- Would you like to learn how to self-publish
a children's book?
Well today we're gonna be starting out
with the best first step,
and that's going to be researching keywords
and your niche, stay tuned.
Hey, I'm Dale L. Roberts, a best-selling author
as well as a self-publishing advocate
who wants to show you how to publish books that sell,
and today starts the first part
of a four part series on how to self-publish
a children's book, and we're gonna start out
with the best first step
in researching your keywords and niche.
The very first step is identifying your target audience.
Now it goes without saying, our target audience
are children, but remember, there is a barrier of entry,
a gatekeeper, and that's the parents,
because after all, it's not like a three-year-old
is going onto the Amazon Marketplace
and buying their own books,
so we need to of course identify that area,
and how are they searching?
What are some of the words they're using
to look up books like yours
or the type of books that you're going to be publishing?
Now that we have that out of the way,
we gotta figure out our age range,
and this becomes a little bit more problematic,
because I researched until my eyes bled, it felt like,
on different age groups, and it just varies per resource.
Some people say zero to three, and then three to five,
and then six to eight, and then nine to 11,
and it just becomes so muddied.
The important thing is
get a general idea of the ages that you're shooting for,
and allow yourself with about a one-year deviation.
So let's say that you choose
to publish a book for three to five year olds.
Understand that if a parent is looking for their child
that's at two years old,
and they happen to stumble onto yours,
it's not gonna be a bad thing,
'cause they're gonna grow into your book,
and if a parent picks up one for a six-year-old
and yours is between the three to five,
it's not gonna be the end of the world.
The six-year-old may enjoy the book nonetheless.
Your next step is brain-dumping all of your ideas.
I want you to think about everything
that's going to encompass your book.
Any type of descriptors, any type of characters,
or traits, or personality of those characters.
Any type of story arcs.
All of those things, write it all down,
you're gonna probably take about a 1/2-hour
to an hour to do this.
The more that you have, the better.
Next, we're gonna need to go into the Amazon Marketplace,
so the Kindle Store and the Book Store,
in the browser what's called Incognito Mode.
The reason we want to go Incognito Mode
is if we were to go into the Amazon Marketplace
through your regular browser,
where you're normally browsing,
Amazon's going to give you products and searches
based on your interests, what you've searched for before,
and what you've bought before,
and we don't want that.
We want to see what their general recommendations
are to the public.
For the Chrome browser,
and if you press Ctrl+Shift and the letter N,
it'll open up Incognito Mode,
and we're gonna go into the Amazon Kindle Store,
and you're gonna take your keywords,
type it into the search query box, don't press Enter.
You're gonna allow it to populate the Auto Suggest.
It's gonna give you a ton of other keywords
that are related to the keyword that you just typed in.
You're gonna either take a screenshot of it
and then maybe type it into a document later on,
or just get a journal
and write it down on that for later use.
And we're just gonna keep on writing down
keywords that are relevant to your specific book.
Now, we want to focus on just the auto-suggested stuff
that we have here, not the ones that we wrote down
during our Brain Dump.
Some of 'em might work, some of 'em might not.
Our next step is going to be installing what's called
DS Amazon Quick View into the browser.
Now this little free tool is a great way
to figure out what the product's ranking is on Amazon.
The closer a product is ranked to number one,
the more sales it has.
The further away it is from number one,
the less sales it has.
So we're gonna take the keywords we wrote down earlier,
and we're gonna start to type those in
and then press Enter.
Now it's gonna bring up the search results,
about 16 products, it's gonna come on up,
and we're gonna look at DS Amazon Quick View
for each one of the books that come up,
and focus on that Amazon Best Seller rank,
and the lower it is below 100,000, the better it is,
because if it's at 100,000,
that means it's getting at least one sale per day.
If I see it at about 10,000, that's even better,
so that sweet spot range for me
for any new publication between 10,000
and 100,000 is pretty good.
Now if for some reason the products
are getting really close to number one,
let's say 100 or 300, it doesn't mean it's a bad keyword,
it just means it's going to be very competitive
to get yourself on the first page placement
when somebody searches your book after you publish.
Now we're just gonna go ahead and rinse and repeat
with all these keywords until we narrowed it down
to the good from the bad.
Now, you could probably save yourself a lot of time
if you got my favorite tool, called Publisher Rocket.
Publisher Rocket does all the keyword, category,
and competition research in a matter of minutes.
You can save yourself a ton of time
and grab a copy of this over at dalelinks.com/rocket.
Any purchases made through that,
it's an affiliate link, so it benefits this channel,
but in the same instance,
it does not adversely affect your cost.
Now we've gotta narrow down this list even more.
We gotta figure out the cream of the crop,
the best keywords.
So we've already kind of separated the bad.
We've got the good.
We've gotta figure out
what's the best way to describe our book,
and is it appropriate?
So the very first thing is I wanna figure out:
can I put any of these keywords into the title,
subtitle, or the book description?
If I can get it in the title and subtitle,
that is a big bonus because it makes your book
more discoverable on the Amazon Marketplace.
Don't worry: if you can't get your keywords
in the title and subtitle, it's okay.
Sometimes it just doesn't make sense,
and it'll seem almost disjointed and stilted
if you put some keyword into your title
and it's not supposed to be there,
because now we have the seven backend keywords.
Now, this may be Greek to you, and it's okay.
In part four, we're gonna cover exactly where
they come into play.
These seven backend keywords
are gonna be the way that people are able
to bring up your book and search volume.
So we're gonna wanna make sure
that three to four of them are kind of like a combination,
a collaboration of the best keywords that have overlap.
So let's say for instance I have three different keywords
with some type of overlap.
Let's say one's workout plan.
We have another one that's home workout,
and we've got another one, is workout for beginners.
We can splice this whole thing together
for a home workout plan for beginners
as one keyword string, and in our seven keyword slots,
we're allowed upwards of 50 characters per slot.
So just remember, you can have up to 50 characters.
Combine as much as you'd like
that makes as much sense to you.
Now, the other three to four slots
you're gonna use for an exact phrase match,
meaning that you're not gonna combine it with anything.
Save those three to four slots for the best of the best.
Let's say you found a keyword,
and you're like, "This is the best descriptor."
And it's no at nothing else,
you don't wanna deviate off that,
it's totally fine, keep that for an exact phrase match.
Here are three bonus tips I wanna share with you,
starting at with number one,
adjust age ranges with the keywords.
Now, you might find some keywords
that pull up a specific search volume,
and you're like, ooh, this is not so good.
Maybe try to adjust the age range.
So let's say for instance I have
monkey books for kids ages three to five.
Maybe if I just adjust it to say
age ranges of four to six,
it might bring up a different volume.
Bonus tip number two: explore author profiles.
Do your due diligence.
Go take a look at other authors
and what they're doing.
What kinda keywords are they utilizing?
What's their key to success?
You're gonna kind of speculate on some of these things,
but at least it'll help you
to where you're not flying blind
into publishing your book.
Bonus tip number three: become prolific.
You're gonna be a children's book author,
it's important that you have enough content
for them to binge.
Kids love something that they can know, like, and trust,
and parents will buy products
that they can know, like, and trust as well.
So I would really recommend that you not hedge all your bets
on just one publication for children's books.
Think about the big picture and the long term plan
of going about six to maybe a dozen or more publications
as a children's book author.
Hey, that's not the end of things.
In part two, we're gonna be talking about
writing and producing the book for kids,
and that's gonna be in this very next video
as a continued part of the series.
And I will see you in the very next video.
What are you waitin' for?
Click away.
(easygoing guitar music)