Tags deleted from Kindle ebooks. What did you expect?

Tags have been removed from Amazon Kindle ebooks. They remain in place for paperbacks.

Tags are an ostensibly useful feature in search because they allow users to add descriptive words to an entry. These descriptive words help search engines like Amazon’s determine what a book is about. If, for instance, I call my book “My Holiday”, tagging it with “travel” and “Paris” will help the search engine serve it up to readers looking for books about trips to France.

Tags cease to be useful when I start tagging my Parisian memoir with “cheese” because I ate brie at some point on my travels; or “Eiffel Tower” because there’s a picture of it on the cover.

Conspiracy theories

The internet abounds with theories for Amazon’s decision to delete tags from ebooks (seen as the domain of self-publishers) but not paperbacks (dominated by traditional publishers). This one from novelist Francine Saint Marie on her blog is eloquent and typical of the thrust of many of them:

‘Indie’ titles have steadily gained ground on Amazon.com, helped also by a search tag feature that places the most popularly tagged ones high up there in search results… much to the chagrin and annoyance of the big publishing houses… who have seen their own marketshare dangerously plummet.

No doubt then, in order to lend aid to those flailing publishing enterprises (who provide huge ad revenue), and to cut room for its own soon-to-be-announced imprints, this is the reason that Amazon removed the search tag feature completely from kindle books.

No doubt? Really?

We asked for it

One of the first things I came across when I started promoting my own ebooks were the plethora of threads asking other authors to tag books. You’ve probably seen them: you tag my book and I’ll tag yours. Not, you read my book, decide what tags are appropriate, and tag the book. No reading, purchasing, or critical thought required.

As forum user notjohn says in the KDP forum thread What happened to all the tags?!:

Did ole Jeff Bezos stumble across this forum and see those odious threads on Tag My Book? I would have had the same reaction: okay, guys, trying to game my system, huh? Right. No more tags!

I have no more data than anyone else so I won’t go so far as to claim no doubt but it’s my educated guess that tags stopped being a reflection of what readers thought and just a cheap way for authors to game the system. So Amazon killed them, at least in their original form.

Of course it could also be a technical problem or temporary until Amazon rolls out a fix to the problem of gaming.

Amazon isn’t for authors foremost and you shouldn’t want it to be

Whatever it is, Amazon wants its search engine to be useful to readers, not authors. If authors make a mockery of the system, Amazon should and will change the system. Remember in school when you were told that a few of you could spoil it for everyone else?

Amazon didn’t get to be the near-monopoly it is by being stupid. If you can find tag-exchange threads, so can Amazon.

If in doubt, the simplest answer is usually correct

In the absence of information to the contrary, it makes more sense to suppose the simplest possible answer: Amazon either had a technical problem or killed tags where they had stopped being useful. And, if it’s the latter, they stopped being useful because authors were trying to game them. Was it the evil “Big Six” or their traditionally published authors that tried to game the system?

I doubt it was the Big Six. And, if they felt indie authors were unfairly benefiting from gaming the system and it worked, why not game the system, themselves?

As for the anti-Amazon conspiracy theory, why on earth would Amazon go to the expense of building the best self-publishing platform in the world only to screw self-publishers over? Do you think Amazon doesn’t know how much money Amazon makes from self-published books?

I wrote in Don’t be an ass choosing your category about thriller writers who list their books in sociology and criminology categories. I said there:

Immature and shady ebook marketing brings all self-published authors into disrepute, which will hurt credibility and sales across the board. We need readers to be willing to take a chance on self-published authors. They’re going to do less of that if we present ourselves as a bunch of shonky chancers.

My belief that Amazon would eventually crack down on bad practice is why I’ve never written here about tagging or focussed on it as a promotion tool for my clients or me. It was my belief that Amazon would eventually deprecate tagging.

It might be that tags will come back but under different conditions — perhaps only someone who has bought a book will be able to tag it, which would make tags useful again.

Either way, if this isn’t the warning shot across the bows that I think it is, it’s worth asking yourself whether you’re treating your self-publishing as a legitimate business and approaching it in a way that’s reputable and keeps Amazon relevant to readers.

I have suggested before that Amazon is heading towards a two-tier system, one that I think will have nothing to do with indie authors vs the “Big Six” and everything to do with quality and professionalism vs their opposites.

What shall we mess up next?

So what are indie authors going to do? They’re going to start asking each other to “like” books they haven’t read instead. <sigh>

Hat tip to reader Vickie Johnstone who emailed me about the disappearance of tags.

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