Playing Tag

How important are tags on your books on websites that are selling them? Apparently they are extremely important. The more tags you have on your books the more opportunities readers have of finding you. If your book is set in New Orleans and someone is looking for books in that city, than a tag will allow them to find it. If you write a book about a homicide detective, the same thing applies. Every aspect of your book that might draw a reader to it deserves a tag to help them get there.

But how do you determine which tags to put out there for your books? My feeling is to go over your book and decide which parts of it you would use to describe your story. It is about a baker or a plumber. Well those tags would be obvious. But the setting, the subject, the genre, the sub-genre, the characters ... there are seemingly endless ways to tag your book.

Can you overdo it? I’m not sure. Being new to this myself I would say no, you probably can’t. You want readers to find you and who knows what they may search for? If you have it out there then if they do type in something the chances improve for you that they can find you if you have more tags for the search to discover you. But I don’t really know.

I would guess that the thing to do is to add the tags and see what the results are. After all, what have you got to lose?