Since Wattpad has changed, selecting appropriate tags for your book have become more important than ever. However, tags don't just exist for Wattpad. They exist everywhere, and whether you're building a website, launching a blog, or releasing a book... getting your tags right can be the difference between popular content and nothing.

However, despite the relative importance the internet seems to put on tags, whenever you look up "how" to select tags that are relevant and useful, the answer seems to be to just do it. The internet treats selecting tags like a given innate talent of every internet content creator. I've grown to the point where unless I'm absolutely forced to, I tend to avoid tags in my books. I KNOW this causes me to lose readers. I KNOW I could be doing better. Yet, despite that, tags are just way too much of a pain in the ass, and I don't want to.

So, to encourage myself to start caring about tags, I've decided to create a little guide. I'll be using the same principles often used when trying to pick meta tags (those are tags websites use for google search) and youtube tags. So, if you're having problems coming up with tags, here is what you need to do!

The first batch of tags you select should come from your description of your book. Therefore, having a well-written blurb is important. Before you do anything like picking tags, you need to be able to explain what your novel is about. This can be harder said than done. I have other chapters in this book explaining how to do so. In them, I recommend narrowing your story down. At the end of the day, you should be able to describe your entire book in a single sentence.

That sentence is the theme/goal/intent of your book, and it's very important both for writing the book and for writing a decent blurb for the book. You'll find it's also very important for the Tags you want to write. If you can't even explain what your book is about, how can you expect people interested in what your book is about to find it?

Once you have a blurb, refine it to the handful of words that have the greatest meaning overall to your book. These should include the genre and the keywords to the description of your book. You should pick keywords in a branching pattern, picking the highest order words, and then slowly breaking down your work into my specificity.

What do I mean? Well, remember my chapter on describing your book? I told you not just to describe your chapter based on genre, but to be more and more specific. Let's pick an example you're probably familiar with, Harry Potter. How would you define Harry Potter? You'd first think perhaps of the genre. Fantasy... Young Adult... Maybe you can add in Urban or Contemporary if you wanted. Then, you start selecting tags that add more specificity to it. Magic. Highschool. Then you break down into the more specific tags. Male protagonist. Hero. Ghosts.

Do you notice what words I'm not picking? Muggle. Voldemort. Hufflepuff. Now, if you were trying to sell a copy of Harry Potter, these identifiable words would do you well. However, when you're trying to get people to read your book, a book I presume to be not world popular and well known, things like made-up names, character names, locations.... These are NOT things that someone would every use to search for your book. It may be a convenience for you to write in the search engine "Muggle" to quickly find a Harry Potter book... but unless people are as familiar with your book as Harry Potter, they're never going to google the word huyman... the made-up name for the human race in your alternative timeline.

Keeping an idea on the order of your tags is important, that's why your next step is to focus on making sure you know which tags belong in which categories.

Broad-Spectrum Tags are genre and all-encompassing tags. They are the tags that describe your book in general. A Supernatural Romance for Teens. Supernatural, Romance and Teen would all be considered broad-spectrum tags. They catch your book in its entirety, but ultimately don't inform about the specifics of your book in the slightest. There is any number of supernatural teen romances, from my very own "Bad Boys of Fairmont High" sold on Amazon (formerly Hawtness), to Twilight, to the shape of water. These spectrums are very useful in catching a lot of readers, and having a good 4-5 of them will help narrow down what people are looking for while casting a wide web.

However, broad-spectrum tags aren't the kinds of tags that bring in the fans. For that purpose, you'll be looking at Refining Tags. A refining tag takes the broad tag and adds a bit more specificity. It starts talking about the individual interests in the story that people might be interested in. "Bad Boys of Fairmont High" isn't just a supernatural teen romance. It's a novel with a female protagonist. It's a girl in high school. It's a novel with demons, angels, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and zombies. Any of these tags would help refine a novel. You need to focus on the terms that would differentiate your novel from the large number of other novels in your genre and type.

There are many supernatural romance novels, but only so many of them involve a sasquatch. Even less involve the protagonist in college. Even less involve the protagonist as a female gorilla with halitosis. So, when you write your Magnum Opus, "The Big Foot and I", make sure to pick the tags that not only throw a wide net but allow the fish that are really into hairy romance to be able to find your net as well.

That's why things that start following into the specific terms start to stray from your goal. Ideally, most of your tags should be from the first two categories. I'd go so far as to say about 5 terms should be broad-spectrum, with another 15 as refining terms. However, just because specific terms tend to only be relevant in certain unique circumstances, it doesn't always hurt to pick a few of those terms as well.

Specific terms are like Hogwarts and Slytherin in Harry Potter. They're terms rather unique to that world. For example, some of you may remember my book Hawtness, now called "Bad Boy's of Fairmont High". I still have a tag for it for Hawtness. This isn't relevant for anyone who hasn't read Hawtness. However, for anyone who has read Hawtness, if you use Amazon's search engine and search for Hawtness, low and behold my two published books on Amazon show up.

