A guided audit of the most important keywords in your entire ecosystem. Bring your book, bring the Beckham example, and bring a willingness to be honest with yourself about what you’ve been putting in your bio.
Let’s do something uncomfortable together.
Open a tab with your author bio. Or your book page. Or the last caption you posted to social media.
Read it as if you’re a romance reader who’s never heard of you. A reader who arrived from a hashtag or a share, who knows nothing about your books, who’s running on a craving she can’t quite name but would absolutely recognize if she found it.
Ask yourself one question: does this tell me how I will feel?
Not what the book is. Not what happens. Not what trope it contains. HOW. YOU. WILL. FEEL.
If the honest answer is no — or maybe, or sort of — then your emotional keywords are broken. Not in a catastrophic way. In the extremely common, completely fixable way that almost every romance author’s marketing is broken, because nobody taught them this part.
That is what this audit is for.
What Emotional Keywords Actually Are
In the 10-Level Keyword System, emotional keywords are Level 7 of 10. These is where the structural description of your book — genre, trope, word count, all the shelf-filing information — stops mattering, and the emotional experience begins.
Level 7 keywords are the words a reader types when she’s leading with feeling rather than category. They are the search strings that exist because readers don’t think in marketing terms. They think in cravings.
She doesn’t type: “contemporary western romance dual POV first love”
She types: “romance that makes you believe it’s not too late” or “healing romance for women who gave everything” or “slow burn cowboy romance that earns it” or “books that make you ugly cry”
She types the feeling. She types what she needs from the next thing she reads. And if your content doesn’t contain that language — or language that signals that feeling without using those exact words — she scrolls past you on her way to the author who does.
Level 7 is where the Language Gap either closes or stays open. It’s the most important layer in your keyword system and the most commonly missing one.
The Audit: Five Questions
This isn’t a theoretical exercise. Work through each question with your actual book in front of you. The Beckham example shows you what complete looks like. Your answers live inside the book you already wrote.
Question 1: What’s your reader feeling when she searches for this book?
Not when she buys it. When she searches for it.
She hasn’t found your book yet. She’s somewhere — probably her couch, probably late at night — and something inside her is running. A craving. A mood. An emotional state that is driving her toward a specific kind of reading experience.
What’s that state?
To answer this, you need to know which emotional drivers your book activates. Write them down.
The Beckham example activates: hope and safety, belonging, transformation, tension and thrill, and comfort.
That’s five drivers. Each one produces different search behavior, different language, different emotional craving.
A reader chasing hope and safety is searching differently than a reader chasing tension and thrill — even if both of them would love the same book. Your Level 7 keywords need to reach both of them.
The Beckham Level 7 keywords built from this question: romance about starting over, healing romance for women who gave everything, it’s never too late romance, slow burn that earns the payoff, romance that makes you feel held, quiet cowboy romance with emotional depth, romance that wrecks you slowly
Write five to ten Level 7 keywords for your book from this question alone. Do not filter for searchability yet. Write the feeling first. Make it real, then make it findable.
Question 2: What does your reader say to her friend when she recommends your book?
This is the most useful exercise in the entire audit, and the one most authors skip.
She has finished your book. She loved it. She’s texting a friend — not a marketing professional, not another author, a friend who also reads romance — and she’s trying to get her to read it.
What does she say?
She doesn’t say: “it’s a contemporary western romance with a grumpy sunshine dynamic.”
She says: “okay I need you to read this, the hero’s a cowboy who’s basically decided he doesn’t deserve love and the heroine’s this woman who’s trying to figure out who she is outside of a relationship that slowly erased her, and it’s SO SLOW and SO WORTH IT and I cried at the end in the best way.”
That recommendation is full of Level 7 keywords in their natural form. Extract them.
From the Beckham recommendation: hero who doesn’t believe he deserves love, heroine rediscovering herself, slow burn worth the wait, emotional payoff romance, romance you cry at in the best way
Now read your own book page or social caption. Does it sound like that recommendation? Or does it sound like a back cover blurb — accurate, competent, and completely stripped of the feeling that makes the book worth recommending?
If it sounds like the blurb: you have structural keywords. You’re missing Level 7.
Question 3: What’s the one emotional promise of your book — and is it anywhere in your marketing?
This is the hardest question in the audit, and the one that reveals the most.
