Amazon.com: Your Billboard to the World

What: Your book’s presence on Amazon is critical. It is literally your billboard to the world. That is why Berrett-Koehler puts a lot of effort into making sure the data for your book is correct and we load as much promotional information as possible on your Amazon book page.

Why: When people want to buy your book, they often first go to Amazon to learn more about it.

How: You can do a number of things to promote your book and your business online through Amazon, including actively recruiting customers to review your book, participating in the Amazon blog called AmazonConnect, and optimizing your book’s presence through other features on the site.

1. Make sure your basic book information is correct.

Berrett-Koehler works hard to make sure your book information is correct and complete. We post a basic description initially and then a longer one when the book’s cover copy is complete. If you find errors in the basic information for your book, please notify Jeremy Sullivan at Berrett-Koehler right away. He will fix it on Amazon and also fix it in our distributor’s database, which feeds to Amazon once a week.

2. Get at least ten customer reviews of your book posted on Amazon as soon as your book is available.

Once you have your first ten customer reviews posted, keep working on building the number of reviews you have on Amazon. One easy way to do this is whenever people tell you that they liked your book, ask them to go to Amazon and post a customer review. You can create an email that can be sent to any readers you hear from that includes a link to your Amazon book page.

Be sure to tell people that they can also post the same review on Barnesandnoble.com, Borders.com, Powells.com, and other sites as well. Please also note that the top Amazon.com reviews flow through to our website www.bkconnection.com.

*What can you do if you get a negative customer review? You can’t have the review taken down unless it is truly offensive and violates Amazon’s customer review guidelines, but you can manipulate its placement on the book page. The reviews that customers vote as most helpful are at the top of all your book’s customer reviews. Thus, if you want a particular review or reviews to show up ahead of the others, then have your contacts vote that those reviews are most helpful and the others are not.

3. Take advantage of Author Central and Author Pages.

Amazon just launched a new program for authors! It is setting up Author Pages,which is replacing the author stores that already existed for some of our authors. Amazon is also setting up a new free service called Author Central, which will allow authors to reach more readers and promote their books. In Author Central, authors can post a photo and biography to their profile, view and add to a bibliography, and use a blog to connect with readers (this used to be called AmazonConnect). AmazonConnect will now be part of Author Central, and if you are already signed up for AmazonConnect you will automatically be enrolled in Author Central. You should have received an email notification about this from Amazon.  One great thing about the Author Pages is that you can post content to it as soon as your book is listed on Amazon, which is usually several months before it ships.

Click here for more information on Author Central.

Click here to see the author pages for Brian Tracy and Ken Blanchard.

4. Blog on your Author Central page .

We highly encourage authors to participate in the blog on your Author Page. It is a fantastic way to connect your readers with you personally and your website. Through the blog you can direct readers to your website, your speaking schedule, a video of you, recent articles or reviews and so on. Also, if you have other titles published, your Author Page blog is a great way to highlight your new book to your existing readers and drive preorders of your new book. We strongly encourage every author to post at least one blog post to introduce readers to their book and link back to their website. If you are able to come back once a quarter to update your readers on some news related to thebook, that is great, but if you canʼt, that is okay too. Please note that the blog will only keep three blog posts and will only show a small amount of each. If you blog somewhere else, you can use RSS to surface your existing blog directly to your Author Page blog. But please do this only if what you are blogging about is relevant to yourbook topic.

Check out the Author Central blog for John Kador’s book, Effective Apology. To see his blog, scroll down the book page.

*Update: Booktour appearances also feed into the Author Pages now!

5. Keep us informed of your activities that will lead to sales on Amazon.

Amazon buys our books on a nonreturnable basis, so its buyers are very cautious about the inventory they bring in to Amazon’s warehouse. They can get stock replenished very quickly from our bookstore distributor, so they will bring in only what they are confident they can sell based on the information they have.

If you are planning a major campaign that will direct people to Amazon, please let Marina Cook, Sales Manager at Berrett-Koehler, know at least a month in advance so she can alert the buyer. Please provide as much detail as possible on the number of people being contacted, who they are, and when the campaign will happen.

6. Consider a preorder campaign.

If you are particularly concerned about how much stock Amazon will have on hand when your book is released, we recommend doing a preorder campaign to Amazon. This means you will do advance promotion for your book before the book is available on Amazon and, thus, build up customer orders with Amazon. There are several advantages to this:

• All the customer orders will ship on one day, which will increase your sales rank for that day.
• The buyer will have a better idea of what sales to expect on your title and will potentially order more than was originally planned.
• You get word of mouth going on your book earlier because customers will have your book as soon as it has shipped (and they can write customer reviews sooner).

One more advantage to driving traffic to Amazon’s site is that the more sales that Amazon has on a book, the more its search engines will recommend your book to others on the site and the more your title will pop up as a book bought by others when they bought another book on the site. You can track how your book is “paired” with other books on Amazon through this website SalesRankExpress.

7. Consider an Amazon bestseller campaign.

Authors can conduct bestseller campaigns to drive sales to Amazon on a single day to get their Amazon sales rank to be in the top 100 bestselling books on the site that day. These campaigns were very popular a few years ago, and, since lots of people were doing them, we think that reduced their effectiveness. However, we haven’t seen anyone do them lately.

