I think I’m up to 14 Kindle books now, and some of them are selling well. I wanted to share a little bit of what I’ve learned by offering these tips to aspiring writers focusing on selling in the Kindle store at Amazon.
1. Number of Pages – doesn’t matter. Within reason, the number of pages you write for a Kindle book doesn’t matter much at all. If you’re giving someone valuable information in the case of a guide or informative book on some some subject and you cover everything you should, the number of pages shouldn’t be a consideration. Your book might be as short as 5,000 words. With fiction you need to hit a decent word count – maybe 30,000 words, unless you’re calling it a short-story. Traditional word counts for paperback books are out the window in this digital age.
2. Color Images – include them. Though the Kindle is black and white today, tomorrow it may be color. Within a year everyone expects it to have color capability. Write for tomorrow’s technology, whether the Kindle is going color is a no-brainer. It is. Add to that the fact that today you can read Kindle books on your computer, iPad, iPod, iPhone, and many other phones and tablets and they DO show the color images, and it just makes a lot of sense.
3. Black Text – the Kindle attempts to show shades of color by lightening the text in shades of grey. This gives a bad user experience, and some colors – Lime for instance, shows up very faintly. Go with black.
4. Proof – I’ve yet to format a book in MS Word perfectly for the Kindle. Always download the source code for your ebook and either edit it yourself in an HTML editor, or sit beside a geek that can help you with it. While you’re at it, ask the geek to teach you how to do it, so you don’t need help anymore.
5. Title – name your book something that catches eyes. Name your book something with important keywords in it that you want to be found for. Title, along with cover, are the two most important parts to selling your books if you don’t already have a following and people searching on your name or people that are finding you from some other source (Oprah, TV, your blog, etc.).
6. Cover. Cover. Cover! Everything else can be perfect – and if your cover bites, you’ll not have the sales that you could with a great cover. I have done 2 and 3 iterations of some of my covers – and found that the cover profoundly affects the number of buyers. Spend a little cash and get a decent cover. I’m offering $30 covers for Kindle books if you need it.
7. Description – You can use a couple of thousand words to describe your book. I don’t use more than a couple of hundred, but perhaps I should? Give your potential buyers a reason to buy your books. State the benefits of owning the book. Pull them in with a hook. Pull them in with a pair of pliers. Whatever you can do to get them to buy your book. Don’t spout hype, but do try to get them emotionally involved in buying your book. Otherwise they’ll buy someone else’s book.
8. Keywords – max out the use of your keywords by making them the same and along parallel lines as your title and description. Think bigger scale, and use keywords that are beyond what your book focuses on. If I have a book on Thailand – I always use “asia, southeast asia, bangkok” as keywords because there are many people searching on them. If your book is about raising kids, you might use these keywords: development, education, teens, teenagers.
9. Categories – you are allowed five. Use five. Use all of them wisely, this is another major way buyers find your books.
10. Price – I tried a few pricing schemes and I settled on $2.99 for almost all of my books. At $9.99 I was selling about 25 books per month. At $2.99 I’m selling about 150 books. I’m actually making a little more at the lower price, and my books are being more widely read – reaching new people, because of it. $2.99 is as low as you can drop the price and still get 70% commission at Amazon Kindle, or it reverts to 35%.
11. Include Links to Your Blog – within your book you must have links to your blog and other books on your site(s). The reason being, Amazon is keeping all the lead information for your buyers. You have no way to reach them except putting links in the Kindle books that lead to your blog. You should try to capture your blog visitors’ email addresses so you have permission to email them later. A great service for this is Aweber.com.
12. Send Free Copies to Get Reviews – another part of the game at Amazon Kindle is the reviews section. There are stars indicating what readers thought of your book. Your competition may be sabatoging you by giving you junk reviews if you’re in a tight niche and fighting for buyers. I’ve already had this happen. You can fight it by offering free ebooks to friends, website visitors, anyone you can reach that will agree to write a review for you at the reviews section. Many authors are doing this. Is it unethical? It’s the game, I don’t think it goes against the bounds of good taste when I do it in response to someone giving undeserved bad reviews.
13. Don’t Link to Your Books at Amazon Kindle Store – Amazon has enough Google juice to get high rankings for your book. In fact, many times Amazon beats me in the Google results for my own books. Much better for you to rank higher than Amazon and have potential buyers come to your own site. Once there you can refer them to Amazon to buy a Kindle version, as well as offer PDF or other ebook formats for purchase. It is essential that you have your own blog and sell your own books there. Your long term success depends on getting a large group of readers that will buy most of the books you put out over the course of your life. Developing this core group should be a major focus of your efforts outside of writing books.
Why does nobody end a list at #13?
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
It is good information to share. It is interesting. Reading book in Kindle does not waste the paper.