Full Free Book! Get Your Book Selling on Amazon by USA Today Bestselling Author Monica Leonelle

Chapter 22: Next Steps. This book has been particularly stressful to write, because there is truly so much to know about Amazon, and so many people who want to know it. I knew going into it, that it might get more visibility than some of my other books, but it's always when the book is done that I worry about actual and smart people with lots of experience of their own in the topic reading these words. As a reminder, if I got something wrong, just let me know. I have tried to be as careful as possible in this book to make sure nothing egregious slips through. I really appreciate the time you've taken to read this, and I hope it's been helpful to you in understanding how to increase your sales on Amazon using their own tools, along with what we know about the many algorithms that make their store hum along. Thank you so much for reading the second edition of this book, and thank you to the Kickstarter backers that made the second edition of this book possible. What next? Please send your questions and suggestions to Monica's team at support@writermba.com or team@theworldneedsyourpassion.com. We will get your message to the right person. We'd love to help you out. Monica's blog. I've been blogging professionally since 2006, and in the last several years have begun to collect all my work in one spot, under one brand called "The World Needs Your Passion." This is the one place on the internet where I am not "on brand" or niche-focused toward a goal. I bring my whole self to this blog, write about whatever I want, and share everything from my greatest lessons learned to best my business advice, to my love of Lego, tarot, Taylor Swift, and more. It's also a place where I keep the footer fully updated with all my links to everywhere you can find me on the internet. Read this resource: theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Monica's YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is The World Needs Your Passion, and I teach people how to find, pursue, nurture, reignite, and even make money from their passions. I also teach people about entrepreneurship, creativity, business, writing, art, and more. You can watch my channel, youtube.com/theworldneedsyourpassion. Monica's Podcasts. I post new 20-minute episodes about publishing going wide, serialized fiction, industry trends, and so much more on my podcast feed. TheProductiveNovelist.Buzzsprout.com. Russell Nohulty, and I also have a podcast for Writer MBA called Kickstart Your Book Sales. There are over 80 episodes here. Kickstartyourbooksales.buzzsprout.com. Follow Monica on Medium. I post regular articles about the publishing industry if you prefer to read about new developments. MonicaLeonelle.medium.com. Take our Author Ecosystems Quiz. The Author Ecosystems Quiz will give you more self-knowledge and help you identify what type of publishing business model is going to work best for you. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Noholti, creators of the Kickstarter Accelerator, Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sales Supercharged, and more. Https://author-ecosystem.com/ https://author-ecosystems.substack.com/ The Book Sales Supercharged Series. The Book Sales Supercharged Series focuses on each retailer, format, and platform, diving deep into everything you need to know to succeed in that particular space. If you want to dig into other platforms that are useful to authors, I encourage you to continue the series. I have books on all 5 major retailers. Get your book selling on Apple Books, Book Sales Supercharged #2. Get your book selling on Kobo, Book Sales Supercharged #4. Get your book selling on Google Play Books, Book Sales Supercharged #5. Get your book selling on Barnes Noble, Book Sales Supercharged #6. The series is available at all retailers. We are aggressively wide over here. You can find all the information about the series, plus grab the entire set of books in a bundle directly from my website, at a significant discount to purchasing each individually at retailers. shop.theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Your feedback, please. Our goal for writing this book is to help get more authors up to speed on how to use Facebook to build their careers. We would love to know how we did. There are two ways to leave feedback. Reviews. If you loved this book, we can always use an honest review on our public retailer pages, where other people looking for the books can see what real people think of them. Choose your retailer and leave a review here. theworldneedsyourpassion.com/reviewbus3. Feedback form. If you have anything you'd like to share privately, please feel free to fill out our feedback form here: theworldneedsyourpassion.com/feedback. All answers are private, unless you say we can use the responses publicly in our marketing materials. Spread the word. Can you think of 2 people who could use this book in their lives? Perhaps they've just started their author career and don't know much about Amazon. Or perhaps they're considering going wide and wondering how they will make the transition. Maybe they are an old hat at Amazon and are always looking for the little tidbit or trick that can propel their sales and reach even higher. If so, we would love it if you could connect them to this book so they too can learn the ins and outs of Amazon and its visibility and discoverability algorithms. Thanks again for reading. Be the igniter. Chapter 1: An