Getting the Best Out of Amazon Book Promotion

Let’s face it. Book promotion has become a lot simpler since Amazon entered the landscape. No matter if it’s ebooks or normal paperbacks, Amazon is taking the sole reign to become the number one platform to find books.

If you are an author, then you most possibly will have your book listed on Amazon. As the popularity of Amazon books increases, there is also a huge competition among the authors. Increasing your book sales through intelligent Amazon book promotion techniques and landing new readers is becoming a challenging task on Amazon with new books coming up every day.

If you are a new author just starting in Amazon, then you will probably be at a loss wondering how you can get your book on the bestsellers list. Well, no worries. Amazon book promotion isn’t such a difficult job, but let me tell you this. It is quite a time-consuming one. For all those authors who think that their work is done after publishing the book, well, don’t just rest yet.

If you want to increase your book sales, then it is time to wear the hat of a marketer to become an expert at Amazon promotion services for authors.

To start with the Amazon book promotion, here are a few pointers for you.

How to Prepare Your Book for Amazon Book Promotion

Before we talk about the actual promotional strategies for promoting your book on Amazon, let’s look at a few important things to prep.

1. An Amazing Book Cover That Catches the Eye

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is a thing of the past. Inadvertently or not, people’s first impressions are formed by looking at a book’s cover.

There are thousands of books in every genre on Amazon, and if you want to interest the people in your book, then start with a great book cover. As people are scrolling through looking for the next book to read, an intriguing and attractive book cover is vital to capture the person’s attention.

If you are good at designing, you can design the book cover by yourself. If not, you can splurge a little and hire a good designer to deliver the essence of your book on an attractive cover.

When using an image as a part of the book cover, stay away from the usual stock images you see on the internet. Try to pick an image that sets you apart from the books in your genre and provides a refreshing look.

2. Choose the Right Categories and Book Description

When you are adding your book to Amazon, you will be given the option of choosing the categories. It is vital to list your book in the two main categories where your ideal readers will be. Also, selecting the right category is very crucial if you are planning to get on the Amazon Bestsellers’ List.

Next to the categories comes the metadata. Don’t get scared by the technical name. Metadata is just the description of your book. If you are adding your book to the KDP, you can set the metadata by yourself. When writing the description, make sure to include a lot of keywords and phrases, which your readers can search, in between the book description.

Adding such phrases to the metadata will increase of probability of getting your book on the search results of people who look for books in the related genres. Here are a few examples: this book is a European historical romance book…, if you are a fan of suspense thrillers…, this book is a guide about time management for freelancers… Include such sentences in between the description to avoid stuffing and make it look natural.

3. Make Maximum Use of the Keywords

Apart from including the keywords in the description, there is a separate section to fill in a maximum of seven keywords. This is the key to increase the exposure of your book to readers who are looking for just one like yours.

If you want to go the technical way with the keywords, then you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest. Another simple technique is to type in the chosen keywords in the Amazon search bar and see the kind of results it displays. This will give you a good idea of the right Amazon keywords to include in your book.

4. Giving Importance to Reviews

We all know how much importance we give to customer feedback when we buy any product, and the same goes for book reviews. If there is no review or rating for a book, then the person would think twice about buying it.

To sell your books, it is essential to have some good ratings and reviews in place on Amazon. Here are some promotion techniques to get good reviews for your books.

• Reaching out to your followers on social media
• Sending out an email to the beta readers
• Giving out free copies of books in exchange for reviews
• Launching a limited time free deal for your book in the hopes that you can score some good reviews

There are several other ingenious ways to score great reviews, and if you can come up with something better, then go ahead!

5. Ideas to Market Your Books on Amazon

Now that you have added the right details to your Amazon book profile, next comes the actual Amazon book promotion strategies. There are several free as well as affordable paid promotion strategies with which you can make a considerable increase in your book visibility. To start with, let’s understand the different sections on Amazon where your book can be displayed.

Amazon Sections Where Your Book Can Be Listed

• Related to Items You’ve Viewed: This is the section that is displayed on all product pages. This section includes the books that were browsed by people who previously looked at this book too.
• Hot New Releases: This section consists of books that were released in the last 30 days or can be released at an upcoming date. Amazon only includes the top three books from the bestseller list of each book category for Kindle and print books.
• Recommended for You: In this section, Amazon suggests similar books based on the previous purchases and the last page book visits of the particular person.
• New and Noteworthy Kindle Books: This section features the books that perform well from the ‘Hot Releases’ section. Only books that are published within the last 90 days can be included in this section. Mostly, a book that gets an enormous amount of sales in the first month can enter this section.

You can set your goals to enter at least one of these sections to increase your book sales. Books that enter into sections and stays there for more than two days have registered astonishing book sales during the period. With these sections in mind, let’s look at some of the Amazon book promotion strategies.

Amazon Ads

If you have KDP books and paperbacks, then you can make use of the Amazon Promotion Services for authors (AMS). Amazon Ads are cost-effective as you have to pay only if someone clicks on your ad. You can customize the Amazon Ads based on the readers you are targeting by tailoring the target keywords. There are three areas where you can display the ads for your books on Amazon.

• On the search results related to the specific keywords
• On the product page of related books under the description
• On the product page near the section of ‘Also Bought.’

While you are setting up your Amazon Ads, you can choose to display to users who search for specific terms, specific books, and genres. Unlike the wide competition among the organic results, you will have an edge by directly appealing to the person who is interested in buying books similar to yours. If you want to know more about the eligibility and ways to set your Amazon Ads, visit their official help page here.

Free Amazon Promotions

Free promotions work like a charm for many authors! Sean Ogle increased the sales of his first book, Conquering Foreign Languages, by 600% times by making it available for free for a short period. Once he made his book free on Amazon, his book was downloaded more than 400 times in the first 24 hours, which was more than the total number of sales witnessed in the six weeks since listing it on the Kindle store.

This is just one such story of an author who was able to increase sales with the help of free promotions on Amazon. In the Amazon KDP program, you can schedule the promotions for five days at a time.

When people see a free book, it automatically brings the financial risk to nil and gives them the courage to try out a new book written by a new author. And, as we saw earlier, including free promotions, is also a good way to get substantial Amazon reviews, which again plays to your advantage in increasing the book’s credibility.

Open for Pre-Ordering

If you are releasing a Kindle ebook, then you can keep it open for pre-ordering. This strategy will open up your book to get good ratings and reviews even before it is released. Additionally, it gives you an open time of 90 days to work on the book promotions to get on the top sections like ‘Hot Releases’ and ‘New and Noteworthy Kindle Books.’ If the book sales increase and cross the thousand sales mark, it can easily get on the bestseller list or any of these sections.

Here is how you can take advantage of the pre-ordering period:

• Invite your beta readers to leave ratings and reviews before it is released
• Promote widely on social media asking your followers to pre-order the book
• Schedule free giveaways and any other programs to create the hype for your book release
• Send out newsletters asking your subscribers to pre-order

Limited Time Discount

Aside from the limited time free deals, you can also make your book available for a discount for a short time. This heavy reduction in the cost will motivate the readers who are on the fence and give you a good nudge to increase your sales.

When you are trying out the different Amazon book promotion techniques, make sure to keep including it at specific periods. For example, if you have added a limited discount, after around three months, you can provide a free promotion or another discount deal. It is advisable to keep them in rotations and keep them coming to have a steady flow of book sales through Amazon book promotion.

Amazon is one of the simple platforms to promote your books, and by trying out various strategies, you will soon find out what works for your books.