Every romance has a surface promise (the genre and trope expectation) and a deep promise (the specific emotional truth only this version of this story delivers). Level 7 lives in the deep promise.
The surface promise of Fighting for Us is: slow burn western romance with tender character dynamics and an earned HEA.
The deep promise is: it’s never too late to be chosen. It’s never too late to choose. That deep promise speaks to a specific reader — a reader who’s 38 or 42 or 55 and has quietly wondered if she missed her window.
She’s not searching for a western romance, specifically. She’s searching for the feeling that deep promise delivers.
She types: “romance for women who feel too late” “romance about second chances at life, not just love” “books that give you permission to want something again”
Go find your deep promise. Write it as plainly as you can — one sentence, not a logline, just the truth.
Then ask: is this anywhere on my website, in my bio, in my social content, in my book pages?
If the answer is no, you have found the most important missing Level 7 keyword you have.
Question 4: What’s the worst Level 7 keyword you are currently using — and why doesn’t it work?
This question is going to sting a little. That’s fine. It’s the most useful sting you’ll experience today.
Look at everything you currently use to describe your book emotionally — not the genre tags, not the tropes, but the feeling language. The adjectives in your bio. The phrases in your captions. The words in your book page description that are meant to signal emotional experience.
Common broken emotional keywords that appear everywhere and work almost nowhere:
- Heartwarming.
This word has been used so many times it has stopped meaning anything. A reader searching for a specific emotional experience does not type “heartwarming.” She types what heartwarming means to her — cozy, comfort read, romance that feels like a warm hug, books for when you need to feel okay again. - Steamy.
Too vague to be useful without context. Is it Band 5 steamy or Band 8 steamy? The reader who holds a Band 4 boundary and the reader who wants explicit content are both looking for “steamy” and they’re not looking for the same thing. - Emotional.
Every romance is emotional. This word tells the reader nothing about which emotion or what kind of emotional experience. It’s the generic option chosen when the specific language hasn’t been found yet. - Epic love story.
This is marketing language that announces rather than describes. It doesn’t put the reader inside any feeling.
Identify the word or phrase in your current marketing that’s doing the least specific emotional work. Write what it’s actually trying to say — in the more specific, more honest, more feeling-forward language it should have been in the first place.
Question 5: Read your bio as your NTM reader. What’s she feeling after the last word?
Your bio is often the last thing an author updates and the last place emotional language appears.
It defaults to structure: genre, number of books, where you live, what you love.
Here’s what a structural bio sounds like: “Sarah writes small-town western romance. She’s the author of the Harlow Creek series and lives in Montana with her dogs. She loves coffee and slow burns.”
Accurate. Completely devoid of emotional invitation.
Here’s what a Level 7 bio sounds like: “I write romance for the reader who’s been responsible for everything and everyone for so long she’s almost forgotten what it feels like to want something just for herself. My books are slow, tender, and earned — set in a small Montana town where everyone knows your history and love still finds a way through it. Start with Fighting for Us if you’re ready for a hero who has to learn he’s worth choosing.”
Same author. Same books.
One of these creates recognition. One creates orientation.
The first says what the author does. The second says who the books are for — from inside that reader’s experience.
Read your bio. Which version does it sound like?
What to Do With Your Answers
You now have the raw material for your Level 7 keyword list. The feelings, the recommendation language, the deep promise, the specific emotional search strings your reader is already typing.
The next step is deployment. Level 7 keywords belong in: The first sentence of every piece of content you create — before the structural information, before the trope label, before anything else. The first sentence earns the reader’s attention or loses it.
- Your bio. Not buried in the third sentence. In the first or second.
- Your book page emotional hooks. The line before the blurb that makes a reader decide whether to read the blurb at all.
- Your Pinterest pin descriptions. Level 7 is the language that makes a pin findable when someone searches by feeling rather than genre.
- Your email subject lines. The subject line that opens with an emotional state outperforms the one that announces a new release.
Everywhere your NTM reader might land before she knows she loves your books.
The full keyword system that puts these Level 7 keywords into their complete architecture — across all ten levels, across all three pillars, deployed across your entire ecosystem — is in the Keyword System Master Guide.
The free BFF Keyword Quick Start Guide walks you through the first five levels and gets you started before you’re ready for the full system.
But start here. The audit is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it’ll show you exactly where the Language Gap lives in your specific ecosystem.
Your Level 7 keywords are in your books. They always have been. You just needed to know where to look.