It’s been said that you can spot a book published by a publishing company from a book self-published in a second based on its cover. There’s a difference in quality between the thousand dollar cover created by a professional graphic designer and the free, self-made, or five dollar cover.
You can also spot the book that’s professionally published from the self-published by the title. What’s the difference?
Self-publishers sometimes think that if they put as many keywords in the title as they can, the book will rank higher in searches.
Amazon and other eBook sellers do hold the title as the most important source of metadata. When it comes time to pair your book up with what people are searching for, the eBook seller (Amazon) will look at different parts of your book’s information. First is the title, followed by specific keywords and the description.
Yet the book titles coming out of publishing houses are so simple they often only have one or two words as the title for both fiction and nonfiction.
I have never seen a published book with the long titles that self-publishers create.
Self-publishers are leveraging the algorithms within the system to get more sales, but the publishers know that readers are attracted to the abstract and simple titles.
So which sells more? The publishers simple one or two word titles do, but that’s also because those books are heavily marketed and don’t rely on algorithms to sell their book.
Page ranking is almost entirely based on the number of sales the book has and not how many keywords match up with someone’s search. The other data is more of a complement to the main figure of sales; keywords, clicks, review rating and links and book mentions online.
The problem is that a self-publisher doesn’t have thousands to millions to spend on marketing to get those sales. Most feel the second best bet is to optimize it for metadata.
Here is how to get the best of both worlds: the simple, attractive title followed by a keyword heavy subtitle.
In the past, places like Amazon had one bar to enter the name of your title. Now they have two: a main title and a subtitle. Both are treated equally as far as metadata is concerned. Here is the formula for the perfect title:
The main title should be one word or at the most three. The subtitle should be one sentence, not two or more, with as many keywords as possible without hurting logical flow. In other words, the subtitle should read well and make sense, not just be stuffed with keywords for the sake of it.
The book cover should have the simple main title readable from the thumbnail picture, which is possible with one to three words. Avoid adding the subtitle to the cover picture unless you can make it look really great.
The cover is what the reader looks at first and the title next. So if it's visible on the cover you're a step ahead. The way Amazon combines your title and subtitle can make the overall appearance look like one long title, which isn’t good from the customer’s standpoint. But since they read the short, simple title on the cover, you’ve met the “attractive” requirement as well as the “metadata” requirement in the subtitle. Best of both worlds, baby!.
If you find yourself still struggling you can check out book service sites like HugeOrange that will do a SEO (search engine optimization) service for your book. They research keyword popularity and can even add HTML to you description.