Found First. Then Bought.

How TEACH Services prepares your book to appear in search results, and then to be chosen.

Every marketing decision we make for your book is governed by two priorities, in this order:

Priority 1. Write the title, subtitle, bio, back cover, and retail description so the book appears in search results.

Priority 2. Write the title, subtitle, bio, back cover, and retail description so the browser who finds the book buys it.

The first always takes precedence. A description that would win a reader at the moment of decision is worth nothing if that reader never sees it because the book never appears in search results. The two priorities sometimes compete over wording, and we feel that tension on every title. But the contest to get a book in front of a reader is too fierce to give first place to language that sounds a little better and buries the book beneath thousands of competing titles in its category.

Where readers search now

Picture your book on a brick-and-mortar bookshelf. That’s not real. It’s a total fantasy. Readers find books online. They search Amazon. They search Google and Bing. And a growing number ask an AI assistant, “What is a good book about...?” Nearly two-thirds of U.S. shoppers have now used AI to research a purchase, up from about half a year earlier, and half of them completed their most recent AI-researched purchase on Amazon.¹ A book prepared the old way, with a graceful title and a hopeful description, never appears in a subject search. That is why so many self-published authors call us after their book has sold all of five copies in its first year. They didn’t think about how to compete online. What are you gonna do?

Amazon remains the single largest source of retail book sales in the world, so most book searches happen on Amazon’s search engine, either directly or indirectly, because Google, Bing, and the AI assistants draw much of their book data from Amazon and send readers there to buy. Each of these search environments has its own habits. They share some features, yet when we test a phrase across all of them, we routinely find differences in what each one favors. So we test on all of them, to learn which phrases readers are actually searching and which are most likely to make your book appear in each place.

Research before writing

Our process is proprietary, built over the past two years through long hours of research, testing, and programming, and judged by one measure: actual retail sales. Its most important feature is its order. We do the research first, on Amazon, Google, Bing, and the AI platforms, before a word of marketing copy is written. Only then do we write the subtitle options, the back cover, the bio, and the retail description, so that every one of them carries the phrases real readers use. Because Google and the AI assistants look especially for the problems a book solves when they recommend it, every title also gets a “Problems this book solves” section, written from the actual searches readers have typed on those platforms.

One book, by the numbers

One of our authors recently brought us a book for a small niche market: Beyond Money, on Christian stewardship. His working subtitle was Whole Life Stewardship. It described the book’s content accurately and gracefully, and it finished the sentence “This book is about...” But when we tested it, we could not confirm anywhere, on Amazon, on Google, on Bing, or with the AI assistants, that readers were searching for that phrase.

That matters. A book’s title and subtitle are what most search algorithms try to match first. If competing authors reaching for your readers use the phrases those readers actually type, and your subtitle is written in lovely prose no one searches for, your book gets buried beneath theirs. Not because your competitor’s book is better than yours, but because your competitor’s book uses a title that has been S-E-O’d—search engine optimized.

Our research found four phrases in the book’s subject that real readers search. For each, we measured how many books compete for it, how hard the first page of results is to reach, how many readers search it each month, and whether those searchers buy.

“How to put God first.” 190 competing titles on Amazon, which is a small shelf; 1,000 or 10,000 competing titles is common. About 266 Amazon searches a month, with the books on the first page of results earning about $600 a month between them. Small shelf, real traffic, buyers who spend. Would we prefer a phrase that gets 1,000 or 10,000 hits a month? Yes, but then you’ll also have 1,000 or 10,000 titles using that phrase, and only about 75 books fit on the first three pages of search results, where 90% of books are bought. So unless you have reason to believe your book will beat the other 10,000 titles using that phrase, you better think twice, because using a popular phrase can bury a book rather than make it rise to the top.

“Christian stewardship.” A good description of the book’s core subject. Too crowded to own outright at 10,000 competing titles, but the books on page one are weak, and the phrase matters for priority two, turning browsers into buyers, so we included it. Books using this phrase earn about $1,900 a month, the largest buying audience of the four.

“Time, talent, treasure.” Only 27 competing titles and a competitive score of 1, so a new book reaches page one immediately. Amazon suggests the phrase in third position when a shopper starts typing it. Fewer than 100 shoppers a month search it on Amazon, and they spend only about $24 a month between them, which tells us they are mostly browsing. We kept it anyway, because its job in the subtitle is priority two: it names the book’s subject in an appealing way that is also an exact match for a phrase being searched.

“Tithes and offerings.” 867 competing titles and a competitive score of 13, a shelf a new book can realistically climb. Fewer than 100 shoppers a month type it on Amazon, but the books on page one earn about $484 a month, so the people who search it buy. Amazon offers it as the first suggestion when a shopper begins typing. And it is the only phrase in the book’s subject with strong demand beyond Amazon: about 1,400 Google searches a month and about 700 U.S. searches on Bing over three months, where the other three phrases barely register. It is the phrase that brings readers to the book from the open web and the AI assistants, not just from Amazon.

We offered the author two subtitles built from those phrases and showed him the trade-off. The shorter, How to Put God First Through Christian Stewardship of Time, Talent, and Treasure, reads as one clean sentence with strong search results. The longer, How to Put God First Through Christian Stewardship of Time, Talent, Treasure, Tithes and Offerings, carries every phrase we found demand for, including the one that brings readers in from the open web, at the cost of two extra words. He chose with the data in front of him. Every word in his subtitle now earns its place.

Beyond the title

Amazon also lets us list seven keyword phrases that make your book appear when a shopper types them. These are easily changed, so when a news story or a TikTok or YouTube trend changes what people search, your book’s search results can adapt fast.

The same is true of your book’s page on teachservices.com. Every TEACH book gets a dedicated page, built so that it tells search engines and AI assistants exactly what they look for on a publisher’s page. What you don’t see are the data fields that Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, and Amazon read: title, subtitle, author, ISBNs, publisher, subjects, and the questions the book answers, phrased the way readers ask them. Many small publishers skip this step; their books are either missing from their own websites or listed incompletely. When you publish with TEACH Services, your book is optimized to compete.

The work continues after launch

Every 30 days for the first three months after your book is published, we test results. We purchase Amazon ads, which also buys exact data on which search phrases are working and which are not, and we adjust the listing. Your book’s marketing learns from results. When world events, a news story, or a TikTok or YouTube trend related to your book changes what people search for, your book’s marketing changes too.

What we can and cannot promise

No one can guarantee sales. Too many factors go into one reader’s decision: the cover, the price, the reviews, the subject, the season. What we can say with certainty is this: a book that is not optimized for today’s fast-changing search environments will not sell, because a book that cannot be found cannot be bought. Our first job is to make sure yours is found. Our second is to make sure that, once found, it is chosen.

Mike Brazington, Publisher