Your Amazon Book Marketing Strategy Is Now Obsolete. Here’s What A10 Changed

The latest Amazon algorithm Update, lovingly called A10 in the publishing community, dropped in May of 2025. But it takes a while before anyone can really start to understand the changes that have been made. And wow, this one is impactful. And the biggest changes mean that your marketing strategies need an update if you're selling books on Amazon. So if you want to make sure that you're staying up with the times and selling as many books as you can on Amazon, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, your one stop shop for all things nonfiction, book writing, publishing and marketing, including our amazing software for book marketing called Author Launch Kit. I started talking about this in the summer. Book launch days don't look like they used to. The days of big launches blasting through all the bestseller flags on Amazon, those days they're gone. Amazon did inform us that they were updating sales reporting to not be hourly, but rather to be daily with a bit of a lag. But the real impact of what that means for marketing is now a lot clearer than basically just realizing your launch day won't look as big as it potentially is, but the days after will be better if you did some good work in pre sale. Now, Dave Chessen did a training not that long ago on the A10 update, which by the way, as I mentioned at the start, A10 is an unofficial name given to this update. It's not an official Amazon name. And while Amazon never discloses exactly what their update to their algorithm really mean, a lot of people do a lot of research to figure it out. And we've done a lot of book launches in the time since the update, so we've seen a lot of things change. Now there's been some key changes, sales velocity, keyword stuffing, internal PPC ads. None of those things are valued like they used to be on the platform. We're also finding the customer experience. You know, organic relevance, external traffic is what is more important. Now, there's really no value in doing a bunch of keyword stuffing into your description. In fact, the new algorithm seems to penalize anything that's awkward. It's going to favor natural, reader friendly language. Now, all that said, you do need to be very conscious about your title, your subtitle and your keywords. Those keywords that you put in the KDP box and your description, and of course what's showing in the read sample. With all of that information, the algorithm is determining where your book should sit and how it can be set up to convert if it finds other books just like yours and determines some phrases you should rank for based on how those other books have done. That's what it's going to do. I think it's always important to remember that Amazon has one goal and that is to make money. So if you know that this is actually a positive for you, you have the opportunity to make more money if you play by the rules Amazon is playing by because they see them converting better. Now the big shift is while keywords still matter, a lot of what Amazon is going to derive the the keywords from is contextual. So being thoughtful about your title, subtitle, keyword phrases and description is really and what appears in the early part of your book is really what's vital. Beyond that, this fundamentally shapes book marketing by de emphasizing quick hacks like Hooray for that and rewarding that authentic multi channel strategies for authors and publishers. This means visibility isn't just about Amazon ads anymore or a one day flurry of sales at 99 cents. It's about building demand elsewhere, choosing the books you want Amazon to think you're like and building it all up together to create a more organic and holistic marketing approach. So what does all this mean? Well, number one, and this really came from Dave Chessen, external traffic becomes a powerhouse. Signal views and referrals from social media, email lists, blogs, influencers, anything that is proof of genuine demand will boost your organic rankings. This seems to improve the search placement for genre related queries. Basically you don't want your sales source to be a single thing like ads or a link directly entered over and over. Number two, listing optimization shifts to reader first design. Now frankly, we've been doing reader first anyways, but it's not that keywords don't matter, they're just not as important as they were before. I think it's important to be thoughtful about the books that you want Amazon to think your book is like. And to do that you can use the keywords those books rank. For now you can use the reverse ASIN tool on Publisher Rocket, which is my preferred tool for this kind of work. You can get it@book launchers.com Rocket that's our affiliate link. But really what we're trying to do is thoughtfully create clear and compelling descriptions that read like a hook, not SEO. And then we want to drive conversions when someone is shown our book. So making sure you have a great cover and compelling copy that should be number one and two on your list and then making sure the keywords you focus on are less about SEO and More about I'm like her kind of marketing. Again, this really has to be emphasized because a lot of people get up in arms against Amazon. But Amazon cares about making money, which means it cares about professional covers aligned with genre norms. Because getting a great click through rate matters a lot. And Amazon also wants to convert, which is what we want too as authors. We want to make sure that people see our book and click add to cart. So these changes are ultimately going to benefit all of us. And that's why we were focused on reader first from the beginning. And it's not that keywords don't matter, it's that it matters more to utilize those keywords to help Amazon figure out what books you like so that they know what books to show your book amongst number three, ads still have value, but they're supportive. They're not the savior of your book. Ultimately, what this one is is you need more marketing than just ads. And this is going to be a tough pill for the authors to swallow who really just want to sell books and don't want to do any other marketing. Because I do hear that from time to time. Can I just sell my books without doing the interviews, the articles, the social media? And the answer is that it's getting harder and harder and harder to do that. And I talked to a guy the other day who's writing a book with a pen name. He said the book is not about me, I don't want to use it to be a thought leader or I just want to help people. And I said that's fine, but you're going to need a marketing plan that's going to help with that. And if you want to use a pen name, you really have to focus on influencer outreach and getting other people to recommend you. Because he didn't want social media, he didn't want media attention of any kind, and he thought a good book is going to sell. There's so much more to it than that. Ebook sales and Amazon ads are only going to get you so far. In fact, Amazon ads don't do much for books unless the author is driving traffic to their page and getting reviews and continuously proving to Amazon their book will convert. I've also been seeing some commentary that you need to treat your launch like a 30 day event, not a one day event. And I'll post one article. We read on this down below because it summarizes it really well and it clearly reflects what we've been seeing too. Post launch visibility hinges on continuous momentum. Not a single day of sales, a sales Deep after week one can eject your book from recommendations, especially in competitive genres like romance or self help reviews and author credibility which comes from author central profiles, external bios, other links feeding in that all feeds into your seller authority which influences your trust scores, which impacts how much your book gets shown to Amazon shoppers. So what do you do? Well besides getting Publisher Rocket and doing some periodic checks on your category and see what the top selling books in your category are doing so you can adjust some of your phrasing from time to time, plan a multi week campaign and plan them to be on regular intervals and focus on getting reviews early and often. I really am enjoying get authentic book reviews. It has been fantastic for helping my books self publish and succeed and self promote and succeed. Get reviews. We've been using get books reviewed for for our clients and that site is working well for them too. Sign up months before you need it, ideally so you can collect points and then get more reviews when you need them. But really what we're shooting for is 50 plus early reviews and steady external pushes to maintain that top 100 genre spots as long as you can. And if you do that, Amazon will help you perform better. I think for the most part this is a good update. It favors quality over quantity and it even further devalues the games that people used to play to rank in the Amazon algorithm. It does demand more upfront investment in branding and outreach. Authors who ignore external marketing risk obscurity while those adapting they're likely to see compounding sales. It also means tools like Publisher Rocket to stay on top of the keywords and the bestsellers and what they're doing. That's very important and a tool like our Author Launch Kit is going to be vital to keep the outside marketing activity going with podcaster interviews, media interviews, influencer outreach, content marketing and more. Of course, if you don't have Author Launch Kit, head on over to book launchers.comalk to get it. It works incredibly well with Publisher Rocket. Ultimately you want to drive external traffic to your Amazon page, email newsletters, social proof through influencers, even SEO optimized author websites linking to Amazon will help keep converting traffic hitting your book. If you're an author, this is an update to treat your book like a brand, not a transaction. And again, grab Author Launch Kit and Publisher Rocket to help support you with that. See you on the inside.