Sophisticated Amazon Searches

To help make books more discoverable on Amazon (despite them hiding “adult content” books and redirecting search results to other books), here is a tip for *how* to search for the books you want to buy.

Have a shortcut to take you to Amazon advanced search page, rather than just opening the Amazon site and using the default search box.

http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Search-Books/b/ref=sv_b_0?ie=UTF8&node=241582011

In the fields on the Advanced Search page, you can enter one item or any combination of author, title, ISBN, publisher, etc. When you do a search this way, adult content will come up. And the search results seem, from our experience, to be more in sync with the search terms entered.

For example, if you search on author Jaid Black in advanced search, the 12 items on the first results page are all books by Jaid Black. But if you search by that author name in the default All Departments search box at the top of any page, five of the items (including the top one) displayed on the first results page are by other authors and have nothing to do with Jaid Black.

I did a search for “Heather Hiestand” and “historical romance” and the list was pretty accurate. Only one of my contemporary romances showed up. So this is a great way to search for authors who have long backlists like I do!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&field-keywords=historical+romance&field-author=heather+hiestand&field-title=&field-isbn=&field-publisher=&node=&field-p_n_condition-type=&field-feature_browse-bin=&field-subject=&field-language=&field-dateop=During&field-datemod=&field-dateyear=&sort=relevanceexprank&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=31&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=7

 

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