Author: Allie P.

My Obsession with Amazon

by Allie P., posted in General Tips and Tricks, Writing and Publishing Tips

Ever since I discovered that Amazon’s SEO was more complicated than merely a word for word keyword match, I have been visiting my book on its virtual shelves daily. I was very happy to see that I now have top billing when searching for my book, at least I have top billing based on my searches. Who knows where I may still rank with other people’s searches, and that unknown keeps bringing me back to Amazon day in and day out as if Amazon would suddenly take pity on me and say, yeah we know you are interested in this product. We’ll sell it for you if only so that you move onto other product pages and start buying those as well. Of course if they did come out and say that directly to me, I would turn around and sign up for a multi-year prime membership. I hear that is only mildly less addictive.

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So many hats

by Allie P., posted in Life as I know it

When writing an Uncertain Faith I struggled to contain the many roles the main character has into a single story. Each of her roles could have taken over the entire story. This week life imitated art. We found out that a former employee was breaching his non-compete contract and actively attempting to steal clients, I was pulled into multiple international conference calls, and had to somehow find the time to plan a five year old’s birthday party while also pulling together last minute Halloween costumes and candy runs. Daylight Savings time ended, so does that mean I gained an hour? Why do I instead feel like I lost 12?

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Searchability In Amazon

by Allie P., posted in General Tips and Tricks, Writing and Publishing Tips

As previously mentioned, my recently published debut novel entitled, An Uncertain Faith, was recently picked up by Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. I was understandably excited and wanted to promote this event within my network of family and friends. When they went to search for it by title, however, it didn’t appear in the results. I also conducted the same search with similar results, however searching by author’s name found my novel instantly. I thought surely there must be a mistake somewhere and contacted Amazon’s customer service. I was told that there is more to their search algorithm than merely matching keywords word for word and that even though I was looking up a specific title verbatim the search might return results it thinks I want more and hide the direct match. I would have thought the word for word match would have at least appeared towards the bottom of my search results rather than stripped out altogether. Now I am wondering if there might be a whole world of other products and services I am unaware of just because a computer came to the conclusion that it knows better than me what I want. This is not necessarily a complaint, just an observation, and I was able to search by book by title shortly after my discussion with customer service.

I would like to repost an article on the subject as I do not seem to be the first who learned the hard way that there are ways to optimize searches on platforms other than the big search engines

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How did I get here?

by Allie P., posted in Life as I know it

A few years ago, my husband learned of his faciliy’s imminent closing when a co-worker happened to notice that their site was no longer showing on the corporate website’s locations. Determined to be more in control of our own destiny we decided to enter into the world of small business ownership. I’ve often joked since that I could write several books on the various mistakes we’ve made since then. Eventually though I decided to stop joking and wrote An Uncertain Faith, loosely inspired by those ‘learning experiences’ now available through Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com

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