So, while specific terms may have limited uses, if you have a few to spare, it might be a good idea to give you book a few unique identifiers that make your book stand out. Whether it be terms or definitions you invented or previous working names your work was known under, they can serve a purpose. The same can not be said for irrelevant tags. Irrelevant tags, the last group, are tags that really have nothing to do with our work. In general, there is no reason to use irrelevant tags. Some people do use them to try to trick people into reading your work. Tag your book one direction and maybe you'll get a few clicks from one direction fans who... after reading a few chapters and realizing it does not contain one direction, stay because they liked it so much.

Wattpad's new system is specifically designed to try to discourage irrelevant tags. Relevance is a measure built into the system. So, if you select tags that ultimately have nothing to do with your story, you will be penalized even more for it, making irrelevant tags even more useless in the long run. Simply put, stick to what your book is.

If you haven't noticed it by now, there seems to be almost an order when it comes to tags. I like to see this a bit like a phylogenetic tree. For those of you who don't know what that is, all animals are given scientific names. Homo sapiens, for example, is the name of human beings. However, that's just part of our name, specifically the last two categories of genus and species. If you wanted our full name, we are Animalia Chordata Mammalia Primates Hominidae Homo sapiens sapiens.

Each level from Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species narrows down based on certain traits until you end up with a human. Kingdoms are broad, I mean... imagine how many species belong to Animalia (animals). You can get or more specific, such as the Mammalia. Now we're only talking about mammals, which discludes the likes of fish and reptiles and birds and amphibians.

Why am I describing this in a conversation about tags? It's because selecting tags uses the same kind of concept. The highest order of tags would be your genre selections. Each subsequent tag should aim to be a mixture of broad tags, covering a broad range of stories to cast out your largest web, and then more specific terms, refining the search towards books like yours.

I've said before, but when you want to write a book, it's important to reach the demographic you care to reach. You want them to have appropriate expectations. Don't expect a reader who was planning on reading a comedy receiving a bleak drama to be entertained or amused by your story. At best, they'll just stop reading it. At worst, they might even criticize or come to dislike it. So, always set up your environment properly, by selecting the tags that reflect your story the best.

I highly recommend that you start from the top too. I mentioned previously that you start with a genre, and then pick your 4-5 broad-spectrum tags. Moving off of that, future tags should, while narrowing down the search, also continue to cast a wide net. As mentioned very few tags should be too specific. Make sure to pick higher order tags which can hit more search engines. Don't fall back on tags that are too specific or too abstract, or they won't be able to be found.

If you face a creative bad end when trying to come up with words, there are natural tools to help you get around this. The first tool, and the most obvious is the thesaurus. I'm not sure there is too much to say on this subject. Come up with the highest order words you can, and then use a thesaurus to find words "like" the word you had. In your book, "Big Foot and I", A Big Foot is also a sasquatch and I bet you could get away with his close friend the Yeti and maybe even the Abominable Snowman.

However, the thesaurus isn't the only tool to use. There are various tag generators you can depend on as well. Insert a word, and it'll pump out another 50 similar words. The hardest part for you is going to be picking the ones that are worth keeping while tossing away the others. Remember, in Wattpad, you only have access to 25 tags. You can see that as 25 chances to get your book a hit on the search engine. If you want a successful book, you need to make those chances count.

Only the best tags should be selected. So even though a generator CAN produce 50 tags quickly, just using those first 25 tags and then moving on with your life would be selling your story short. Tags are important, that's why...

Eventually, once selecting tags, the system will catch up and give you a rating. It might take a day or two, so don't get too caught up on protecting your tags in a single sitting. You might think up 50 tags, then use the 25 best picks. After that, you can wait for the system to grade you. If your book gets any attention, you'll eventually see the most impressive rankings listed under your book, along with a "see all rankings" option.

Selecting "see all rankings" will show you all 25 tags, and will show which tags work and which tags do not. The top tag is the one doing the best to help your book out. The bottom tag is theoretically the worst tag in the bunch. This system is an automatic calculation, so while it is informative, it's probably a good idea to use your own brain power a bit too here.

For example, you might want to remove stories that are "out of" a very small number. When you're #5 out of 500... that's a bit more impressive than when you're #2 out of 8. Even if it shows up rather high on your list, if there are only 3 other stories on Wattpad using this tag, either you're surfing the wave of a new fad, or more likely, the tag you picked is just too infrequent.

Now, if you feel strongly this is a tag that people will absolutely type into the search, then, by all means, use it. It'll be like winning the jackpot because no one else on the sight releases this frequently typed search term is so popular. However, it's also as likely to be a reality as winning the jackpot, so always keep that in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind is how low you are on the list. Even if your #1000 out of 20,000, and the system declares that to be super impressive, do you think anyone is ever going to find your book? What are the chances they skim through 1000 books until they find yours? Therefore, don't blindly follow the story that the Wattpad system is selling. It may not be as simple as their algorithm.

On the other hand, those least impressive tags, the ones where you're virtually the last place if not last place... maybe you should get rid of those. To be honest, you can work out a decent list of tags and just call it a day, or you can continue to tinker with it, constantly trying to see if you can do better. Leave those last 2-3 tags to be swapped out every week and constantly try to find a word to outdo the words you're currently using. With constant optimization, who knows, a book that once got no attention might finally discover its niche and become much more popular for it.

Good Luck, and Happy Writing!