5 Things to Do Once Your Book is on Amazon

You got your book on Amazon. Congratulations. Now here's five things you need to do right away to ensure that people actually see your book and buy it. Stick around. Hey there. I'm Julie Broad with havemoreinfluence.com Congratulations on getting the hard work done to get your book finished and loaded up. So it's now available on Amazon. That's fantastic. But the reality is a little grim. There's a lot of information out there saying that the average book sells less than 250 copies. What? So that means just getting it on Amazon is not enough. You need to do some things so that it appears when other people are shopping on Amazon, so that it gets seen, so that it can be purchased. So here's five things that you need to do once your book is available on Amazon. Number one, and I know you know this one already, but it is critical get reviews. The verified purchase reviews are the absolute best, but initially you are absolutely allowed. Still, Amazon's been changing their rules around what is allowed and what isn't. But books are still okay to be given free and you can ask for a honest review. So spread that book around to clients, colleagues, friends, and ask them to read it and write a review. Now, the key is that they can't be related to you. They can't be close friends or family. And of course, the review needs to be honest. You. Here's the harsh reality of this. You're going to have to ask probably five to ten times more people than you're going to get reviews. A lot of people will happily take that free book, but about 20 to 30% will actually write the review, even if you follow up and ask them politely to come through on their commitment. So just know that going in that you're going to have to get commitments from a lot more people. And what does not work is is posting on Facebook to the masses saying, hey, listen, please write a review of my book. It doesn't work to write mass emails. You have to contact people individually and get a commitment from them to get those initial reviews. Now that you know how important reviews are and how hard it is to get good reviews, I hope you're taking the time to write reviews for the authors that you read and enjoy because it's something that we can all do to help each other out. Number two, submit your book to the Look Inside program. You know what I'm talking about, right? It's right here. So this is where people can click on your book and go to certain pages and read them. It gives them a chance to preview the contents of your book without giving them access to the entire thing. So it's a pretty cool marketing tool. But if you haven't seen submitted a Kindle version of your book, which automatically creates this Look Inside thing, then you need to submit your book to the Look Inside program. So here's what you do. Go to Search Inside Publisher signup and then the Look Inside will be activated on your book's main detail page within seven to ten days after you do the content submission. A couple of things you need to know is your ISBN number? Well, first of all, you have to have an ISBN number. Don't know what that is. I've got at least two videos to help you with that, so you can check those out. But you need to have an ISBN number and it needs to correspond exactly to the one that you've submitted for the Amazon catalog. The other thing is the content that you submit for the Search Inside or the Look Inside program has to be identical to what is inside your book. Okay. Number three, create your Author page on Amazon Central. It allows you the opportunity to upload extra pictures, biography, other details on your book, and as you write more books, you can add that here too. So it's a great way for customers to find you in a different spot on Amazon. Now what you do is if you don't already have an Author Central account, you'll need to set that up. It says it takes about a week for it to show up. I think mine showed up a lot faster than that. But just so you know, once you do this, it will appear. And now you have an Author Central page where customers can find you. Number four, you want to plan promotions for your book, probably focused on selling on Amazon every three to five months just to ensure that your book climbs the rank on a regular basis so that it can be seen by new readers. Because a lot of times the books that they're seeing are only the ones that are ranking the highest in certain categories or the ones that are currently selling or currently being viewed by people who are looking at other books that they're interested in. So you want to plan promotions that drive sales to Amazon every three to five months to ensure that your book stays refreshed and in front of new people. Finally, number five is using the metadata. Basically you want to think about. There's kind of a couple different approaches. One is to think about the keywords that you're going to associate with your book and to keep those updated. There's a great, there's a couple resources out There called one's called let's get visible again. I'll link to it down below where you can learn about the metadata. You can learn about the categories and pick one that's going to make the most sense for your book. And there's a lot to this. So simply do some research and look at the books that are already there and kind of see where they rank overall on Amazon. And if you find a category where a lot of the books are ranking over a million overall or something like that, that means that you have a good shot of ranking highly in that particular category. So you want at least one of those and you also want to be inside of those core categories for whatever your book is and also have corresponding keywords that make sense. One tip on finding keywords is inside of Amazon search bar you can type in start typing in your keywords and see what auto fills. That tells you what Amazon is already searched for and gives you a sense of some of the keywords that are available and that are being used. So that's one way to find some keywords that you might want to associate with your book so that when people search for those keywords, your book is one of the results that they're seeing. And if you have a fantastic tip for selling books on Amazon, please go ahead post it down below. And of course be sure to mention what the title of your book is that you used these tips for so we can all go and check it out. Like this video. Give it a thumbs up. Makes me happy. Lets me know that you want more like this and you haven't already subscribe to this channel so that you never miss an update. This thanks for stopping by. See you again here next time. Bye. Oh and if we haven't already connected, come over to havemoreinfluence.com at the bottom of the page or on the right hand side of each page. You can sign up for the Broad Thoughts newsletter. Inside of that I give some updates that I don't share anywhere else. Plus you can always use the reply button to send me a comment or a question and I just might shoot a video to answer your question. Bye.