Amazon Introduction. Amazon is the largest e-commerce company on the planet, and holds 80-90% of the ebook market share in majority English-language markets like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and more. It also holds between 30-50% global ebook market share, across all places where digital books are sold online. Because of that, it's no surprise that authors and publishers focus a lot of their marketing efforts and attention on studying how to get more book sales on Amazon. In this book, we'll be doing the same. There are dozens of books on succeeding at Amazon as an author, but few are written from a global perspective that goes beyond the most basic elements of Amazon's bookstore and algorithms. This book aims to be in-depth, complete, and inclusive of all the different ways that you can make Amazon Storefront work for your books. Let's get started. Who is this book for? If you are reading this book, I'm going to assume you are an independent author or a soon-to-be-published independent author, an author interested in publishing on or optimizing their backlist at the ebook, print, and audiobook retailer Amazon. If you have somehow stumbled upon this book and you are confused by what I'm saying, then I'm not sure this is the book for you. I would recommend instead that you pick up the first book in this series, Get Your Books Selling Wide, Get the Basics of Publishing in Print, eBook, Audiobook, Translations, Apps, and More, Book Sales Supercharged #1. This book is going to catch you up on the series and prepare you for the following discussion about Amazon which is the subject of the book you're reading right now. The series starter, Get Your Book Selling Wide, is permanently free at most ebook retailers. Check the price to make sure. It costs nothing to try it, so definitely pick it up. With that out of the way, let's get right into the topic at hand: Amazon. What sets this book apart from other Amazon books? When studying math, which is the foundation of all algorithms, we usually spend a few minutes looking at how the math applies to most scenarios. The rest of the class period is spent looking at the special cases. So for example, you may have an equation that describes how price affects something, that works for nearly all scenarios, but then you'll spend a ton of time looking at questions like, what happens when you set the price to zero? What happens when you have a negative price, a return possibly? Throughout this book, we're going to use the base scenario to get clear on what's happening, then spend the rest of the time on special cases like permafree, preorders, different formats, and more. As I was writing this book, I realized most of the special cases are things that wide authors really care about and that play to wide author strengths. That's when I realized I was covering Amazon as a retailer in a really unusual way that hasn't been done much before. That's also when I realized that most resources don't go into the same level of detail about these special cases. Which is why so many wide authors don't understand the elements of the Amazon algorithms that can actually help them. In truth, both KDP Select authors and wide authors can learn a lot from this book, but not all of the sections will be interesting if you are an author primarily in KDP Select. Where most Amazon books focus almost exclusively on KDP Select and its inner workings, this book relegates that program to a single chapter. It instead covers how to get more sales, not borrows, not reads, at Amazon. Increasing your sales at Amazon. There's only one purpose of this book, and that is to help you increase your book sales at Amazon. We'll do this by discussing what marketing works at Amazon, and what doesn't, and then we'll dive into the algorithms that drive visibility on Amazon. I'll be honest, it's very weird to be writing a book that's so specific, as normally, I have pages and pages of material material to try to sell people into the concept of whatever I'm talking about. But let's face it, you just wouldn't pick up this book unless you specifically wanted to find more ways to increase your book sales at Amazon. That's it. There's nothing else. I'm racking my brain right now for something else you could possibly want from this book. So this book is about one thing: increasing your book sales at Amazon. Here's how we divvy up the chapters: Chapter 2: Amazon Basics—How to upload your books, find and handle links, and the things that really move the marketing needle at Amazon. Chapter 3: Optimizing Your Amazon Metadata—How to use your metadata to gain visibility in various places of the retailer's store. Chapter 4: Getting Merchandised with Amazon—the things you need to do before attempting to get merchandised, and the different ways you can get into in-store promotions. Chapter 5: A Primer on Algorithms. Why different authors might experience a platform different ways, and how algorithms can react differently to books based on category and genre. Chapter 6: A Primer on Artificial Intelligence. All retailers use some forms of artificial intelligence to sort books and other products, and many have also begun creating AI-generated content. This chapter offers a basic understanding of various terms that you might see as the publishing world changes and AI plays a greater role in subsidiary rights and offerings available through the platform, along with platform mechanics. Chapter 7: Introduction to the Amazon Algorithms. How visibility works on the store, what