How do you sell a book on Amazon when 8,000 new titles are released every month? I’ve learned more about book marketing in the last 30 days than I have in my entire life – and I’m a bookworm! Here I share my very first insights.
Challenges on Amazon
Just like in a bookstore, Amazon also has “shelves”, called categories here. But where do I sort a book like “Rock Dreams”? And how does a book even become visible with 8,000 new German publications every month?
The first option is the Amazon algorithm: it assigns books to buyers based on title, subtitle, category and keywords. I was too naive at first, but I’m learning more every day. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend this article by Johannes.
By the way, did you know that Amazon handles over 70% of e-book sales worldwide? This shows how important it is to understand the algorithm and its mechanisms.
An example? The German word “Rock” can refer to both a music genre and an item of clothing. You can imagine my surprise when I found my book between “skirts” and “dream skirts”. It was an amusing moment, but also a clear reminder of how important the right categories and keywords are. So I changed almost all the texts on Amazon and “rock” became “rock music”, “band” became “music band” or “rock band”.
Around 25% of my sales now come from the algorithm – there’s still room for improvement!
Successful alternatives: reading lists and social media
Surprisingly, I have achieved the best results through reading lists. Recommendations directly to readers are worth their weight in gold.
Facebook and Instagram also help to become visible. I will describe my next steps here in more detail soon. And since I started two campaigns (reading list and Facebook) in parallel, I only know that both together account for about 60% of the books sold.
Do you have any experience with book marketing or interesting tips? Share them in the comments or follow me on Facebook. I look forward to the exchange – because one thing I have learned: book marketing is not rocket science, but an adventure!