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 take. 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.