you can control and what you can't. Chapter 8: How Bestseller Lists Work at Amazon. How to better understand your book's sales rank as well as how sales rank affects bestseller lists, Category Lists, and Search Results (a special case bestseller list at Amazon). Chapter 9: How Popularity Lists Work at Amazon. How to better understand your book's popularity rank, and how this rank affects bestseller lists, category lists, and search results (a special case bestseller list) along with search at Amazon. Chapter 10: Mastering Search Optimization at Amazon. How search works on the store, what you can control and what you can't. Chapter 11: How to get the most visibility from carousels at Amazon. How carousels work on the store and how you can use them to gain more visibility. Chapter 12: What we can use Also Bots for at Amazon. How Also Bots work on the store and how you can use them to gain more visibility. Chapter 13: How personalized recommendations work at Amazon. How personalized recommendations work on the store and how you can use them to gain more visibility. Chapter 14: How Kindle Unlimited Works at Amazon. Amazon's KDP Select program is exclusive and pays authors based on a payout pool and page reads. Chapter 15: Creating and Selling Print at Amazon. Taking everything we've learned and applying it specifically to print books. Chapter 16: Creating and Selling Audiobooks at Amazon. Taking everything we've learned and applying it specifically to audiobooks. Chapter 17: Selling Translations at Amazon. Taking everything we've learned and applying it specifically to translations. Chapter 18: Creating Serialized Content for Kindle Vella at Amazon. An introduction to Amazon's fiction serial platform. Chapter 19: Selling Illustrated Books on Amazon. Taking everything we've learned and applying it specifically to comics, graphic novels, and other illustrated books. Chapter 20: Amazon Advertising: The Ads You Should Be Using and Testing. If you are a wide author looking to increase your sales at Amazon or use the algorithms at Amazon to teach them how to sell for you. Chapter 21: Marketing Recommendations Checklist for Amazon: A summary of takeaways and to-dos from all previous chapters. This is your Amazon marketing plan checklist. Chapter 22: Next Steps. The final takeaways from the book to help you improve your marketing and sales at Amazon. By the end of this book, you will know more about how to succeed at Amazon than 99% of all authors, and most publishers too. Who am I? My name is Monica Leonelle, and I have been independently publishing since 2009. I write young adult fantasy under Solo Storm and used to write romance under another pen name. I'm relaunching those under the Solo Storm brand. I have about 40 books total in my catalog, 25 of which are fiction. My urban fantasy novella, The Last Daughter, hit the USA Today bestseller list in 2017 as part of a boxed set. I've also written over 15 nonfiction books about writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and business. You can learn more about my work at TheWorldNeedsYourPassion.com. Studying the Amazon Algorithms. When it comes to Amazon, I have no inside information or direct line to the CEO. That is coupled with how Amazon in particular keeps a fairly tight lid on how their retailer storefronts work, aside from a few key things that they share privately through webinars, in person, or on a one-to-one call. I am not a representative of Amazon. This is not an official guide to Amazon, and I can't guarantee that I understand absolutely everything about Amazon or that everything I've put into this book is 100% accurate. Amazon as a company does not talk about their algorithms across any of their software or products, which means that a lot of my information around how the algorithms work come from observation, talking to other authors, and educated guesses as to what might be happening behind the scenes. In short, and this is very important, unless the mechanics of the store are confirmed by an Amazon representative, it's not a fact about how the retailer works. Throughout the book, I'm largely speculating, and while I try to use language that indicates that, I don't always get it right. And I tend to think I'm right most of the time, so sometimes the ego has a way of writing something with confidence when I don't 100% know that it's true. So even if I sound sure of what I'm talking about, always take it with a heap of salt. None of us can be sure except Amazon. We can only make smart, educated guesses and experiment to see if we get the expected result in the store. Getting Things Wrong Sometimes. This book and Book Sales Supercharged, the series of books that it's attached to, covers an ambitious spread of topics in intense detail. I consider myself as well-versed in the publishing industry as any independent author making a full-time living at this. Still, there is plenty that I don't or can't know. I have done everything humanly possible to get these books right, but there may still be gaps in my knowledge or places where we misstate something. Call me out. No, seriously. Notice that I got something wrong or suspect that my educated guess is not so educated? I want to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out to me with corrections or additional information if I've gotten something wrong within these pages. I want to make these books the best resource they can be, so I won't be offended. You can email me at team@theworldneedsyourpassion.com or through my email with Writer