Episode 15: Updates on Keywords and Reviews

The BookSmarts Podcast, with Joshua Tallent

There are some changes happening around keywords and reviews at Amazon, so we take a few minutes this week to talk about them.

Amazon recently changed their keyword requirements again. It is unclear how broad this change is, and whether it will even stay in place, but Amazon started restricting the Keywords field to 350 characters a few weeks ago for some titles at some publishers. Because this is such a new change, I recommend publishers who send ONIX to Amazon take a look at recently updated titles and make sure the changes they sent were not suppressed.

Amazon has also recently changed how it handles review quotes and endorsements, again at least for some publishers. Their system now apparently only shows the last quote or endorsement provided in the ONIX record, instead of showing all of them. This is problematic for many reasons, but it mainly means that ONIX files sent to Amazon now have to have these elements combined into one field, instead of in separate fields.

Hopefully we will see some more consistency on these issues, and better compliance with the ONIX standard, in the future, but as always I recommend every publisher check their titles on Amazon and watch out for issues.

If you don't have a title performance monitoring tool in place, you should really take a look at Eloquence on Alert. It makes watching for changes on your titles much easier, and provides a unique mechanism that can help you quickly review your Amazon (and other) product pages. Take a look at https://www.eloquenceonalert.com/