Amazon Self-Publishing Success with Dale Roberts

Do you have a book on Amazon? Are you confident you've done everything you can to set it up for sales success? If you aren't saying yes, you have Amazon mastered, then this special author expert interview with Dale L. Roberts is absolutely for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on your readers. And and done right will help you grow your brand, build your business and make you money. The best part, you yes, you keep all rights and royalties. Chances are you've already met Dale Roberts if you've been watching self publishing videos on YouTube for a while. But just in case you don't know self publishing with Dale, let me tell you, he is my go to guy when I have questions we can't figure out answers to when it comes to Amazon. And if there's someone I want to meet in the publishing world, he's also the guy I call. And now Dale has taken that networking and Amazon expertise and bundled it all up. He's put everything he's learned while self publishing and selling his books and put it all into an excellent book called the Amazon Self Publisher. So here's Dale to let you know a little about his new book.

The Amazon Self Publisher. How to Sell More Books on Amazon is perfect for anybody that's trying to leverage the Amazon platform, whether through Kindle Direct Publishing or other avenues where they're publishing directly to Amazon. We cover the main pain points of getting better keywords, marketing and promotion and getting more book reviews.

Okay, so this book is a must read if you're selling books on Amazon through kdp. And one of my favorite things he covers was the underutilized tools. He was right. There are things we haven't been leveraging or highlighting for our clients too. So I asked him to share what he thinks is the most underutilized tool to set you up to use it. Take it away, Dale.

By far the most underutilized tool when it comes to leveraging Amazon is Amazon author central. Now this is how you're able to build out a profile for yourself as an author. Now, when it comes to a few of the key features, we could do an entire video series about it. But I'm just gonna go ahead and just highlight some of the areas that you really need to focus on. First of all, your bio. Now this should not be a full autobiography covering everything into your entire life. What we need to focus on is what is most relevant to potential readers, grab their attention and entice them to buy more books. So you're gonna wanna make sure that when you're writing out a bio that you think of it kind of like, well, copywriting, for lack of better words. You need to be slipping in keywords. And we're talking about discoverable keywords, things that your ideal audience is looking for. So that way, this further indexes your Amazon author profile to be discovered. Oh, through Amazon, the next best feature is going to be the editorial reviews section. I see quite a few people just rehashing some reviews they have inside the review section. That's really not what it's supposed to be for. You want to get reviews from other areas. So whether you're using, say, Union Square Review, you're using places that have editorial reviews, you're using Reader's Favorite, getting book reviews outside of Amazon, and you're going to curate it into this section. The nice thing is, if they're saying the right keywords within each one of these reviews, guess what it does? Its search engine optimizes your author profile and of course, the book to where it's more discoverable.

Amazon Author Central is absolutely an underutilized tool. It's one even I've neglected. I have a great updated video for you on this subject, which I will link to at the end. Dale shared the most important tip there, but truthfully, there are gold nuggets in his book he didn't have time to cover. So I will link to the book in the description below so you can grab your copy as well. But Dale also did throw in a third little tip for you. So let's give it back to Dale.

So to share that rather than camping out on your product page and slowly but surely eroding relevancy on Amazon with your title by refreshing your page to see what your latest reviews are, guess what? You can do that all on Author Central. You can go over and see all of your books and all the reviews that they have in real time. So really stop stressing out and going to your product detail page and hitting refresh, hoping that your mom or your dad or significant other has posted a review to your book. It's going to be over at Author Central instead.

So this is a cool tip because Dale touches on something we don't always think about, and that is Amazon wants people to land on your product page, which is your book sales page, and they want people to buy it. If you sit there and refresh and refresh and refresh looking for that review, then you could be impacting your conversion rates and other relevancy within Amazon. Why not camp out on your Amazon Author Central page where you can see all the Amazon site reviews and in one place? It's a little thing that people don't always think of and sometimes little things add up to give you big results. So why not give it a try? Or better yet, rather than refreshing repeatedly, refresh, refresh, refresh. Waiting for a review to pop up, why don't you go and ask five more people if they'll write a review for you now in the Promotional Strategies for Books section of the Amazon Self Publisher, Dale talks about Networking I already mentioned that Dale is my go to guy if I need to meet someone in the publishing industry. What you you may not know is that he is also an introvert. So I know many of you authors think you can't network because you're an introvert. But both Dale and I are introverts and we get out there and get it done. And Dale frankly does it far better than I do. So I asked him, what are your secrets for all our fellow authors to make awesome connections like you do for book promotion and beyond.

