All About Amazon A+ Content for Authors #bookmarketing #amazonpublishing

A content has been around Amazon for a while now. Introduced as a tool to enhance the shopping experience for buyers on Amazon, it is another opportunity for authors to showcase their book and lock in that sale. So what is it? Should you produce it? And if you should, how the heck do you make it look good? So it sells your book. If you have any of these questions, well, happy days. This video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that you own the rights to and keep all the proceeds on. One of the many things we do for clients is produce a content to help them sell their book. So first, what is a content? Well, let me show you. Here's my book, Self Publish and Succeed, which I highly recommend for every nonfiction author. So here's the Amazon page for the book. As you scroll on down, you see this section from the publisher with striking images. You can feature other books, awards you've won, media, and a few other details for the book. This is the A content. Now, you need to know the rules before you do this because we get kickbacks every single week from a content we submit and they don't tell you why, or at least they don't give you a ton of details as to why. We usually have to change something, resubmit, and see if that fixes it. So. So it can be a little tricky. One time we had an author get hers kicked back because they said the endorsements weren't from notable people. And one was from George Clooney. Yes, that George Clooney. And the other one was from Sarah Blakely. See, right here at the bottom is the rejection note. So, yeah, it can be a little finicky and tricky to manage the A Content submission rules, which you will find on their website. Okay, so that's what it is. And should you create it? Well, that's up to you. But it does make your page more compelling to a reader. And while I can't really tell you that it increases conversions, I can say that Amazon is always testing things to improve conversions. And they have kept it around for a long time, so their data must show a benefit to having it. And everything you can do to help your book and your brand stand out and be remembered is a good thing. So I would say yes, it's worth doing. And. And it's not an expensive thing to do. It does take some strategic thinking. But tools like Canva actually make it a lot easier than ever to create on your own, but the thinking and planning might be the hard part. So let me help you with that. But again, it doesn't cost you anything to load it onto your page. And you don't have to be in KDP select to use it. You don't even have to be uploaded to KDP directly. If you are using Amazon Seller Central, you will have to be a part of their Amazon brand registry to do it. But. But I'm not getting into all that today. It is available in other countries and languages, so if you're in one of the 13 countries that they offer it in, you can select the language preference and that's where it will show. Again, you can find details for all of these pieces on KDP's site. I'll put the link in the description below. Okay, let's talk strategy. First of all, where do you find this? Well, let me just take you into the KDP Dashboard and show you where to find it. But as I do this, don't just hop in to build it inside of this account, but you because that's going to be a real pain in the patootie. It'll be clunky and won't quite work the way you want to do it. So do some planning before you do that and probably hire somebody to create some images or create them yourself. All right, so this is where you go. You're going to click on the Marketing tab and here you go, A plus content. Again, you're going to spin in circles if you try to use this tool to build your A plus content. So spend some time doing a little research. Look at books like yours and see what they have in there. Because authors have different things in their A plus content. So look in your category, look at the best sellers, see what they have, think about what you might have that's a good fit for your A plus content and start writing these things down. I really like looking at content from books that are similar to yours. You can use that for inspiration and ideas. Let's take a look at Rise of the Reader. We worked with Nick on his book. I don't think we created his A plus content for his book. So it's going to be a little different than our normal standard kind of process. But you can see he's got some really cool pictures. So think about maybe what images or pictures you might have that represent your book and might help a reader decide if this book is for them. A is visually oriented, so it's less about text than it is about these images and pictures, which is why I thought Nick's a content was a good example, but you do not want to put your book cover there because that's redundant from what's already on your book page. So think about what images you already have versus what you need to create. Anything you put for text should be to sell your book to your ideal reader. You're creating sales copy here, not book summaries. Once you have some inspiration and ideas, you can go ahead and look at the modules and choices that Amazon has to offer. You'll see that they have text only, image only, image left, text right, and comparison of items such as covers from a book in a series. Once you have a sketch of what you're going to create, I would recommend hiring a designer to get this ready for you or if you're good in Canva, pop into that platform and start building. I am not that good with designing things, so I've always, always had a designer doing these kind of things for me. You can find great people for not that much on platforms like Fiverr or even Upwork and the more clear you are on what you want, the easier and cheaper it will be to have somebody create this for you. Okay, so what do you do for design? Tell me in the comments below. And when you comment. The day a video is released, you get entered to win some of our fabulous hashtag noboringbookswag or some of my books and you get one step closer to being one of my YouTube besties like Efren Delgado, Kevin Hall, Darla Mondragon, Black Market Leadership and Stella Golf. Thank you. Now before you hire a designer, you want to know what sizes you need. So go back into KDP account, click Marketing and select a content and when you're here you're going to be able to get specific ideas for what you're going to need along with the image sizes and description of the images that you may want to ask your designer for. Once you're done and you've uploaded it all right here, you're going to have to submit it for approval. There's actually a two step approval process. Step one is an automated one and it will flag potential issues before you submit it for a formal review. Some of the things that will cause you problems anything unverified Be prepared to prove anything and everything you put on your A content from the awards to the media to anything else. Do not include text from customer reviews. Also avoid saying Free buy now bonus or anything that is kind of a timing thing like new you can only use a max of four quotes or endorsements, and as we learned, they must be a public figure. And sometimes that criteria is very questionable. Approval takes at least a week, and as I mentioned, we see a lot of kickbacks, which requires us to just make small tweaks and see if it will pass the next time. A content is one of those tools Amazon has given us to sell our books, and because every book needs all the help it can get, authors should take advantage of it. One of the other tools Amazon gives us is the Read sample or look inside feature and and the ability to embed it. This video will show you how to do that and why it's something to take advantage of. If you already have that done, this one is the one YouTube believes you should watch next. Either way, head on over and say hi when you get there.