Promoting your book is a bit like bringing your baby home from the hospital: After the joy of bringing it into the world, you want to have all the tools you need to give it the best advantage possible to succeed!
A large part of your book’s success comes from how it’s promoted, and it’s well-established that Amazon is an important tool when publishing and promoting your book. Once your book has been released, here are the first four tasks you should accomplish to make sure your book’s visibility is optimized on Amazon.
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. Update your book in Author Central. Make sure your jacket copy is included, add editorial reviews if available, update your author bio. Fill out as much detail as possible!
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.
Once you’ve completed these important actions, step back for a moment and take in the enormity of the success you’ve already achieved by publishing your book. Congratulations!
If you like this blog post, you’ll love our All About Amazon Course! Learn more about our courses for authors here.
These tips are really helpful – thank you!
Regarding adding tags, do you by chance have a link to a more detailed explanation of how to do it?
Laurie
Oh, you know what? I think I misunderstood your point about the tags — you meant on the book’s page on Amazon, right? I didn’t get that at first. (So ignore my earlier comment.)
My question is on “tags.” I looked my book up on Amazon.com “Faith Steps for Military Families” and I didn’t see any tags. Do I create them or does Amazon do this automatically? If I have to create the tags, how is it done?
Regards,
Lisa N. Phillips
Hi Lisa, Unfortunately, tags were phased out of Amazon awhile ago. This post was actually written back when tags were still an option and it should have been updated to reflect that! I just removed that reference and apologize for the confusion!