Amazon.com may be the most powerful selling channel on the planet for self published authors. With the tag line "Earth's Biggest Selection," the site has become a platform for authors to connect directly with readers. Many of Amazon.com's features, which are designed to help readers find what they are looking for, can be utilized to drive readers to your book's detail page and result in a sale for you. Below are some of the features you can use to market and gain greater visibility for your book on Amazon.com. Get online and explore!
Customer Reviews
Located just below the editorial reviews on your book's detail page, customer reviews are almost always impartial opinions of other consumers who purchased your book and want to tell other shoppers what they thought. How can this help you sell more books? Encourage anyone who tells you how much he/she enjoyed your book to write a review on Amazon.com. As your positive reviews grow, so may your sales.
Search Inside the Book
With Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature, customers no longer have to visit their local bookstore to see the actual interior pages of a book.
How does it work? When customers search for books, the actual text of your book is searched to display the most relevant results, rather than simply the author, title and keywords. Customers can also browse sample pages and perform additional searches inside the book to confirm your book is exactly what they are looking for.
AmazonConnect
Communicate directly with your readers and potential readers through AmazonConnect: post messages that will appear on your readers' Amazon.com home pages and your book's detail page, provide stimulating content for potential buyers of your book, and build a reader community by establishing loyalty and direct one-on-one relationships with your readers.
Before you get started, you might want to check out the AmazonConnect Author Directory to browse through the list of registered authors.
Amazon Shorts
Receive additional ongoing income streams and grow your online audience by publishing short fiction and non-fiction through Amazon Shorts. Offering the widest range of digital short-form content, Shorts will help you reach new audiences,drive sales and create robust marketing opportunity and visibility on Amazon.com. As a self-published author, you can leverage your rights ownership and provide readers with a risk-free way of sampling your work and promoting your full length book titles. Visit www.amazon.com/shorts and learn more about the program.
Buy X, Get Y Advertising Program
Buy X, Get Y is a paid promotion that allows you to increase the visibility of your book by pairing it with a top-selling book (or other product) to offer shoppers added value for purchasing both items simultaneously. Promotions are featured in the "Best Value" section of each product's detail page for one month. The products, when purchased together, are offered at a 5% discount.
Tags
What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label strongly related to a product. Tags can help customers on the Amazon site find products they otherwise may not come across. Anyone can add a tag to a product on the Amazon site and assuming that person has purchased at least one product from Amazon in the past, that tag will be visible to other customers.
How can this be beneficial to you, the author of a published book available for sale on Amazon? From your book’s detail page, you can add tags that are relevant to your book’s topic; once you add these tags, your product will come up when customers on the Amazon site click on that tag to see all associated products. The image below shows the tags currently associated with BookSurge author Richard Ridley’s book, The Takers. In order to add a tag, you simply type it into the box, “Your Tags” and click the “Add” button. Your title will automatically be associated with that tag.
Notice that the tags associated with The Takers are words such as “horror book” and “young adult,” which relate to the book’s genre and target audience.
You’ll also notice from the image above that it is possible to suggest tags for Amazon search; this allows you to specify the search for which you think the item should appear, along with your explanation of why it is relevant. To submit tag suggestions for your book(s) to Amazon search, you’ll want to go to your book’s detail page and look for a section called "Tags customers associate with this product" (featured above). You’ll then click on the “suggest link” and you’ll be taken through the process of making a tag for Amazon search. Please refer to the Tag for Amazon Search Guidelines for more details.
Rankings
Your book's sales ranking on Amazon.com can be a great selling tool to include in promotional materials. How do the rankings work? The calculation is based on Amazon.com sales and is updated each hour to reflect recent and historical sales of every item sold on the site. As your book's popularity grows, so will its reviews and ratings which, when favorable, will add to the marketability of your book.
Listmania!
Listmania! is a tool created by Amazon.com to help shoppers help one another find useful products, (or in our case, readers find books they may not have otherwise come across). The lists appear on the right side of the page when a keyword search is conducted and at the bottom of a product's detail page. The lists appear when they pertain to the keyword that was searched or contain the product currently in view.
Create a Listmania! list (and ask your friends, family and fans to also) featuring your book and other similar books and products - a great way to lead readers straight to your book! Visit Amazon.com to learn more about creating Listmania! lists.
So You'd Like to ... Guides
So You'd Like to ... Guides are similar to Listmania! lists. They are created by Amazon.com users to help other Amazon.com users find products they may not have otherwise come across. Just like Listmania!, you (and your friends, fans and family) may want to create a So You'd Like to... guide that features your book. It will increase the likelihood that people will come across your book while browsing on Amazon.com.
via Booksurge.com
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