by Penny C. Sansevieri
When we look at how to market a book, we know this for sure: Amazon is a great place to list your book, but it requires work on at least two fronts—focusing your effort to stand out on the site itself amidst all the other noise, and having solid strategies to keep readers longer on your Amazon book page, which has become decidedly more cluttered.
At the same time, Amazon offers a number of free ways to drive more attention to your book (think keywords) and to keep readers interacting with you (think Amazon Author Central). Let’s explore some of these offerings, plus a paid option, that you can use to market a book and gain more exposure on the uber-busy Amazon site.
Find the Right Keyword Strings for Your Book
Although the algorithms change constantly on Amazon, one thing remains constant: you need to have a great set of keyword strings. Why strings and not a single keyword? Because we know that a consumer who types the term “romance” into Amazon is not a serious shopper. This method of using strings vs. single keywords is based on a test Google ran a few years ago. They discovered the more keywords a consumer pops into their search bar, the closer they are to buying. If you type car vs. hybrid Toyota 2021, you’re probably ready to buy a new car. That’s why typing more keywords into a Google search will prompt all sorts of ads on the sidebars of other sites like Facebook and even Skype.
Remember that what you’re offering them (your book!) is a solution to some problem they’re having, even if it’s entertainment. Understanding what solution you’re offering will help you formalize your keywords strings.
Make Sure You’re Sitting in the Right Category/Genre
As crazy as it sounds, this is a big one. As authors, we often aren’t great at knowing which category we should be in, which is why it’s often good to get an outside perspective. Not sure where you belong when it comes to category/genre? Take a look at other similar books and see where your book fits in. It’s one thing to market a book; it’s quite another to market it to the right audience.
Add a Fun Author Interview to Your Book Page
This is a cool idea—a fun get-to-know-you interview with you, the fabulous author. Maybe use a format like 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me. Play with it—have fun! Let your readers get to know you. Be human. Consumers really gravitate toward people who show their humanity. Yes, you want to market a book, you want to market YOUR book, but you also want to appeal to your consumer in a very real way. The more you can humanize your book page, the more you’ll keep your potential reader on the page. You have the Amazon real estate, so why not use it?
Enhance Your Book Page with Author Central
Aside from the author interview, there’s a lot of other stuff you can do with your Amazon book page via the back end of Author Central, which offers some great tools to market a book. Regardless of how you’re published, you can access this back end and add things like the author interview I mentioned earlier and so much more. If you’re a nonfiction author, why not add your table of contents to the book page? If you’ve written fiction, maybe a book excerpt? You can also use Author Central to add reviews that weren’t put up on your book page or re-add ones that were pulled from your awesome list.
Amazon Video Shorts
I love this so much and yet, sadly, so few authors use this tool. Most, I think, assume this is for the reader to post reviews, and it is, but you can use it, too. Just record a video, maybe telling readers how much you appreciate them spending time with you, or providing a tip from your book, or including a snippet of your book trailer. The sky is the limit, really. Once your video is approved, you’ll get access to the back end of all the videos you’ve uploaded and can delete any you no longer wish to use, like book updates, etc., that may have become outdated.
Take Advantage of the Pre-Order
The Amazon Pre-Order function is an awesome tool to market a book. But here’s the deal-breaker: don’t promote it too early. You might be thinking, “Well, if it’s up for pre-order I can promote it, right?? Sure, you can, but here’s the thing: unless you have a massive platform like Harry Potter, most consumers don’t buy books months out from release; pushing a book even 30 days prior to launch can be iffy.
You need to weigh this against your mailing list and the open/response rate of your followers. If you aren’t sure what the response rate would be, your platform isn’t big enough to support a long pre-order. If you’re a new author, stick to my rule of thumb: promote your book heavily within a two-week window. So, two weeks prior to launch you go full-on, pushing to your social media and mailing lists and using Amazon ads to aid your push as well. This is also a good time to coordinate with you launch partners, the folks who have agreed to help you push your book to their audiences.
Explore Amazon Advertising
If used correctly, AMS ads are a great way to market a book, but you should use them as a booster and not as a stand-alone book-marketing piece. What do I mean by using a booster? Well, use it to enhance anything you’re already doing; for example, a new book launch or a short-term pricing discount. Lots of folks like to run ads continuously, and while that’s not a bad approach, you’ll have to watch your dashboard carefully so you don’t spend a lot of money for very little return.
The other piece of Amazon Ads is that you want a lot of keywords (300-400 to start), and you want to make sure that the keywords match what’s on your book page. So if you have used “Dracula thriller” as one of your keywords, make sure that term is reflected somewhere on the book page. For most keywords—for example, suspense thriller or contemporary romance—if your book cover, title, and optional subtitle make it clear that your book fits that genre, you don’t necessarily need to include these keywords in your book description. But when you use specialized terms—holiday romance, for example—it should absolutely be in your book description.
I used “sell more books on Amazon” as one of the keyword strings for my 5-Minute Book Marketing for Authors book and then made sure it was one of the bulleted benefits in my book description. Otherwise, I would be paying for someone to click the ad, go to my page, and then be disappointed when the benefits of my book didn’t match what they searched for.
Marketing a book is tough, but with a little TLC and some elbow grease, you can get Amazon to do some of that work for you; the time you put in will ultimately add to your exposure and thus benefit your books sales.
You got this! Happy marketing!
Penny Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (AME) and an adjunct professor at NYU, is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns.
