t Rehearse with Mozart in the Jungle (a delightfully salacious memoir with a little bit of classical music tossed in) . . . SO, any time someone searches for Mozart in the Jungle on Amazon, Amazon shoves the cover of my book in that buyers face. Hooray.
Tagging accounts for something like 90% of my online book sales, so you can understand why I think tagging is wonderful.
Unfortunately, Amazon limits each account to only 10 tags, and I maxed out on my tags a long time ago. So here is where the audience participation part of the program comes in: If you have the time and/or the interest, and you have not used up your allotment of 10 tags, and wish to help out your local-bass-player-turned-self-published-author, I hope you will share the love by sharing your tags. Just go to the Amazon page for Real Men Don’t Rehearse, and do some tagging:
Note there are two kinds of tags, apparently. One is just the little keywords, the other is "Suggest a search." (or something like that) If you are short on time, just do the keywords. But if you really want to help me out, hey, your expertise really comes to the fore here, as perhaps you know the title of a book about oboe reed sculpting that I have never heard of. Note, you will need to write a little 15 word essay explaining why MY book would be of interest to people searching for this OTHER book… so you can’t tag it with Harry Potter. But that’s okay. I’m not trying to do anything unethical here, I just want to take as much advantage as I can of this tagging feature, as it helps other people find the book. One tag is all I am asking! More than 2 might seem suspicious, as a real human monitors all the tagging. And note, you can always take your tags back.
Note, I started a discussion in amazon's classical music forums asking people what their favorite classical music book was, so as that forum grows perhaps it will become a fecund resource of possible titles to tag. For more ideas you can also just do a search in amazon for a list of classical music or humor/ memoir titles.
While you’re at it, if you really want to help me out, I could also use some book title tags for my other book, Principles of Applied Stupidity. This book is both a management and leadership advice kind of book as well as a sort of self-help personal improvement kind of book. It would be wonderful if someone would tag it to other amusing management books/phrases such as Dilbert, The Dilbert principle, Parkinson’s Law, Murphy’s Law, The Peter Principle, management guru Peter Drucker, and anything else you care to think of. Hey, you can also do what I do, type "self-help" or "leadership" or "humor" in the main search box and see what comes up.
Thank you all so much. TAG you’re it !
© Justin Locke
PS I want to thank Bruce Hembd at http://www.horndogblog.com/ for promoting my blog, thanks so much . . .
