Book Not Selling? How to Revive a Stalled Book on Amazon KDP

Is your book sitting on Amazon collecting nothing but virtual dust? Whether you launched your book last week or last year, if you're looking for some ways to revive a book that is not selling on Amazon, KDP well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad. I'm founder of Book Launchers and a four time author and we've worked with hundreds and hundreds of authors at Book Launchers and sometimes they come to us with a book that is sitting on Amazon and just not selling. In that case, we do a zero sales audit and we evaluate what the next steps are to help revive sales. And I'll take you through elements of that which you know begin with the first step, auditing what is happening. The first step is to analyze and then based on that, update your book. So first we want to evaluate the basics. This is where metadata matters. And my favorite tool for checking metadata is Drumroll Publisher Rocket and my affiliate link because yep, I have an affiliate link for this product because I Love it. Book launchers.com Rocket now what I need to check is the categories my book is in and whether they make sense. And also I can use a great tool here to look at what my competitors books are doing and what the keywords are that they're selling for. I'm talking competitor books. I mean the books that I think my books should be sitting beside in the virtual bookshelves. And with Rocket's Reverse ASIN tool you can do this really fast. Watch. Let's say my book Self Publish and Succeed wasn't selling. I might look at a book like Dale Roberts Self Publishing for New Authors and use it to do some research. I would go to the Amazon page, grab the asin or the 10 digit ISBN and and then take that over to Rocket to look up the keywords that are helping that book sell. And then I would enter that number into the competitive analysis or competition analysis and see what the categories he's in are. This information would be something I then use to compare where my book is and make sure everything is a okay. And you can see that once you get this data you can drill deeper and start to really analyze if you have any metadata issues. But I also want to go to these categories and look at the covers. And then after I've looked at the covers I want to take a really critical look at my own book cover. You want to review your book cover and consider updating it to be more eye catching and professional. A poor cover design can significantly impact sales even if the COVID is nicely designed. If it's not a fit for your category or it doesn't appeal to your ideal reader, you. You're going to struggle to get that book moving. Let me say that again because a lot of people love their cover, but it's not selling. It has to appeal to your ideal reader. So dig into this after you're done that, review your book description. Don't think of it as a book summary. Think of it as sales copy. Is that copy going to sell your book? Ensure your book description is compelling and keyword optimized. And now you have that keyword list from your rocket research. Use it. And then with this research, it's easy to double check that your book is priced within the ranges that the top selling books are priced. Being too much cheaper can signal it's too cheap, and being too expensive can scare readers away. So check that your pricing is competitive for that category and the format that you're in. Next up, it's time to consider improving the content. What should you do to improve this? Well, one service we have that can help if we have the capacity, is a book assessment. So you can email us and ask if we have room to do this. It's $500 and we'll go through your book, including the COVID and will identify things that could be issues and opportunities for you to improve the book. If you're wondering what to do to make your book better and more marketable, having us or someone else go through it can be really valuable to identify whether you need to refresh that content. Also, reading any reviews you have will give you a clue as to whether there's things in your book that should be changed, updated or added as well. So check those reviews. Next up, optimize for discoverability. Okay, so that metadata work you did above, well, now it's time to update that in your KDP dashboard. Logging into my neglected book, the new brand you'd I'll show you what I mean. So here's the book description spot. You can take those keywords and feed a few of them into this book description or even rewrite this whole book description to be some killer sales copy that will be irresistible to your reader. Then scroll on down and update these categories if you need to. And hot tip here, I would only change one category today and then in a few weeks after you monitor what your book is doing, consider changing another category. Now, if you're dead in the water and it hasn't sold a copy in a long time, well, you can probably change it all. But if it sold a few I would probably change one thing at a time. Now here you can add in those new keywords that you didn't put in your description into these keyword boxes. Now, there's a whole lot more to keywords than just dropping them in here, so make sure you watch the video at the end. Or even better, go over to Rocket Publisher Rocket and take their keyword course on this because they are masters of keyword research and usage. Okay, now next up, let's talk formats. If you look at