In addition to allowing you to call your book an Amazon bestseller, these campaigns are great at forcing you to get organized to let a lot of people know about your book in a concentrated period of time. Basically, you put together a package of free gifts that customers get if they buy your book from Amazon on a particular day. Ideally, these gifts can be downloaded from your website. Overall, these campaigns are great because they get a lot of people buying your book in one day and have a lot of the advantages of the preorder campaigns. It is critical for Marina to know you are doing one of these campaigns as far in advance as possible to make sure Amazon buys enough stock to cover potential orders. When possible, we recommend that you do these campaigns as part of a preorder campaign.

Click here to read an article on a book marketing website about how one person did this.

8. Use optimizing features on Amazon to get your book more exposure.

You can help get your book noticed on Amazon in a number of other ways. All of them will get your book more attention from customers that are shopping on Amazon.

Listmania

Amazon has a feature called Listmania Lists, where you can create a product list on the site for others to see. You can create a list that focuses on your area of interest or expertise (such as “Books every HR Manager should have” or “Books that will make you more creative” or whatever you want) and include your book or books on the list. You can include any item from the Amazon store. To create a Listmania list, when you are logged into your Amazon account, click on the “Create a Listmania! List” link on a book page or click here.

“So You'd Like to...” Guides

You can also create a guide, similar to the Listmania List, that will help people become informed about some area that you are an expert in. Some examples would be “So you’d like to get a job you love,” “So you’d like to be more creative at work,” and “So you’d like to be a better leader.” These guides are created in essentially the same way as the Listmania Lists.

To create a “So you’d like to…” guide, when you are logged into your Amazon account, click the "Create a Guide" link on a book page or click here. All you have to do is name your guide and choose the products you want to list. You also have the option of including introductory remarks and comments on the individual products.

Tags

Tags are keywords or category labels that you can put on books. Tags can help you find items on Amazon as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify items for later recall. You can tag your book with keywords, so that if someone searches for that keyword, your book will come up in the search results. For example, our book Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em has a tag for “employee retention” so that if someone searches for books on employee retention, our book will be one of the first books to come up. Once you set up the tag, ask others to tag it with that same keyword because the more people that tag it with the keyword you have chosen, the higher up it will show in a search.

To set up a tag, go to the page for the book you want to tag and scroll down to the section “Tags Customers Associate with This Product.” There you will find the option to click on a list of possible tags or suggest a new one. Please note that it can take a week or so for the tags to show up.

Customer Discussions/Forums/Communities

Amazon has several areas on each book page where customers can have discussions with each other around topics related to the book. You can use these areas to connect with other customers and share your questions, insights, and views about your book and topics related to your book. Honestly, we think that these discussion areas are not as frequented or as used as other social networking media, so they may not be the best use of your time. Here’s the Customer Communities Directory.

Amapedia

Another area on the book page is a section called Amapedia where customers can post wiki-type articles on products they like. This section has been going for a few years, but isn’t really used by customers. We recommend skipping it.

9. Track Your Amazon.com sales rankings.

Of course, all authors at one point or another become obsessed with tracking their Amazon sales ranking. The sales rankings are updated hourly, and several free or low-cost services can track your sales rankings for you:

• Titlez.com

• Rankforest

This website will give you sales ranking information for Amazon for one title for free, but you can also upgrade to a paid subscription that offers you other options as well.

• BooksandWriters

For $10 per year, this website will track your Amazon and Barnes and Noble sales rankings.

• SalesRankExpress

This website is an Amazon sales rank checker site that is free. It does not track your Amazon sales rank like the other sites but offers a book’s status and standing on Amazon. It also allows you to see which books your book is paired with on Amazon and how your book is listed on Amazon international sites.

• Publishers Marketplace

For $20 per month, this site has a wealth of information on the book publishing industry. Berrett-Koehler has a membership and we use it extensively, particularly the site’s book tracker, which allows us to track the Amazon and Barnes and Noble sales ranking history of any book we want, in addition to bestseller lists and book reviews.

10. Sign up to be an Amazon Associate.

If you are going to be driving a lot of orders to Amazon, you should sign up to become an Amazon Associate, which will allow you to earn a 6 percent commission on sales that you refer to Amazon either through your website or through links in emails. To get more information go to: affiliate-program.amazon.com.

Berrett-Koehler has also just launched an Affiliate program so that you can earn 10 percent commission on sales you direct to our website www.bkconnection.com. For more information, please click here to learn how you can become an affiliate publisher, Google’s term for affiliate partners. David Marshall also just sent an email with additional information for authors. To access his email, click here.

How Much: In general, each of these items is a component of making your book’s presence on Amazon the best it can be. It isn’t crucial for you to do all of them, but the more time you invest in making the book page engaging and up to date, the more likely it is that someone will see that there is a community around the book, believe that the book is relevant, and want to buy it. Please note that it can take up to year for a book to reach its full potential on Amazon because it can take that long to get fully integrated into all of the Amazon search capabilities.

Help: No companies specifically do Amazon bestseller campaigns anymore, but the companies below will do bestseller campaigns. We haven’t worked with them ourselves, nor have any of our recent authors, but you may be interested in checking them out if you want to pursue an Amazon bestseller campaign and want to hire someone to help you. If you end up contacting them or working with them, please pass on your feedback to us.

Planned Television Arts Best-seller Marketing

Bestseller Millions

Here is a publishing guru that we recommend who blogs and twitters with regular updates on Amazon and other online marketing tips: www.weberbooks.com/publish.htm

Please contact Kristen Frantz or Jeremy Sullivan for more information or if you have any questions.

Berrett-Koehler Publishers

www.bkconnection.com

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