It is all about who you know and getting more connections, whether inside the publishing industry or outside of it, really can make a huge difference. So I would just recommend that when it comes to growing your author brand, go out. Try to get into any virtual networking meetings or if there's some in person meetings, try to go to those as well. But here's the key. Don't be a wallflower. You need to be stepping forward. Now. This is not to say you should be aggressive. You don't need to be going over and squeezing someone's hand, you know, as you shake and be like, ah, I'm the alpha male here. No, it's going to be all about just trying to make connections. Learn more about the other person than you're willing to give of your so I see quite a few people trying to network and the very first thing they're doing is trying to get showered praise upon themselves. Me. I love to hear about me. Guess what? What a lot of people are doing when you're talking about you without even being asked about it. They're typically tuning you out and they're thinking about how they can work themselves into the conversation. So I would just recommend step outside your comfort zone, meet new people, try to get to know them and then you can figure out some way in which they can work within your network to help build out your author brand.

I think this is excellent advice, and we talked about that during a live stream and in a video I did afterwards. Speaking about building your brand from your book. It really is about giving without the expectation of receiving. Dale is really generous, and if he ever asks me for something, which is really rare, it's always a heck yes. Like when he asked me to write the forward for this book, he was actually nervous. I would say no, but I was honored. And truly, when somebody who's always generous with their time and gives you way more than you've ever given them asks you for something, the answer is yes. It's not overnight that this kind of networking stuff happens, and I think that is what frustrates people. But networking takes time and consistent effort. But it pays off so much in the long run that it is worth it. All right, I wrapped this up with a really tough question because Dale packed this book full of great advice for selling books on Amazon, and I asked him to pick his number one tip, the big one, the pot of gold. So, Dale, what is it?

This is the biggest tip. When you're trying to sell more books, a lot of people automatically go back to keywords, and they think to themselves, well, if I just change XYZ for my keywords and put ABC in there, it'll just, you know, rain money down upon me. But the thing is, folks, don't get keywords to try to appease the algorithmic gods. All right? Put keywords together for your ideal audience, and then you're gonna need to build your brand and sell more books to build more relevancy for given keywords. So that way it's served to your ideal audience. So don't build out keywords based on an algorithm. Build it out based on your audience.

That was a mic drop moment, my friends. I've actually never thought of it quite in that manner before. So if you hear me saying that in the future, you know I just borrowed it. The brilliant Dale. Okay, so, Dale, where can folks find your book to get a copy? Because they really need to get a copy today.

That's a good question. Give me just a second. I do have a quick link.

Okay, when your book launches, you're going to get asked that all the time, and you want that quick link to come out a lot quicker than it did for Dale. Thankfully, this wasn't live, and technically, I could have had my editor delete that part, but then we would have never known that he didn't have a smooth answer for you on take one. And I wanted you to see he's human and remind you to have an answer like this one ready to go. So Dale, where can people find you and your book?

Hey folks can go ahead get ahold of me over@self publishingwithdale.com you're going to find quite a bit of information about my YouTube channel, my blog, my podcast, and of course my published books. We'll just keep it simple. Self publishingwithdale.com and you can get your copy of the Amazon Self Publisher when you visit dalelinks.com selfpubbook okay, so go.

To dalelinks.com self pubbook and get your copy. I'll put the link in the description below. Well, I think that was a really awesome episode with Dale, wasn't it? Did you get a cool tip from today? If you did, please smash that thumbs up button on your way down to comment below and let us know which was your favorite tip. Or if you've read Dale's book yet, what was your favorite tip from his book? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbooks swag. We have new videos every Tuesday and Friday. Make sure you catch everyone by subscribing to the channel and turning those notifications on. You're fun. Do you want to hang out a little more? Okay, great. This video right here is the latest on Amazon Author Central, but if you've seen that, then I also recommend you check out this one on building your brand from your book in 2021 and beyond. Head on over to the one that you most want to see and I'll be waiting for you right there.