the top selling books in your category and they all have audiobooks, soft cover and hardcover books of a lot along with ebooks, it might be time to invest in different formats. I especially recommend this if you're going to be doing a big marketing push to get your book going after this refresh, it can be really worthwhile to add formats because multiple formats like audiobook, paperback and hardcover in addition to that Kindle increase visibility and appeal to different reader preferences. Now, audiobook production is an investment, whether it's money or time or both, and so I would really only recommend adding that option if you are going to do a big marketing push. Which leads me to the next step. Once you have gone through all of the above steps, it's time to get back onto the marketing train and get some momentum. Marketing and Promotion Run Targeted Ads Start running low budget Amazon ads to increase visibility. Of course, you can run ads on other platforms too, but my first stop would be Amazon so I can confirm that these changes that I have made are going to generate some results. Amazon ads are low cost and can be a great way to tell if your cover or your description or your keywords are on point now or not. At the same time, build reviews. Seek honest reviews from readers, book bloggers, and even book review services. Reviews add credibility and can boost your book's visibility in Amazon's algorithm. And you can use services like Booksprout to help with this. You can visit booklaunchers.com booksprout and you'll get a free month of their service when you do that. But their service works well to get a few reviews. You can also check out book sirens or if you're willing to do reviews for other people, you can use a service like getauthenticreviews.com regardless. Having recent reviews is always, always important for social proof that your book is good and relevant to a reader in this moment, and the Amazon algorithm will reward you with more visibility. If you're getting reviews actively, next, look at your pricing strategies. A temporary price drop can work really well to increase momentum. One thing we do for our clients at book launchers every 90 to 180 days is a 99 cent ebook sale will run ads through promo services like Written Word Media and run short term promotions or price drops to attract new readers. This can sometimes help revitalize your book because you get sales momentum and you'll get a few reviews as you get a lot more sales. We also find that, well, most sales will be in the ebook format because this is a 99 cent sale. Some people just prefer an audio or print version and will pick that up during the promo. So it can work really well for an overall sales boost. I mean, a lot of readers might be like me and I have some books that I buy in audio and then I buy the print version or I buy it in Kindle and then I buy the audio version afterwards. The books I love I tend to consume in multiple formats. Now, depending on what kind of a push you want to do, you may want to revise and relaunch. We just did this for author Amy Friesen with her book Breadcrumbs. With this she actually added content to her book and it was a significant amount, but now we're launching it again. You don't have to do a total update and expand your book to relaunch though, you can just treat it like it's new. So the relaunch strategy you consider a full relaunch with a new marketing plan. This can include building an ARC team, your advanced reader copy team, creating pre launch hype on social media, planning a strategic launch day push, or even having a relaunch party. You can combine it with promos, parties, you know, and more media if if you want. There's no rule anywhere that says you can't relaunch a book. And of course there are options that we talk about all the time. Expand your reach. Cross promotion, Collaborate with other authors in your genre for cross promotion, or participate in some sort of a multi author event, or run a group promotion deal. And of course there's always content marketing. Create blog posts, videos, podcasts, any kind of content related to your book's topic to continue to attract interested readers. And of course, if you want help with all of this, we have our full service marketing offerings which you can reach out to us@book launchers.com apply to set a call to chat with us about it. Or if you're more of a I want to do it myself but I need help knowing what to do. You can go to our Author Business Accelerator. It's a low cost monthly service where you can hop on calls with our book marketing experts, have them look at your ads, your book, your pitches and we have monthly training and it's a community where you can get support from your fellow authors. So you can visit authorbusinessaccelerator.com and give it a try for up to 14 days. And if you don't love it, well, we'll give you a full refund. But I'll be surprised if you don't love it. It's pretty awesome. Now remember, reviving a book often requires a combination of these strategies and it's not going to work overnight. Be patient and persistent as it takes time to see results. Continuously analyze what's working and adjust your approach accordingly. Now you probably want to know how to write a great book. Description well, that's right here and the video I promised on keywords is right here. After you've subscribed to the channel and said hello below, head on over to one of these videos and I'll see you there.