Do you know how long it's been since our last tag party? A long, long time.
The Brigade had a tradition of hosting a Tag Party on Thursdays. Tags are those little words and phrases that help Amazon's search engine sort through all the titles.
Any idea how many titles Amazon has? It's in the millions for print books and now over 800K for Kindle. Wow. Tagging gets us noticed on the search engine - makes it easier for the reader to find us amongst the teeming masses. (And, yes, I'm quoting a tag party there.)
Tagged books also give us a good idea of what's out there to read, and gives us an open comments forum for fun (spoiler free!) talk about the books. You're not required to buy or review the books, but you'll probably find yourself adding books to your TBR pile.
From the Twitter chatter, there's a lot of interest in getting this going again. All we need is some victims, and some volunteers willing to click a few buttons. A party host who is willing to organize everything and write the actual Tag Party post would be wonderful to.
Thursdays are in the middle of the week, everyone has a busy life, so let's put this to a vote.
YAY or NAY?
If YAY, would you be interested in hosting?
I'm always willing to go tag but the next few weeks are going to be too manic for me to volunteer as a host. :-/
ReplyDeleteOh, I mean YAY. :-P
Sure, why not?
ReplyDeleteThe author should add all the tags to their own product page giving out the link. That way, a simple Agree with these tags is all the tagger has to do.
If a tagger gets to the page and there are only a couple of tags, how are we supposed to know which tags to add? We don't unless we've already read the book. If author has enough info, maybe the tagger will buy right then and there.
Do you have have an Amazon membership to tag?
ReplyDeleteAnd as complete, utter newbie to tagging, can someone leave instruction on how to do this?
Thanks for bringing this up, Lianna. And Marva, that's a great idea to tag your books and then submit for a tag party.
ReplyDeleteSandra Stixrude did a wonderful job with our past tag parties, but she hasn't been able to do one in awhile.
Anyone else willing to step up to the plate? (Pippa, I agree you should pass, not only because of your upcoming debut novel release of KEIR but because you're already doing several volunteer jobs.)
Or another idea is we could skip the formal tagging party and just have authors tag their books and then submit to the Brigade with a link so others can help tag their books.
Kylie, I'll go dig up one of our previous Tagging Party posts that had the instructions. With the links, it's really easy.
Ok, here we go. This is from one of Sandra Stixrude's last posts.
ReplyDeleteCriteria:
1. It must be on Amazon
2. It must be SFR (includes Steampunk, Apocalyptic, Futuristic, Space Opera, Near Future, YA SFR and all the other subgenres that fall under that SFR umbrella.)
3. Must be written by a Brigader
A brief step by step:
Go to the Amazon buy page (links should be provided)
Scroll down to the Tags Customers Associate with this Product header
Look for these tags: SFR, Scifi Romance, SF Romance, Science Fiction Romance and Paranormal Romance - please feel free to add any extra tags you feel are appropriate to the work (i.e. Space Opera, Military SF, etc.)
If the tags are already there, just click on them to add your 'vote'
You can also type into the 'your tags' box to add your own (no need to save the page, just type and add)
It wouldn't be hard to have a page where the authors could submit their name, title, and link so all we need to do is copy and paste the information every week for the tag party.
ReplyDeleteI know several authors who submitted their books to the library are interested in having their books in the tag parties, all that's missing from that information is the amazon link.
Or maybe we could set up that instructional post to go live every week and authors could add their current link and tags in the comments each time?
ReplyDelete@Laurie - oh, but I always feel bad if I have to say no to doing something.
I like the idea of making it as easy as possible to tag. I've been, well, I was working on doing a Pinterest board for the group with links going through Pinerly, so I could track the stats. I didn't get a lot of response for it on the FB page. Obviously, i can only add one or two books per member, because of time constraints. It takes a bit more to pin through Pinerly, but if I had the links, that would make it a lot easier. It is possible to have a page set up, so people can add their own for tagging? that's a great idea, if we can make it work.
ReplyDeleteWhat about the linky pages we use for blog hop sign-ups or blog circle sign-ups like Six Sentence Sunday and Sci-fi & Fantasy Saturday? Instead of name we could do title and link to the Amazon page.
ReplyDeleteWould that be possible?
Maybe limit the sign-up to 4-5 books, and only books that haven't been promoted in recent weeks?
I don't mind seeing if I can set that up being as I have an account with inlinkz already. I'm not sure exactly how it'll work.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I've had a play and I can set up an inlinkz that will allow us to enter a book title and the amazon link. Peeps will need to have added their own tags to their books since there's no facility on the inlinkz to do so. I can limit the number of entries, and/or the time the links can be entered. What I am wondering is whether the list should be open on a Wednesday and/or as a page or post, so that the complete list can be posted first thing Thursday for tagging. Thoughts?
ReplyDeleteHi everyone,
ReplyDeleteI'd have to agree with what Laurie posted because I've never done this before and didn't understand it at all the last time you tried it. I'm unpublished at the moment, but it sounds like it would be fun searching for the titles (or tags). Plus, learning what's out there in SFR would help me in finding books I like to read.
Hi Ester,
ReplyDeleteDo the instructions Laurie included make it any clearer? I know it often doesn't make sense unless you have the page in front of you. Maybe a screen shot would help?