I hate keywords. Not just for the self publication process, but really for everything.

I’m very glad in a way that I’m not in my twenties anymore, beyond the “it’s uncertain out there and you haven’t been tested/don’t know your limits yet” which is enough to make me say “not for half the time and twice the pay”. They are drowned in a sea of keywords, from dating sites to job applications.

And since you have no idea what the keyword will activate on the other side of the blind panel from the provider, you really can’t tell how the keywords will affect your visibility and sales OR you know, your ability to find a job or a mate. Heck, half the time you can’t tell which of the categories you choose Amazon will take, and which it will conjure out of clear air.

Imagine doing that for your dating. You’re twenty something, like cats and quiet men and find yourself listed as looking for a musician who plays hard rock, preferring dogs and– Poor kids. No wonder they’re upset.

Or maybe they’re clued in about keywords. Or intuit them better than I do.

Here I have to confess I have some very specific areas in which I’m a complete idiot. Most of these areas I believe relate to my not being able to stay with something long enough to figure out how it works, and also being unable to figure out how things work (and remember it) unless I do it several times in a row. MANY TIMES. Enough for it to stick.

This is why my newsletter is on substack because apparently “Too brain damaged to figure out how to run a normal newsletter” is a thing. And my friend who enthuses about ai agents to do all the things I hate to do misses how bad at understanding how to do such things I am. I like tech, I’m just really bad at figuring out the how-to. I still remember when getting anything up on Kobo made me curl up in the fetal position and cry. (It’s all visual. I don’t do visual.) I solved it by avoiding it and going Draft to Digital.

So, here is the confession: I offload writing blurbs and finding keywords and categories to AI.

The truth is I’m so bad at writing blurbs that over the thirty some books I have published/re-published, it’s a miracle none of them came out with “This is a book. It has words and everything.” However, a lot of them came close. I think my original blurbs for the Musketeer series said “The musketeers solve another mystery”. Yes, I’m AWFUL at this.

So, I use AI, but I’ve just recently figured out how to do it and haven’t uploaded the new optimized blurbs yet. My first pass was hit or miss. Still better than mine.

I will warn you that at least on that first pass, AI hallucinated categories that you can’t choose. That’s life. Still sells better. Somehow.

Now am I recommending that to you? Forefend the thought. Some of you have an almost religious aversion to AI — meh. I already have a religion. Two if you squint and if they weren’t mutually incompatible. Three if you count the made up religion in Darkship Thieves (USAians forever!) — so here are a few tips because just because I can’t do it, it doesn’t mean I don’t know why. I have a long theory, I just fall apart on the practice.

The blurb is like the cover a way to sell. It doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed. It doesn’t have to tell us everything about the book. If you fit on the hook, say “Bob has a cybernetic heart” you don’t need to explain he found it in a crashed spaceship. Or that it’s set for another planet altogether. Just let the cool sentence be there.

The best way to learn to write blurbs is to read a lot of them. So get out there and read a lot of them. Go where books are sold and read the back, particularly of the prestigious pushed works. Then mentally remove the bizarre woke verbiage, because you’re trying to sell. Then sigh and go where they sell used books and read blurbs from when books used to sell.

Keywords… There are programs out there that help you pick keywords, but most of them use AI, so you might as well cut out the middle man and use AI. No seriously. Or if you want to remain pure, use one of the other programs.

Categories, the only useful advice I have for you is two pieces:

Don’t put you book where it will piss off people. No, seriously, if you put in that your book is steampunk, but it’s a future-set book with nary a coal powered anything in sight? You’ll piss off people. Portal fantasy and no one goes anywhere different in a sudden and magical way? You’ll piss off people. Romance — and this is SO normal for guys to do — and the closest thing to a romance is the very-background relationship of two people in a mil sf, who might, at some point, consider maybe in the future holding hands or something? You’ll piss off people. And for the love of all that’s holy, do not call it erotica if it has A semi-explicit sex scene, but that’s not the main thrust — deal. I gave up phrasing for lent — of the story. Erotica is all sex all the time.

Your books main genre is the one that drives the plot. Yes, you can have romance or mystery as a subplot. In my current headache, though very much science fiction, mystery is DEFINITELY a subplot. And I’ll probably check that ticky box, because it is the entire structure of the thing, and they’re trying to solve a death. Will it attract a ton of mystery readers? Probably not. But it might get me a handful I didn’t have before. It also has a romance but I’m not even going to consider checking that box because, well, there’s no kissing (except between a married couple, and that is another thing) much less anything else, except implied, and the couples are human-modified-hermaphrodites, so most romance readers will nope.

So, don’t be a lunatic. Choose categories that fit. My AI advises me to pick smaller categories because it means you have more chances of going to the top and staying there, which attracts sales. So, you should probably do that. For instance most of my sf books can be put in genetic engineering, because it’s a major part of the world building, even if not taking place on screen.

Oh, also, please for the love of all that’s holy, don’t restrict the age of your readers. Unless you’re actually writing erotica, and even then I’d seriously consider not doing it.

Look, there are questions Amazon asks that are not designed to do what seems logical to any of us normal human beings. One of them is the age thing. They are not asking so that readers can be advised that maybe you have two violent scenes that will disturb littles (judging by my own boys, no, they won’t. Actually the stuff that would disturb them, they don’t understand. As in at all.) They are asking because they have a porno problem, and are afraid people will sue over finding a book unmarked.

By putting that there, they can then go “Oh, look, we put it in. The bad writer didn’t choose it, sue them.”

BUT NO ONE IS GOING TO SUE YOU BECAUSE THEIR KID READ A FISTFIGHT. Or not successfully. That is a porno thing.

The problem is if you choose it, Amazon treats it like porno, and it’s virtually unfindable. To the point it won’t bring it up even if you type in the title.

DON’T DO THAT.

The other thing I don’t recommend doing is answering “was this AI assisted at any point” — look, most spell check is now AI assisted — obviously that’s NOT what Amazon is looking for. As for covers, well, if you hire almost any artist, AI will probably be used. At this point photoshop is AI enhanced.

The question isn’t there for that. it is there in Amazon’s vain hope of catching Chinese scammers who are uploading a dozen books a day written entirely with AI. They don’t care if your grammarly is AI assisted. Stop confessing sins you never committed.

Now, tell me what more you need to know about putting up your indie book, because I’m derping on what might be necessary to know.