Releasing a new book is a cause for celebration! It is like welcoming your new baby into the world. Aside from executing your marketing plan, here are four critical steps every author should take on Amazon as soon as the book is released.
1. Submit your book to the Search Inside the Book program. This allows potential buyers to preview contents before making a decision to purchase your book and also improves your book’s searchability on Amazon.
2. Set up your Amazon Author Central account and claim your book. This is a free service that allows you to add and update content to your book’s page on Amazon, get exposure as an author by feeding in your blog and sharing contact information, and even monitor sales information.
3. Add tags to your book’s page. Tags can be found about mid-way down the page and are essentially keywords that users would use to find your book. This can improve search results on Amazon as well.
4. Solicit book reviews. Like it or not, reviews help sell books on Amazon. Ideally you want reviews from real readers–not your great aunt or you mother! The best way to generate reviews is to give away some free copies of your book to colleagues and peers and ask that in exchange, if they like the book, they write a review for you. I’ve also held “Free Book Friday” campaigns via social media where I’ve given away books for the same purpose.
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These are all great tips for new authors. If you want to get to Best-Seller status then this is the way to go!
each stage of my digital-books-age curve since late last year has sent me into an intensive learning and doing of some (other) needed thing to do
coming up hard over the curve in the hill, is asking for reviews
i’ve read many opinions of how to go about this, and your own is like the lid coming off the old creaky box (my mind
) and maybe finally getting me to concentrate on this aspect
maybe you could do an extended article on just that
enjoyed this, thanks much, sincerely,
adan
That’s a great suggestion for a future blog post, Adan. Stay tuned for that one!
I asked my wife to be my business manager and she is the one doing almost everything with Amazon. Reading what helps to promote a book are the things she has done. It’s good to know what we’re doing is the right way to go. The way we work gives me the time to write. On my website there is a place for comments about the book. The feedback has been outstanding and all coming from people I’ve never met but I certainly would like to meet. Your article is certain to help new writers.
Your Pal, Patrick Jones “The Wolf’s Moon”
Great article, I notice alot of indy books on Amazon are not tagged. It’s easy and I noticed a spike in sales when I added “tags” to my titles. Another suggestion for non-fiction writers is to publish press releases/content articles on sites like ezine that allow an author bio with a link back to your book.
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I suggest doing video reviews of related books. They stand out more than normal reviews and you are able to add a link to your book in the attribution text.