If you're about to publish a book on Amazon KDP and wondering what you can do to
give it the best chance of making sales on Amazon.
Or you've already published some books but are not making any sales or only very
few.
Then this video is for you because I've got four actionable steps that you can
take today to give your books the best chance of making sales on Amazon.
And this helps me make more KDP book sales. Now,
if you've not been this channel before, then welcome.
My name's Paul Marles and I do videos on how to make it, keep it and grow it,
and that's your money I'm talking about. If you do like videos like that,
then do give it a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell. Okay,
let's go straight to Amazon. When a customer searches for something to buy,
in our case a book,
they get presented with all these listings of books.Aand it's on
this first page that we need our book to be. And the higher
up on that first page the better, because that's going to get the most eyeballs,
it's going to get the most traffic on that particular book. Now,
to appear on this first page doesn't happen randomly. You see,
Amazon is almost like an artificial brain.
It has what's called the A10 algorithm,
and books have to meet certain criteria in order to
appear on that first page. So what we're gonna do, first of all,
is just briefly go through what those criteria are, there's seven in total,
because it's essential to understand why we're going to take these
four actionable steps that I'm gonna tell you about in a moment.
So first of all, the first criteria it looks at,
and probably one of the most important is the keywords.
In this example I've just showed you a customer types in adult coloring book.
And so the keyword in this case would be adult coloring book. And so
it's the choice of these particular keywords and how they're used that will
determine what Amazon sees in relation to your book and where it puts
it in the rankings.
And this is one of the things we're going to be discussing in a lot more detail.
The next thing Amazon looks at is the clickthrough rate.
When a customer sees your book, it's called an impression.
And when they click on a book, it's called a click,
and it's a number of clicks as a percentage of the number of impressions that's
called the clickthrough rate.
Now a good through rate would be something between no 0.5
to 10%, and the higher the better.
And the thing that affects the click through rate the most is what your book
looks like. And that is determined by the book cover. Now the next thing,
which was new for the Amazon A10 algorithm,
is what we call A+ content. If we have a look at this book here,
and there'll be a section that says from the publisher,
and you've probably seen this before,
and it's an area where you as a publisher can publish this content and you can
showcase a book cover, the interior, and you can also promote your other books.
The next criteria is what we call external linking.
And these are links from other sites to your books.
And these can be from sites like Facebook or even YouTube.
And again,
this is one of the things we're gonna discuss in a bit more detail in a moment.
The next thing is the number of reviews.
Now the more reviews a book has,
the more chance it's going to rank on that first page and, hopefully,
higher up on that first page.
But we get ourselves into this chicken and egg situation because in order
to get reviews,
you need to make sales. And in order to make sales,
you need to be on that first page. And in order to be on that first page,
the more reviews the better. So there's two ways that this can be approached.
One organically, just let your book make sales naturally.
Or, as some publishers do, run ads on their books,
they're called sponsored listings.
And so get sales that way and then get results or get
reviews from those sales. And this leads me into the next bit as well,
which is the sixth factor. And that is the sales history.
Because the more sales a book gets, the more sales history it has,
again, the more chance it has of ranking on that first page.
And this can take time to happen. Now,
from discussions I have with other publishers,
there's often this expectation that you publish a book,
within a few days or a week, it should appear on that first page. And if not,
it's a disaster. What's gone wrong? Well,
I'll show you something and this is my best selling book.
And here we have a graph of the best sellers rank over time. Now,
the lower the best sellers rank, the more sales a book has made or is making.
Now we can see here from when the book was published, which was in June, 2019,
the best sellers rank was all over the place,
which means some days it was making sales, some days it wasn't.
And what Amazon often does is they'll put the book maybe for a couple of days on
that first page, see what the customer response is,
and you can see the best sellers ranking is all over the place.
And so its ranking would also be all over the place,
but it took a few months for it to settle down. Took another three months,
so about six months in total, to really settle down,
and then probably another three or four months for that book to cement its spot
on the first page. And so as the sales come in,
as the reviews come in, it gives that book more strength,
stays on the first page for longer, starts to make more sales. And again,
that further cements its position on that first page. Now,
the next and final criteria that Amazon looks like at is the
organic sales over the paid sales.
Now the sales from these books that you see here on the organic listings can
come from the organic sales, and some of these books can also be running ads,
but the more organic sales that occur from the natural rankings,
then the better that book is going to rank on Amazon over
those sales that just come from paid ads. Okay,
so now let's look at those four actionable steps that you can
And they are free to do and you can do these straightaway on your books. And the
first one is the keywords.
Now there are two aspects to the keywords. One is the choice.
You want to use keywords that hopefully get a lot of traffic.
There's a lot of people searching for those keywords.
There's a lot of potential customers.
But this also has to be balanced with the competition for those keywords because
if there's a lot of competition for a particular keyword,
then it's gonna be harder to get your book ranked for that particular keyword.
And the way you find these keywords is through keyword research. Now,
you can do this for free on Amazon itself,
and I've done videos on how to do that.
