Kara's Stuff

[ramckhatri]

Is Book Discovery a Next Big Challenge for Publishers? Optimize Your Book on Amazon Search

Did you know that more than 600,000 books are published in the United States every year - and over 99 percent of them never see the light of day?

This is, of course, a bad nightmare for every author who has already spent months or even years in writing a book or a similar publication. Fortunately, every author can prevent this issue from happening - with the use of accurate and powerful keywords. That way, their publications will be properly optimized for the Amazon search. On top of that, the cherry picking of these magic words is proven to decrease the various promotion efforts and increases the sales of your book.

But how the use of accurate keywords can boost your book sales and where exactly do you need to use them?

The Search Algorithm That Amazon Is Using

Just like Google and Yahoo, Amazon is a search engine - however a different from the first two. Basically, people visit Amazon site with the intention of buying something. They search the items using specific keywords they already have in their mind and eventually purchase products.

Still, one of the major factors behind Amazon’s success is that it can place the right product at the right time in front of the right customers if the Amazon product is optimized with correct and relevant keywords.

So, if you have properly optimized your book’s metadata information with relevant keywords, the book description will likely show up on Amazon’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP). The more earlier pages the book appear the better will be for your book’s sales. This strategy helps you win your potential readers and is known as Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) - an online decision-making moment of possible audience who are in the condition of to buy or not to buy the product.

Some Other Tips To Have In Mind When Optimizing Your Publication On Amazon

Aside from the catchy titles and meta descriptions, every great book must have a beautiful cover, gripping description and author bio, and other relevant metadata information that makes readers buy your book. There are five major sections) of your book where you need to use the most relevant and accurate keywords, which you can change and update frequently, including:

the book title

the sub-title

the description

the reviews, and

the author name

In my brief research on Amazon books, I found that many books which are published on Amazon were with incomplete in terms of their book descriptions. Even worse, many authors had no Amazon Author Central Pages though books, making their publications empty and lacking great contents.

Luckily, Amazon allows us to use maximum number of keywords in each section - so that every publication or book becomes more discoverable on both Amazon and Google search.

How Do Readers Search For Books And Publications On Amazon

On Amazon, readers generally find your books (or any other product) in two ways:

by typing keywords in Amazon’s search bar or

by searching on Google

Book description sections on Amazon are indexed at Google, which as you probably know is a place where even 67 percent of the world’s Internet searches take place. Therefore, whenever someone types certain keywords on Google, the search query redirects them to the relevant Amazon page - obviously, if it has been optimized with the proper Amazon keywords.

In the end, there are still times when even the keywords used in the interior text—preferably in the copyright page—of the book influences the Amazon search where the ‘look inside’ feature of your book is active. Since book optimization is generally a marketing effort, collaborating with an expert who is specialized in proper Amazon book optimization and knows the book-ranking algorithm can make your book more discoverable and can bring dramatic sales.

Ram Chandra Khatri is the graduate of Book Publishing. Check his website to know more about him. http://ramchandrabooks.com/

[torpublishinggroup]

Head to io9 to read an excerpt from Charles Stross’ next Laundry Files novel, The Delirium Brief.

Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess.

Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize.

Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.

[ninewhitebanners]

More photos of Mongolia’s reindeer-herding minority ethnic group, the Tsaatan, by Joel Santos.

Children are responsible for training reindeer for riding, because the reindeer are not strong enough to carry an adult until they are fully grown, and it works best to introduce them to the idea early. A two year old reindeer, old enough for a child to ride, is called dongor; an adult reindeer is a hoodai.

[astromechapunk]

Sci-fi corridors/Nerd playgrounds 

[writing-prompt-s]

Facial recognition detects the face of an unfamiliar person in the background of one of your travel photos. After looking at a list of your photos that the person appears in, you realize that the same person shows up in the backgrounds of photos from other trips you’ve taken in the past.

[mapsontheweb]

Ancient Jericho – the first walled city in history.

[writing-prompt-s]

It’s the future. Brain transplantation is old news. Terminal ill people switch bodies with prisoners on death row on a regular basis. You wake up in your new body and notice that something is totally wrong.

[writing-prompt-s]

While sitting in class during a boring lecture you suddenly hear someone whispering in your ear. You turn around nervously and see that no one was there and none of the other students heard. But your teacher drops her notes and stares at you in shock.

[writing-prompt-s]

A massive hole appears in the sky, swallowing earth in a moment. We find ourselves orbiting a new sun… and more holes are appearing, dumping more and more planets into the solar system.

[butchdotgov]

Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.

[crystalandrock]

Millennial Tantalus has been promised that his unpaid internship will become a paid position as soon as the company has space for him. Every week he sees their new job posting. Every week he asks his boss if he can have a real job. The boss shrugs apologetically and says he’ll just have to make do with being paid in experience a little longer. He goes back and keeps working, over and over again, forever, and he never reaches the fruits of his labors.

[fiftysevenacademics]

Millennial Persephone can’t get a job without a degree, but because she had to take out loans to pay for college, she must spend 1/3 of her life working just to pay them off.

