What can Amazon do to sell my book?

IWhat tools do Amazon offer to authors who want to sell their books? 

First, there is the categorization of the book itself. You can only choose two categorizations, including the subcategories. You have to choose carefully - a book that is visible in more than one category gets more eyeballs that could buy it. 

Then, there is the book description. Here, you get a generous 4000 characters. This is what gets picked up by Bing and Google as well as Amazons internal search engine. This means you should focus on doing a bit of SEO here, and make sure the potential keywords the customer may be searching for are included. But not excessively. The days when repeating a search term a thousand times got you on top of Google is long gone. Write a honest description of the book, that way potential readers do not feel let down. 

Then there is the author page. If you buy something, you would rather get it from a real person with some credentials in the field than a faceless pseudonym, right? I will test both and let us see where it ends. 

There is a third type of promotion that you can do on Amazon, yet it is not actually a promotional tool. It is the reviews. 

Reviews are terrifically important on Amazon. If you have a choice between two books, most go for the one with most five-star reviews. That means getting lots of reviews is a great way of promoting your book. Especially if the reviewers also bought it. The book also moves higher in the Amazon ranking. The more reviews, the more good reviews, the higher the ranking. Plus the reviews, especially negative ones, are invaluable feedback for your next book. 

Enlisting friends and family is the no-brainer, especially if it is your first book. The tricky part is actually getting them to do something. They may promise but there is no guarantee. You can offer them money, that will probably help, or you can buy reviews in Fiverr. There are actually not so many people offering to review books there. And the quality is doubtful. But it is better to have a few reviews than none. If they are not the first, people are more likely to leave a review. 

There is another promotional tool you can use, and that is the cover. The old saying that you can not judge a book by its cover is completely untrue on Amazon. Weird though it is, a book which has a nice cover sells better than a book with no cover. Even though the picture of the cover is is not very much bigger than a postage stamp. The Amazon cover creator tool does a good job of generating a decent cover if you have a good photo as your starting point. You can upload your own cover as a JPEG, but unless you are an artist you are better off using the Amazon tool. You can export the picture for use somewhere else. 

The other promotion is the "look inside". Amazon gives away about the first 15% of your book, starting in the beginning and going on until it is suddenly interrupted. There is no correlation between chapters, subchapters, and the length of the sample. You have to be prepared and write a first chapter that really sells the rest of your book, but you have to do that anyway. Your book is actually its own best promotional tool, even though only very few people who download the sample read it. You never see the numbers, though. Amazon does not tell you how many sample downloads you have actually had. 

Those promotional tools are actually the only ones available to all authors. Amazon has two other great promotional tools, though, but they have one big constraint. You have to make your book exclusive to Kindle for 90 days. If you do, then you can do two great promotions: you can give away the book for free for a period of five (non-consecutive) days. Or you can do a countdown from $0.99 to whatever your normal price will be during 10 days. The price goes up in five increments during the ten days. 

Either of the two per 90-day period you make the book exclusive. Not both at the same time. 

To get full effect from these, you need to do lots of external promotions of your promotions, as it were. Giving away a book on Amazon does not necessarily mean more sales and reviews however. If nobody knows about the book, they will not find it. If they are sitting on the fence about buying the book, however, the free promotion will trigger them to buy it. Or actually get it for free. But at least they will spread the word about the book. 

This means you have to start long before the book comes out if your promotions are going to have any effect. Not promoting the book, but collecting people whom you will promote the promotion to. The more people you have in your mailing list, following you on Twitter, liking your Facebook page, and whatever you do on Google Plus, the more people you can reach. If they do not like you enough to buy the book, they may like you enough to download it for free and review it. 

Collecting followers takes time. Both Facebook and Twitter have strict rules about how many people you are allowed to follow in a day, especially if the ratio of followed over followers gets too high. They want to exclude spammers. And so do you. Both Facebook and Twitter are most effective when you have an actual dialogue with people. Neither is really very good as a broadcast medium. And there are limits to how many people you can have a meaningful discussion with at the same time. The Dunbar number for the tribe, as opposed to the village, is 1100 or so. That is the number of people you can be acquintances with. Friends, the village around you, those who you meet and talk to daily, are about 150. Somewhere in between is probably a meaningful number. That means, in my experience, it takes about six months to collect them. 

The more Americans you have among them, the likelier they are to read books on a Kindle. Do not try to attract followers who are interested in books first and your subject second. There are too many books out there, but if you have done a good job you will be alone in your subject matter. 

However, the best conversion rates you supposedly get from your own email list. Especially if you have been able to give people a meaninful reason to remember it. If you can get a conversion rate of two per cent, that is very good. It means that to sell 2000 books, you need to have 100000 people on the list. That is a lot of people. You will hardly be able to find 550 people per day to sign up, which is how many you would need if you were to collect them in six months. You clearly nerd more avenues to reach out to people to engage them in a discussion, if you are going to reach sufficient numbers to make it meaningful. 

What methods? That is what I will look into next.