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.
Oleg Medvedkov's Blog 
January 23rd, 2013 at 1:53 am
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 .
January 23rd, 2013 at 3:09 am
Well, perhaps they’ll bring them back…
January 23rd, 2013 at 6:58 am
I have noticed that since they removed my tags that my sales have dropped.
January 23rd, 2013 at 9:43 am
Thanks for sharing. I think we now have to put more keywords in description as a result.
January 26th, 2013 at 8:26 pm
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
January 27th, 2013 at 7:25 am
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.
February 6th, 2013 at 4:57 pm
[…] indie authors used to subvert the bestseller lists with freebies through KDP Select. More recently, Amazon got rid of tags (temporarily? we don’t know), which caused a bunch of independent authors who relied on keyword […]
February 7th, 2013 at 6:46 pm
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?