[sci-fantasy]

Millennial Cassandra’s title is Social Media Coordinator, she was hired to be the expert, but every time she tries to explain the problems in her company’s social media decisionmaking, the managers don’t listen…and end up hiring expensive PR flacks to repair the damage to their reputation when things blow up exactly as she predicted.

[necrofuturism]

Millennial Medusa uses multiple shades of primer and opaque foundation to cover the scars snaking across her face, hiding the bruises, aligning the asymmetry in her broken nose and jaw. Red matte on the lips, green shimmer on the lids. Flawless liner on the first try. She’s had lots and lots of practice. She films her transformation in secret for all to see and learn, and again, men are turned to anonymous stone faces screaming in horror. “Liar!” “Witch!” “Take her swimming on the first date!” These words do not discourage her. These words are a challenge. GlamGorgonXx posts another video.

[mao-tenno]

Millennial Prometheus uploads another PDF to his site. He’s lost track of the printing and edition of this textbook. He knows they just rearranged some of chapters then charge 150 dollars per copy, and the professor wrote the book himself. the ZIP fills uploads successfully, and he starts uploading the next one. He isn’t afraid of the potential lawsuit. knowledge shouldn’t held out of reach like this. 

[i-will-not-be-caged]

Millennial Circe screenshots all the lewd messages she gets from men on online dating sites and posts them on her very popular Instagram along with their pictures and usernames. When people accuse her of attempting to destroy their reputations, she insists she’s just revealing them for the pigs they truly are.

[currentsinbiology]

The world’s first flower may have looked like this

With the incredible diversity of flowers that exist today—from pinprick-sized duckweed to the meters-high blooms of a corpse flower—it’s hard to imagine that they all descend from just a single species. Charles Darwin himself wrung his hands over how flowering plants exploded in diversity early in their evolution. Now, researchers have figured out what the ancestral flower might have looked like. The study may help them uncover how flowers took over the world.

Fossils are the surest way to learn about organisms that lived in the past, but these are hard to come by for early flowers: The earliest preserved blossoms date back some 130 million years—at least 10 million years after the time when researchers think the ancestor of all flowering plants was alive. But there is another way to learn about species that are long gone: by taking a careful look at the forms of their modern descendants, and tracing the history of those forms back to the trunk of their family tree.

To that end, dozens of researchers participating in the eFLOWER project amassed data from scientific papers to create the largest database of the structures of modern flowers, like their sexual organs and the layouts of their petals. The analysis included more than 13,000 data points spanning back to a 1783 description by famous evolutionary biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Combining those data with a DNA-based family tree and information about fossils, the scientists tested millions of configurations of how flowers may have changed through time to determine the most likely structure and shape for the earliest flowers.

One discovery that will surprise some researchers is that its petals and other organs were organized in concentric circles in groups of three, rather than in spirals, the team reports today in Nature Communications. 

A reconstruction of what the ancestor of all flowers may have looked like. Hervé Sauquet & Jürg Schönenberger

[artist-caillebotte]

Yerres, Path Through the Woods in the Park, Gustave Caillebotte

Size: 23x39 cm Medium: oil on canvas

[malamente1992]

[melancholiatis-blog]

[365tinygames]

203 - The Republica Times

The Republica Times is a game about editing a dictatorial newspaper.

Carefully pick through the news and make sure it’s presented in a way that will influence public opinion. Make sure the news is interesting though – the public loves celebrities, sports, and the weather. And at the end of the day, your family’s safety is on the line, along with the fate of the nation itself.

Will you take a risk to help the rebels? And if they win, what will they do with the country? Are there right answers for a single newspaper owner in an all-encompassing system?

Created by Lucas Pope, the developer behind Papers, Please, The Republica Times certainly feels like a similar message about topics of the same timely relevancy and importance.

The Republica Times is available to play for free here. Content warning: transphobia.

[academicssay]

If you’re having co-author problems, I feel bad for you son. I’ve got 99 problems, but single-author manuscripts are the norm in my discipline.

[thefairyknight-deactivated20180]

Just once I would like the mentor’s beautiful daughter to actually, sincerely hate the hero’s guts.

Like, not like ‘belligerent sexual tension’ hate his guts. Not ‘learn a valuable lesson about resentment and gets over it’ hate his guts. No, just straight up, 100%, wouldn’t-piss-on-you-if-you-were-on-fire, the-sound-of-your-name-makes-me-puke-a-little-in-my-mouth hate his guts.

And my entire kingdom for a story where she ‘helps’ him train and then goes and hands a detailed list of all of his weaknesses and strategies to his rival like ‘kick his fucking ass’.

[technoturian]

Alternatively, how about the ‘hero’ is actually the villain, because it turns out that the mentor not trusting his own daughter’s capabilities enough to let her be the chosen one and instead granting phenomenal cosmic powers to the first rando farmboy who comes along actually wasn’t the smartest idea he’s ever had.

[thefairyknight-deactivated20180]

Yes this a good addition