Thursday, December 17, 2009

Another Way to Help Your Small Press Friends

...and this one won't cost a cent.

Reviews of products at Amazon.com are great, but tagging those products can be more productive in driving traffic. Each product page should have a section that looks like this:

(yeah, it's from Fifty-Two Stitches, not that I'm suggesting you tag that particular book)

Simply click the little box next to each term to add your vote. You can also add new tags (there's a little box below the list). The more tags (i.e., number of instances of a particular tag), the higher a product will appear when someone searches for that tag. It's the Amazon equivalent of placing a book in the front of the store. When I managed the book department at Hastings in Lawrence (we sold books, music, and video), my job was all about "real estate". The books on end caps and up front sold better because of their visibility. That should be obvious, right?

So you want to help the small press? Tag the books. Do anything you can to help increase the visibility of books, magazines, etc. that you enjoy.

8 comments:

Jeremy D Brooks said...

Very good suggestion...it never occurred to me that tagging items would make them more visible, but it makes sense--more searchable data.

Cate Gardner said...

I didn't even know you could tag things. Off to check it out.

Alan W. Davidson said...

Great Idea, Mr. Polson. I didn't know that you could do that.

Adam said...

Hmmm...never even knew about that. After a young life squandered on the internet I'm finally getting some idea how it works.

Katey said...

What Adam said, almost exactly. Why did I not know this?

Oh right, because I never know useful things, only absolutely useless ones. My mother always said so!

Fox Lee said...

Looks like I need to be a customer to leave tags : ( Having never used Amazon, I'll have to ask Ying to tag on my behalf.

Aaron Polson said...

I think a lot of people simply gloss over the "tags" without knowing they can join in the fun. I know I did.

Anonymous said...

Great information. Thanks!

-Mercedes