6 Ways to Increase Your
Amazon Sales
by Kevin Joseph

Continued from Mastering Your Amazon Bookselling Tactics.

1) Encourage friends and relatives to buy your book from Amazon.

Because establishing a track record of Amazon sales is a prerequisite to getting your book connected to other Amazon products, you should be willing to sacrifice royalties on early sales in favor of increased sales through Amazon. Many self-published authors favor selling their own inventory copies to friends and relatives, a strategy that makes perfect short-term economic sense. You can make a higher royalty percentage by selling inventory copies that you buy in bulk from the printer than you can by selling through retail channels. If your goals are longer-term, however, I submit that you're better off directing some of these early low-hanging buyers to Amazon, where they will help you amass critical views and purchases. Your progress will be evidenced by periodic spikes in your Amazon sales rank and the gradual appearance of more and more two-way links between your book and similar products.

Once these links appear on your Amazon page, you can track the popularity of your title against the other books in its niche. One way to do this is through salesrankexpress.com, a free on-line resource that allows you to pull up the current Amazon sales ranks for the ten products that are most closely paired to your title. All you have to do is enter your ISBN. Because book sales fluctuate based on seasonal and other factors, your book's relative Amazon ranking in comparison to these ten paired books is probably the best indicator of whether your marketing efforts are yielding appropriate results.

2) Use Amazon tags and lists to get your book noticed by niche shoppers.

Amazon has a number of features that help its customers catalogue products in ways that enable niche-oriented shoppers to find your book among the millions of products available on the site. These features operate much like a library's Dewey Decimal System or the genre-descriptive signs you see above the aisles in brick-and-mortar bookstores.

(Open up Kevin's page -or your own! - in a separate window to follow along.)

Midway down your Amazon page is the heading "Tags Customers Associate with This Product." This tag feature allows anyone with an Amazon account to create brief descriptive phrases to describe the genre of your book. Tags can range from broad genre categories like "thriller" to obscure micro-genre terms like the "running fiction" and "genetic thrillers" tags that appear on my product page. Because products are grouped on separate tag pages based on the number of people who have tagged them, your book will probably never be noticed among the thousands of products that have accrued high tag counts on popular categories like "thriller" or "mystery." In my experience, you're better off using this feature to tag your book and similar products with very specific descriptors, even if that means creating a new tag category that did not previously exist. Once you create a new tag category and populate it with a few titles, you will find that others start using that tag as well. In this way, you can create your own niche micro-genre on Amazon, even if it did not previously exist!

Other popular Amazon tools for cataloging products and drawing niche buyers to your book page are the "Listmania" and "So You'd Like to . . ." features. These allow you to create lists of products that are similar to yours, which appear as links on the bottoms of the Amazon pages corresponding to the products in your lists. Shortly after I published my novel, I created a list of movies, running apparel, running magazines and running equipment entitled "So You'd Like to Become a Better Runner." It has been viewed over 8,000 times, generating many sales opportunities that would not have otherwise existed.

3) Take advantage of your Amazon profile page.

Everyone with an Amazon account has a personal Amazon profile page. This page allows you to enter a bio, link to your personal web site, and other personal data, viewable by those who click on tags and lists that you create. To take full advantage of this profile page, you should consider creating other Amazon content that will induce Amazon shoppers to visit your profile page. (According to statistics Amazon maintains on profile pages, mine was viewed by 440 different customers last month.)

One great way to do attract more people to your profile page is by using the Amazon Connects feature to create your own Amazon blog. Each blog entry you write is automatically pushed out to Amazon customers who have purchased your product, making this a great way to keep your fan base apprised of notable developments in your writing life. Amazon Connects also builds a bridge between your Amazon product page and your Amazon profile page, giving customers more ways to learn about you and your book. Amazon blogs tend to rank highly on Google searches, which make them a great way to draw potential customers to your Amazon book page and your personal web site (which you can link to from your Amazon blog and profile page).

Writing Amazon reviews of books in your genre is another excellent way to connect with potential buyers. If Amazon shoppers find your reviews intriguing, they will often click on your name, directing them to your Amazon profile page where they will see information about your book. While writing reviews takes some effort, it helps keep track of books you've read and increases your visibility and standing in the Amazon community. And while I'm on the subject of reviews, your book page will look much more attractive if it includes a few informative reviews from established Amazon reviewers. There are a number of frequent Amazon reviewers (like me) who are happy to read and review self-published books in certain genres, as long as you're willing to send a review copy.

4) Publish a Kindle edition.

Amazon rolled out an e-book reader called Kindle during the 2007 holiday season, allowing publishers to sell electronic versions of their books to customers who own the Kindle device. Because Kindle versions can only be read on the particular Kindle device through which the purchase was made, the usual copyright concerns about proliferation of electronic manuscripts are well-mitigated. As a self-published author, you should have the unfettered right to make a Kindle edition of your book available (unless you've signed a bad publishing contract with a print-on-demand publisher). This is relatively easy to do if you have a PDF or Microsoft Word version of your manuscript, as Amazon provides easy-to-follow instructions for converting these documents to your own Kindle edition. An Amazon spokesperson reported in July 2008 that Kindle sales comprise around twelve percent of Amazon's total sales for books that are available in a Kindle edition (a percentage that's consistent with my Kindle sales this year), and that this percentage is on the rise as more Kindle devices are sold. You will also enjoy a thirty-five percent royalty on sales of your Kindle edition if you're a self-published author, which makes each of these sales quite profitable.

5) Become a vendor on Amazon Marketplace.

6) Take advantage of other Websites that link to your Amazon product page.

Finally, be on the constant lookout for other free Websites that allow you to create more links to your Amazon page. Remember, the more potential buyers who visit your Amazon page, the more sales you will enjoy. Google Book Search, for example, makes the full text of your book searchable on Google and links searchers directly to your book's Amazon product page. Listing your book in various self-publishing oriented sites, like shared-self-publishing.com [from Steve: Thanks, Kevin!], is another good way to increase your number of Amazon links. Also, be sure to create an author page on LibraryThing.com, a site that allows people to keep track of all the books they own and network with those having common interests.

I'm confident that these Amazon-focused marketing efforts will help your book find a suitable home. While niche-oriented, on-line marketing lacks the glamour of a book signing or the prestige of an end-cap at the front of a Borders, it will cost you nothing, consume little time or effort, and pose no risk of rejection. And, as the sales begin coming in, you will experience how rewarding self-publishing can be.

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