A story with tens of thousands of articles.

A story with tens of thousands of articles.
life and death, blessing and cursing, from the main character in the hands of readers.

Monday, April 9, 2018

How I doubled my Kindle sales rank with a simple 5-minute Amazon hack

How I doubled my Kindle sales rank with a simple 5-minute Amazon hack

From page 7, to page 3 in one hour…
When I review other authors books on Amazon, I usually point out they need more keywords in their description, title, and even author bio.
Why? 
Because Amazon is a search engine.
If you don’t have any WORDS in your description letting Amazon know what kind of book it is, it won’t show up when readers are searching for things.
UNLESS it shows up in also boughts of similar books in your genre.
But if you’re not already attracting and converting readers who read those kind of books, you won’t show up there either.
However, I realized I wasn’t following my own advice for one of my books. I’d stopped targeting “mermaids” because I thought my dark fantasy book wasn’t quite right for typical mermaid readers, so I focused on the drama and story, and not mermaids. It worked pretty well. But after Shape of Water, very dark, adult mermaids are back in style… so I edited my blurb and immediately saw a huge boost in organic visibility. 

Visibility first

Keywords matter to show up, but also for positioning. Hopefully, your book cover perfectly sums up the genre while being attractive to your audience. It should grab them and make them want the book, before reading the description. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to work much harder. But the cover doesn’t matter either, if nobody is seeing the book, so start with keywords.
Once you ARE getting some readers on your page, if the cover doesn’t properly do its job and communicate genre, then the description still needs to tell readers what genre the book is. If they still don’t know whether this is scifi or fantasy, it’ll be much harder to draw them in with the blurb. Sure they can “guess” or “try to figure it out” after reading the blurb, but most of them WON’T read the book. If they aren’t already sold – if they don’t have all the basics they need – they won’t both to click ‘read more’ and finish the description.
In other words, the description doesn’t matter, if you can’t get them to click your cover, and then hook them so they click to read the description. After that they’ll look at reviews. All that together = conversion.

Conversion second

Conversion is how well your cover, description and reviews lead to the sale. You want less traffic and more conversion (because Amazon will learn faster and start promoting your book to the right readers). Organic keywords can help get your book SEEN, but not sold. And too much “keyword stuffing” – focusing on machines, not humans – can hurt conversion once actual readers land on the page.
What’s the solution? Advertising.
Advertising fixes the visibility issue.
And it can help with the conversion issue too, because you can test dozens of hooks and see which phrases attract the right readers and get them to buy. Once you know those, you can rewrite your blurb.
If you’re advertising, organic SEO is less of a problem, because your book will show up anyway in a more prominent position.


Kindlepreneur also has a good free course on Amazon ads


 

About Derek Murphy

Derek Murphy is a book designer with a Ph.D. in Literature. He's been featured on CNN and spoken at dozens of writing conferences around the world. These days he mostly writes young adult fantasy and science fiction, while helping authors build profitable publishing platforms. Find me

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