I’ve been working on breaking Make a Move into its individual episodes to sell as eBooks, but the effort involved in coming up with cover designs that are similar, yet flexible enough to differentiate between episodes has been holding me up. Call it perfectionism or procrastination, but I was stalled. Earlier this week, I read this blog post from Roz Morris (via Jane Friedman’s blog) about her latest novel, which she released in serial form. Seeing her covers and realising that I was missing the moment to do this gave me a kick in the ass, and I’ve just finished uploading the new split books to Amazon, all using episode-labeled versions of the existing cover.

Roz’s post holds some great advice on how to publish serial works (although I’m not comfortable with the idea of categorising a work of fiction using non-fiction categories – that feels like gaming the system to me, and has the potential to annoy readers), so it’s well worth reading if you’re planning to split a novel into episodes.

While I’ve been working this week, some cool news came out of Amazon regarding their new French Kindle store, which is great news for all authors (bigger market) but particularly great for me, given the French focus of my book. With the launch of the Amazon.fr channel in the back of my mind, and while otherwise thinking of the benefits of serial publication:

• Greater visibility/discoverability
• Greater number of potential tags/search results
• Option to give part one away for free if publishing on Smashwords too

another benefit occurred to me.

Amazon’s KDP program allows 7 keyword tags per book. That’s not a lot, so you’d never want to waste a single one on a redundant tag, but with a serialised book, you have (in the case of Make a Move) 6 times the number for the episodic releases, and another 7 for the collected edition. That’s 49 tags, and I can definitely “waste” a few of those. Now, while French and German book buyers will be looking for English language books (the rates of English speaking in those countries is orders of magnitude higher than the number of Americans/British with a second language), that doesn’t mean that they aren’t performing a significant number of native language searches too, which will completely miss your book. By taking some of your tags, translating them into French and German (I recommend Google Translate) and spreading them across a couple of episodes of your book, you can get your work to feature in those searches.

It’s not a major leap in discoverability tricks, but if you had a book you thought would appeal to readers in those markets, wouldn’t you want to give them every chance to find it?