Amazon keyword organizer | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's bookYou may remember that Amazon has recently adopted a more flexible way of reading keywords. You see, Amazon provides you on their KDP bookshelf with a set of 7 separate keyword boxes, giving some authors the impression that they should enter just one keyword or keyword phrase per box.

However, each box holds 50 characters and the more keywords you can add, the better the chance a customer will find your book when they search. The difficulty is in fitting your keywords efficiently into those boxes (they don’t tell you how many characters are left or even that you have 50 to begin with), not duplicating words across boxes, etc.

Making that easier is where we come in with Hidden Gems Books’ free Amazon Keyword Organizer tool.

Amazon Keyword Organizer

Amazon keyword organizer | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's book

Screenshot from the Amazon keyword organizer

Simply enter your keywords or keyword phrases into the box at the top, entering as many as you can think of and separating them by either commas or new lines, and then click the Organize Keywords button.  The Amazon Keyword Organizer tool will first strip any commas, as they are not. It will then add your keywords to the 7 boxes below in the most efficient way possible, maximizing the number of words you can fit per box.

The tool will also strip out single word duplicates but let you know what it removed, or which words wouldn’t fit into any of the boxes (if applicable). This is handled in a particularly well-thought manner: if you added “end zone, zone, friend zone”, the tool would add “end zone friend zone” to the keyword box, keeping the duplicates that are used in phrases and keeping those phrases together (i.e. not splitting “end” and “zone” into two separate boxes or adding words in between them) but dropping the single keyword dupe “zone” because it’s redundant.

Each keyword box shows how many characters were left over (if any) and has a copy button you can use to copy the contents of that box to your clipboard to then paste into one of the keyword boxes on Amazon.

Hidden Gems Books will provide more detailed instructions in a week or two via a blog post and official launch, but right now want to make it available early for HG authors to use and try.  So do give it a spin and let them know what you think. You may also wish to check out their author services while you’re there. If you find any issues with the tool or can think of any improvements, feel free to let them know!