Here's the inside look at how to increase your discoverability on the Apple Book store.

Hi there đź‘‹


I hope you enjoyed last week’s newsletter on Apple Books discoverability! Get excited: we’re going even more in-depth into the mechanics of the Apple Books store today. 


As you may recall from last week (or re-read here), searching for specific subgenres on the Apple Books store isn’t necessarily straightforward. The “categories” tab on the store only shows very high-level categories, and (some) subcategories are only available as “collections” further down the page. 


Here’s the thing about that: if an Apple reader is looking for a book in a niche genre or topic, they’re probably not going to try to figure all that out. Instead, they’ll just run a search. Which means it’s important for you to understand how search and search rankings work on the Apple Books store. And that’s what today’s email is all about.

Keyword matches in title, subtitle and author name

The best way to explore this is simply to run a few searches and analyse what results are presented to the reader. Let’s start with a non-fiction example.



What immediately strikes me is that all of the top 5 books in this search have “Digital Marketing” in the title. The 6th one, Digital Minds, has that exact keyword phrase in its subtitle. And the 7th one has it in its author name. 


What this tells me is that having a keyword present in your title, subtitle, or author name probably increases your likelihood of ranking for that keyword. But that’s just a hypothesis for now. Let’s look at other searches to validate it.



Here, all the top 15 books have “dragon” in the title. But they don’t have “dragon fantasy,” which tells me that:

  1. Keyword match in the title is indeed an important ranking factor; and 
  2. Apple is able to understand that searches for “dragon fantasy” are basically searches for “dragon” in books that are listed in at least one fantasy category.

And here’s one last case study:


Again, most of the books have a variant of “cozy witch mysteries” in either the title, series title, or subtitle. There’s only one that doesn’t (Catatonic) — but we’ll get into why later. 


What I’m interested in here is this: why is the Cozy Witch Mysteries book ranking #1 for that search? It has no reviews, so it probably doesn’t sell very well compared to the others below. And it was published in 2017, so has no “recency.” That leaves one reason in my eyes: it has an exact keyword match with the search. 


To validate that assumption, let’s run a similar (but slightly different) search:


As you can see, while there is a little overlap between the two searches, the results and rankings are very different. Most importantly, the first two books have “witch cozy mystery” in their titles — which validates our assumption that an exact (or almost exact) match in the title is rewarded above all else on the Apple Books store. 

Keyword matches in book description

Now, let’s get back to that Catatonic book that was ranking for the “cozy witch mysteries” search — without having “witch,” “cozy,” or “mystery” in the title, subtitle, or series title! How come it’s even showing up in that search? 


Well, because all of those words are in the book description.


Let’s take another example:


Most of the books here have “Victorian” in their titles/series titles/subtitles, except for The Mesmerist. Now, if we open that book and read its description, we find: “The Mesmerist is the first in a five-book multi-author Victorian romance time travel series.”


And if we search for “time travel series,” we’ll also find this book — albeit in the 42nd position. So while it isn’t as powerful as an exact match in your title, having the keyword in your blurb does play a role in the Apple Book store’s search algorithm.

Sales and downloads

Wait! If it’s more important to have the keyword in the title than the description, how come The Mesmerist in your example is ranking above several books that have “Victorian Romance” in their titles?


Excellent question! This allows me to nicely transition to the last important factor in the Apple Books search algorithm: sales/downloads.


Now, Apple Books doesn’t show the “rank” of the book on the product page, like Amazon does — so we have no way of telling whether a book sells more than another. We can try to guess that through reviews, but that’s about it.


We can see that The Mesmerist has quite a few reviews. More importantly, the fact it’s a 5-book series tells me that it’s probably getting a lot of promo. Which means that it’s selling well — better than the books below it in the search. 


Let’s look at a much broader search to validate this assumption: 


Here, most of the books have “thriller” in the titles. The only exceptions are the two household names, Gillian Flynn and B.A. Paris, which are probably selling like hot cakes right now. This goes to show that sales are, indeed, an important factor in Apple search rankings. Even if you don’t have a keyword match in your titles, you can still rank high for that keyword — if you get a lot of sales.


But it’s not just sales. Seven out of the top twelve results for “thriller” are free books. Which tells me that Apple Books’ search algorithm probably gives somewhat similar weight to a free download as a sale.


This is in stark contrast to Amazon, which has a search algorithm that privileges higher-priced sales, and weights free downloads at 1/100th of a sale (more or less). Search for “thriller” on the Kindle Store, and I guarantee that none of the books you’ll find on the first few pages will be free. 


That’s it for my analysis of the Apple Books store! You’ll notice that I haven’t made specific recommendations. I’m not telling you, for example, to stuff your title and book description with keywords (that’s bad practice and won’t be allowed by Apple Books). My aim is just to show you how readers (probably) find books on the store — now it’s up to you to leverage that knowledge to increase your books’ discoverability!


Happy writing, and happy marketing,

Ricardo