Q&A: Where is my book recommended on Amazon?

QUESTION: On the Amazon page where my novel is for sale, there are several other recommended books displayed under the heading, "Customers who bought this item also bought."

How is this list determined, and how can I find the other places on Amazon where my book appears?

ANSWER: The list is often called the "Also-Bought" list, and it shows the six other books bought most frequently by customers who also purchased your book. Amazon uses a process called collaborative filtering to generate this list, and it prompts quite a few sales. Here's a fuller explanation of how Amazon recommendations can publicize your book.

A Web search will find the other books your novel is being paired with. Start at Google's advance search page.

In the top box labeled "with all the words" enter your book title in quotation marks.

In the next box down labeled "with the exact phrase" enter this: "Customers who bought this item also bought" (no quotation marks are needed here).

A few levels down is a section labeled "Domain." Enter Amazon.com in the box.

Now you can click the gray button on the top right of the page labeled "Google Search" to get your results. Google will show you several Amazon book detail pages that mention your book in the "Also Bought" list for those other books. The results look like this.

At the bottom of the results, you may see a link labeled "repeat the search with the omitted results included." Sometimes Google screens its results like this to avoid showing "duplicate content." Go ahead and click the link to get all the results.

This is a nifty technique for discovering all the places your book is being shown on Amazon, and you can adapt it for several other purposes. For example, there's also a list on each Amazon book detail page headed "What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?" Just replace the "Also Bought" phrase in the instructions above with the "Ultimately Buy" phrase.

If, like me, you're addicted to Amazon stats, you'll want to bookmark Sales Rank Express, which shows you Also-Bought lists and a variety of other factoids about your book. On Sales Rank Express, after you input an ISBN, you'll see a button on the right labeled "Get Pairings." That will get you the top 10 "Also Bought" books for your title. You can check your stats on Amazon's international sites while you're at it.

And here's my favorite feature of Sales Rank Express: it shows you the number of copies of your book Amazon has in stock. You can't even get this information on Amazon's Web site. (Yet another stat to obsess over! I used to think I was going crazy checking my Amazon Sales Rank 18 times a day. Now I'm checking my "in stock" number every 10 minutes.)

SRE's proprietor is Aaron Shepard, the author of Aiming at Amazon, a great guide for anyone who is planning to write or publish a book. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.