Pr
omoting 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. Add tags to your book’s page. Tags can be found about midway 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.
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!
I can’t find the tags anymore. Do you still see them when you look at your book page?
No, the tags are gone! Sorry–we reprinted this post from over a year ago and it needs to be updated!
Also, I’ve found that Amazon automatically enters your book into the Search Inside the Book program. I published a book on Amazon four days ago and within two days it had the Look Inside feature displayed. I have also noticed that when you have the print version selected, it shows quite a bit more than than the Kindle version.
I haven’t heard of being automatically added to the Search Inside program and will have to investigate that!
Chris is right. Now you have to contact the customer care if you Don’t want the ‘look inside’ feature for your book.
Wow, good to know… Thanks!!
I thought the “tags” were discontinued?
Yes, they were! You are right, Ken. This post needs to be updated—Thanks!