Just a quick heads up for all the indie, self-published writers out there who publish on Kindle – Amazon made an overhaul of Kindle book pages and Tags have disappeared.
Whether this is permanent or not, remains to be seen. This is Amazon, after all, they keep changing things constantly. Most of the time we do not even notice these changes. This time, however, it’s very noticeable – the Tags are gone, a few other things seem to be reshuffled slightly around the pages.
To those who advocated using Tags for better visibility in Amazon search, it looks like that now they will have to rely on the old-fashioned keyword loading in the book description and other parts of the page.
How would the absence of Tags affect search visibility and the book rankings? Hard to say right now. I would venture a guess that there would be only a few authors who’d notice the difference. For the majority of indies who publish on Kindle, this should not make any difference at all – more than 95% of the books on Amazon are not being seen by readers too often. Having Tags or not will not change that.
I suppose the “Like & Tag” game we writers are so fond of, is now “Like” only.
Gosh, Amazon, leave things alone. I don’t think I used tags, but I recently read a blog about tags and I was going to start using them .
Well, perhaps they’ll bring them back…
I have noticed that since they removed my tags that my sales have dropped.
Thanks for sharing. I think we now have to put more keywords in description as a result.
Gosh, Amazon, leave things alone. I don’t think I used tags, but I recently read a blog about tags and I was going to start using them . Cher’ley
Amazon changes things all the time, I’m afraid. To keep things interesting, I think
Well, if you didn’t use them before, you are not going to miss them. I’d advise working in some keywords in the book description instead – this pretty much achieves the same result.
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First Amazon deleted positive reviews that in its estimation–and its estimation only–were fraudulent (many, many authors had 5-star reviews removed that they had nothing to do with) and allowed clearly illegitimate reviews to remain, but now they are removing the tags which help readers find books.
What else can Amazon do to kill off the indepenedent author network?