Nine Big Reasons to Learn to Love Amazon
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson,
author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugallySeries of books for writers
Remember the little greeting card girl who looked like Pipi Longstockings? She put her hands on her hips, stamped her little foot, glowered out of the card at her audience and said “Get Over It!” That’s a little like I feel when I hear an author complain about Amazon. Not that I don’t understand their complaints, even sometimes agree with them. What worries me is that sometimes these authors resort to boycotting Amazon which leads to their selling their books out of their garages…or worse. Though what you might have heard about Amazon may be true but we authors still need to just take the advice of Pipi’s look alike and “get over it.” For the good of our books. If you are one of those authors, here’s why Amazon is good for your book and by extension, good for your peace of mind, and, yes, good for your book sales:
1. Amazon sells far and away more books than any other online
bookstore. And far and away more books than all traditional bookstores in the US combined.
2. Amazon provides easily accessed associate sites from Japan to the UK that let you sell your books overseas—even if you haven’t sold foreign rights to your book.
3. Amazon provides a search engine arguably second only to Google’s—especially if you view this statistic from the standpoint of an author or publisher. Your prospective reader can find you by typing your name, title, or important key words like your genre into the search window.
4. Promotion packages like Amazon’s Vine Program are available for getting reviewed by their top reviewers. Some are free, some are costly, but they all work.
5. Amazon offers an author profile. You can even feed your blog and Twitter stream to it and so your readers know more about you instantly. If you don’t have a profile page, go to AuthorCentral.com and explore how you can add all your books to it and a knock-out biography, too.
Tip: I include a shortened URL in my e-mail signature that takes my contacts directly to my Amazon author profile.
6. Amazon offers all kinds of ways to promote your book on a dedicated buy page where your readers get to buy your book, often with one click. That page includes:
o Add-on features that let you highlight your credentials by choosing the best categories and subcategories for Amazon’s logarithms to find and rate your sales numbers against other similar books. (To make the most of these, the author must promote bestselling ratings when they achieve them—perhaps on Twitter.)
o A new feature is available on your Kindle buy page. It is called “Amazon Plus.” Either the author of a book or its publisher may add five enticing quotations from your book and illustrate each with an arresting image of your choice for entry. Find the A+ entries my publisher (Modern History Press) added for the Kindle version of The Frugal Editor or any of the other books in my HowToDoItFrugally series to get ideas for your own book(s). (It works equally well for books of fiction.)
o There is a place on your buy page to install an author- or book- related video.
o The “What other customers buy after they’ve reviewed this item…” feature may feel uncomfortably competitive, but it connects your book to other top sellers on Amazon as well as others’ books to yours.
7. Amazon’s Kindle Select marketing program is free if you can see your way to committing your book as an Amazon exclusive for ninety days. After that period is up, you can publish at Smashwords or anywhere else you want to and you can make marketing hay with the Select program when your book is released.
8. Amazon offers an annual contest for e-books in partnership with some of the biggest names in publishing.
9. When you publish new editions, Amazon offers a widget (gadget) for your backlist book’s buy page that directs readers to your new editions. See how one leads you from the second edition of my The Frugal Editorto the new third edition at my buy page. (Find it a little below the title of the book at the top of the page.
Tip: You may enter some typical “back of the book” features on your buy page yourself. That includes the more about the author, your favorite review, and more. Do watch this important page for changes. Amazon adds features to it and also taketh away. (It’s also the place that lists your book sales ratings.
Don’t Forget: When your book becomes a bestseller in the ratings (or highly rated in its genre!) that news can become highly convincing marketing material for your book. You’ll find a screen shot of one of the ratings Modern History Press recently made for me during the release of the third edition of The Frugal Editor at the top of this blog page.
###
About the SharingwithWriters blogger:
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a frequent contributor to this #WritersontheMove blog. Her The Frugal Editorwas just released in its third edition from Modern History Press. It is the second multi award-winning book in her multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers. Find it on Amazon in paper, hard cover, or as an e-book at the new Amazon page especially for series . (That’s a new Amazon feature, too!) This new edition has been fully updated including a chapter on how backmatter can be extended to both help readers and jumpstart book sales.