I'll leave a link down below to my book tutorials playlist where you'll
find some videos there on keyword research.
The other way to do keyword research is with paid tools.
You've got things like Publisher Rocket and Helium 10,
which are my two favorite paid keyword research tools. The next factor
with keywords is the actual use of them.
Now there are five places where you can use keywords.
I'll tell you four of these and then I'll tell you the fifth one,
which is a new area.
And I'll tell you that when I come to one of the other actionable steps. Now,
the most important places to use the keywords are in the title
and the subtitle of your book.
If we look here as an example of these word search books,
you can see that in the title this book has used word search for adults.
This book has used inspirational word search for adults.
So I can see that they're targeting the keyword word search for adults.
And also in the subtitle,
they've put large print word search puzzle book, and this one here,
large print word search puzzle book as well.
So they've used a keyword word in the title, the keyword in the subtitle. Now,
from many of my books,
I use one or two related keywords in the subtitle.
Again, I've done a video on this in a bit more detail,
which you can find in my book tutorials playlist.
But those are the two main important areas. Now,
if you're just about to publish a book, you can do that.
If you've already published a book,
you can't change the title and subtitle after publishing.
So if it's a book that's not made any sales,
what I'd probably do is just unpublish it and republish it using a new title or
subtitle. And the other thing is, if you are publishing fiction books,
I do understand.
You can't really use a keyword in the title,
but what I would suggest doing is using keywords or related keywords in the
subtitle of your book.
The third place that you can use keywords is in the description
of your book. Now,
Amazon doesn't really index the keywords in the description,
but Google does.
So it can help your book get ranked on Google and can help get traffic from
Google to your book. And again, that's a link to your book.
Remember we talked about those external links,
which in a roundabout way can help get your book ranked on the first page.
The fourth place is in those seven keyword boxes in the
KDP dashboard,
and that's where you can use all different types of keywords related to your
book. Again, I've done videos on this,
which you can find in my book tutorials playlist. As I said,
we'll come to the fifth area in a moment.
Now the second actionable step you can take is with the
cover design because it's this that affects the click through rate of your book.
And it's almost like your sales page,
a cover attracts customers attention.
It will draw their attention to your book and hopefully get them to click on the
book, which is the main important first step in getting that sale.
So it is really vitally important. Now,
if you are not a graphic designer or illustrator,
and especially if you're starting out,
I really completely understand it's very difficult to get good
cover designs on your books. And it does take time and it does take practice.
So what I would suggest doing is just keep publishing books,
but aim to improve each cover design as you go on.
And what you really need to do is educate yourself. Educate yourself on
graphic design principles, things like color theory.
And you can find all information on this on things like YouTube where you can
find the information for free. Sites like Skillshare and Udemy.
I remember on Skillshare I did watch videos by a graphic designer called
Aaron Draplin. And this was early on when I started publishing books.
I found those videos very useful.
And the other area where you want to educate yourself is on using some graphic
design software. So that could be things like Canva, Adobe Illustrator,
Photoshop, Affinity Designer, because once you learn how to use those,
you can then start to create the kind of vision that you have in your mind.
The next thing to look at, as we've mentioned, is that A+ content.
Now, I have done a video on how to create A+ content.
It's in the description below. It looks complicated,
but it's actually quite straightforward and easy to do,
and you can do it in free software like Canva.
You can create mockups of your book covers and interiors,
which brings me onto one other important aspect of.
A+ content.
And that is if you're publishing low content books and you're publishing without
an ISBN, you're not going to get that look inside feature.
So A+ content is the perfect way of showcasing the interiors of
your book. And we come on to the fifth area where you can use keywords,
and that is in the A+ content.
And this is an area that I don't see any or not
many publishers using at all. So if you are, you know,
or if you do start to use keywords in your A+ content,
I think that gives you a bit of a headstart on all those other publishers out
there at the moment. Now,
the next factor that we mentioned earlier is links.
And those are those external links to your books from other
websites. Now, my son is a bit of an seo,
a search engine optimization expert,
and he tells me that currently links from Pinterest are very strong.
They give a lot of strength to the sites that they link to,
they pass strength on, but also they're good for traffic as well.
And Pinterest is ideal for putting up pictures of your books.
Other sites to think about are things like Facebook, Instagram,
which is big, YouTube even.
And also if you've published a number of books and you are creating a brand
around your author name or publisher name,
then creating a website is very valuable as well.
And you can create a simple one page website on sites like Carrd,
Squarespace, Weebly.
And by creating a website,
not only are getting those external links,
but you can also get traffic to your website by getting it to rank on Google.
And again, getting traffic in a roundabout way to your books and again,
boosting its rankings in the search engine.
So those are four steps that you can actually take today on a
book before you publish it or on books that have already been published that
you're not making sales on or you're not making enough sales on. Now,
as I mentioned earlier, I do have a book tutorials playlist,
which explains a lot of these things that I've mentioned in today's video.
And you can find a link to that playlist right here.
I hope you found that useful. Thank you much for your time.
It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.