What if you could be sure there was an audience ready to devour your next book? What are the hot key words you should use in your book description and marketing to get readers to notice you? Is the trending interest going up or down?
Since there isn’t a working crystal ball nearby, I resorted to more useful Google tools, Insights for Search and Google Trends.
Google Trends
This nifty tool allows you to compare the trending pattern of multiple search terms to compare where the greater interest is trending across Google web searches and news references. But there’s more! It also breaks out the data by geographic region and time.
In my own search for “book, art theft” the trend for both the web and news were high which bodes well for my next two novels. Since I set the region to World, I also know that the United States ranks third in interest behind Egypt and India. By clicking United States under the Region results, I get a sub-region breakout by state and then top cities. Now I’m digging down to where my fans may be and can target their time zones via Twitter. (You may have 2k+ followers, but if you miss their coffee break, they’ll never see your message.)
If I were to use this information to tweak my marketing messages, I would need to be sure to include key words related to my genre/content that trend well in web searches. (Think Ad Words)
Insights for Search
The difference between this and Trends is that Search is analyzing the data over search volume rather than directional trend. The graphs may look similar, but the data gleaned will be more detailed here.
Here’s an example for my search “stolen art”:
I’ve added News Headlines so I can verify I’m actually looking at data related to my subject and not a video game or music playlist. Over the past 12 months, New York, California and Texas have the highest search rate. If you are logged into your Google account, you’ll also see actual numbers.
Since I have a fair number of Twitter followers and blog fans in the UK and Canada, I added those two countries to my search and voila, I can clearly see where I have my work cut out for me.
Disclaimer: I do not work for or have any affiliation with Google. I just love how easy they make it to do research and fine tune my work.
Have fun playing and be sure to share any cool tools you’ve come across that helps you write and sell more books:).
*** For other Google tools go to Google.com and click” More” on the top menu and them click “Even More”. ***
Thanks Cynthia, I’m having a blast playing with this and even shared it with the research analyst at my day job and have her hooked too. It’s a great way to vet ideas for new plots;)
Thanks for sharing these links, Judith. I’m already thinking over ways to put this info to good use!