Update Your Amazon Book Description to Sell More Books #amazonpublishing #bookmarketing

In the first month of January. In the first month of January, in January of 2024, Amazon did an update that changes some of the advice you might know about book descriptions. So if you want to sell more books on Amazon, well, you better make sure you know what the update is. So this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julia, the book broad of book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing services company and I'm a four time self published author. If I were to give you a list of things to to review with your Amazon page that you should be looking at, make sure your book is selling as well as it should be on Amazon. I would say things like what does the page look like when you land on it? Is it formatted properly? Does your book cover look fantastic? Does your title and subtitle work to sell your book? How many reviews do you have? What are the average stars? And then I would probably take another step and go, what's in your editorial reviews? Do you have compelling a content? What are those reviews? Say these are the things to look at when you look at your Amazon page, but the most important things are are things that you can't see at first glance when you land on the page, which would be your keyword and category selection. Amazon's algorithm wants to help you sell your book. They make money when your book sells, so they want to show it to people who will buy it. If your keywords and categories are off, they'll start showing it to the wrong people. Those wrong people won't buy it. And bit by bit, Amazon's going to stop showing your book to people. So step one is to make sure those keywords and category selections are good. We'll do a deep dive session which is the two hour training we do in a monthly basis on this subject real soon. So make sure you you're on our newsletter list. So you get the invite because it's free to join live, but you only get the link if you're on our newsletter list. So get on the list@book launchers.com forward slash newsletter. Now, assuming you've got your keywords and categories all set and your book is appearing to the right people, the next thing is to make sure that book description is selling your book. And Amazon recently made a big change. So it's a good time to revisit your Amazon page and make sure you're covered. You see again, if those keywords and categories are working and your cover and title are doing their job, the person hits your page and you want them to hit buy or at least save for later or add to list. And if your book description isn't selling your book, they may end up clicking off of the page without doing any other action. And that's not a good thing. So what does a good book description look like and what does this change? Well, the change they made made it so that a lot more text appears from the book description. It used to be the headline, which was basically the first two sentences, was oh so important because that's all you saw. And it had to be so compelling that somebody would click the Read More link underneath, reveal the full book description. Don't mistake me here because the first sentence is still oh so important. It has to hook a reader. It needs to grab them and make them see this book is absolutely for them. But it used to just be that was the really important piece so that they clicked Read more. But now almost the entire description is appearing. In fact, when you go to my book right here, you can see the entire description appears here. And what immediately strikes me is that we need a little bit more formatting to make this stand out. Go to your page and see what your page looks like now that this update has happened. Because now when you look at this Self Publish and Succeed page, those bullets become really important. And as I look at this, I would like to see a little bit more bolding. So important words are standing out and even a little bit of improved spacing. This is all HTML coding, so sometimes it does look a little funky depending on what browser you're on. But going to another example, you can see on this book page, it's a much longer book description than My Self Publish and Succeed. It's Stan Sloven's better listening. And you do you see a big chunk of his book description, but at the very bottom you have to click Read More to read the last lines. It's not a lot extra at the bottom, but this is a pretty big change because Amazon used to only show a little bit and now it's showing the whole thing. So check your page and make sure it's looking as good as it should, because now it's not just about that first line, it's about a first impression. Make your description compelling and simple to absorb quickly. So it's sells your book. So a couple of tips on this. Keep the sentences short, use simple and direct language and make that formatting really, really pop. You can see how it's even more important now because the whole description is appearing. It's not just those first couple of sentences. So think about bullets, bolding, short paragraphs and spacing so it's pleasing to the eye and it makes it easier to absorb your material. Because if it's a big block of text, the brain is just going to go, oh, that's too much work. When your description is appealing, it will invite the reader to keep going, instead clicking to a different page. And of course, you're reading the text. But while you're reading, the mind is more processing how the page is making the reader feel. Is this page giving them a sense of clean, calm, easy to digest, or is it giving them a sense of overwhelm? And of course, make sure you've checked your keywords and work them into that description. Don't go crazy and try to stuff them in. When you're doing this update and you do your keyword research and you discover maybe another word or that could be used to describe something in your book, description is probably performing better than the word you're currently using. Change it out. Remember, the book description isn't a book summary, it's sales copy. Its goal is to sell your book, and it's not static. You can update it. You don't have to cover all the things that you've covered in your book. Think of it like a movie trailer. And when you're watching that movie trailer, they often just show you the juiciest bits of the movie. So you want to watch the movie. Do the same thing with your book description. Now that you've watched this, Amazon thinks you should absolutely watch this one. Or you can check out the latest and greatest from the channel. Click on over. I'll see you there.