MBA, support@writermba.com. I'll be sure to incorporate those updates into the next version of the book. Lastly, Amazon and the publishing industry as a whole are evolving rapidly. Things are changing all the time on this platform. It's a lot to take in, and even more to keep updated. While I will be issuing new editions of this book regularly, Please keep in mind the publishing date on the version you're reading, as much of the book could be out of date in a few short years. Consistent Formatting Across the 5 Retailer Books. All Big 5 retailer books in this series—Amazon, Amazon Kobo, Google Play Books, and Barnes Noble—are formatted in a similar way on purpose. I want you to be able to find the thing you need, and easily be able to compare and contrast retailers by comparing and contrasting chapters. I also have to share many of the same messages, like in the first and last chapters of every book, and these messages don't change. I have written a primer to aid in your understanding of algorithms and how they work. As retailers continue to incorporate artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI, I need to provide a primer on that too. It would be foolish to try to find a unique and interesting way to write the same information 5 different times, so I've written these chapters, along with the first and last chapters of every book, once. I've made these chapters the best possible for you, so that no matter which book you are reading, you have the chapter for easy reference. If you are reading multiple books about the Big Five, you can safely read these chapters once and skip them in subsequent books. Use them again only if you need to refresh yourself on the concepts. Where you can find even more information about Amazon. If you want to follow industry news as it's happening, make sure you join my Substack newsletters. Each newsletter offers regular articles, with about half posted for free and the other half paid. By becoming a free subscriber, you'll receive great news and analysis about what is happening at various retailers and in the publishing community in general. By becoming a paid subscriber, you'll get all the content plus access to the full archives, where you will find several articles on each retailer. The biggest benefit to joining is that my newsletters are an extension of this book and the rest of the books in the series. My coverage goes deeper and is more accurate than tech sites that do not have a focus on publishing. By supporting my newsletter, you are supporting a niche news resource with a slant toward what publishing is truly interested in. My Substack newsletters are author analyst. Amazon and all of the other big 5 retailers are changing all the time. Meanwhile, this book gets updated every 2 to 5 years, and a lot can change in that time frame. This is a place where I can offer my news, analysis, and opinion on happenings in the industry, and I'm usually able to break news long before news outlets do. For authors who are going aggressively wide in subscriptions and memberships, this publication takes a deep dive into everything about serialization, fiction apps, and subscriptions and memberships. AuthorAnalyst.Substack.com. Author Ecosystems. For authors who are trying to get to the next level in their publishing business, it would help to know exactly what kind of author you are. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Noholti, creators of the Kickstarter accelerator Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sales Supercharged, and more. AuthorEcosystems.substack.com. Our community to support Amazon authors. My Book Sales Supercharged series co-author Russell Nohulty and I also have a Circle community. Circle is a fantastic, decentralized platform that has similar functionality to Facebook without many of the downsides. Please join us in our Circle community to ask questions and continue the conversation from this book. We share lots of awesome stuff related to this book series there. Go.writernba.com. Additional resources: Read Monica's blog. I've been blogging professionally since 2006, and in the last several years have begun to collect all my work in one spot, under one brand called "The World Needs Your Passion." This is the one place on the internet where I am not "on brand" or niche-focused toward a goal. I bring my whole self to this blog, write about whatever I want, and share everything from my greatest lessons learned to best my business advice, to my love of Lego, tarot, Taylor Swift, and more. It's also a place where I keep the footer fully updated with all my links to everywhere you can find me on the internet. Read this resource: theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Subscribe to Monica's YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is The World Needs Your Passion, and I teach people how to find, pursue, nurture, reignite, and even make money from their passions. I also teach people about entrepreneurship, creativity, business, writing, art, and more. You can watch my channel, youtube.com/theworldneedsyourpassion. Subscribe to Monica's podcast. I post new 20-minute episodes about publishing, going wide, serialized fiction, industry trends, and so much more on my podcast feed, theproductivenovelist.buzzsprout.com. Follow Monica on Medium. I post regular articles about the publishing industry if you prefer to read about new developments, monicalenelle.medium.com. Check out the rest of the series. The Book Sales Supercharged series focuses on each retailer, format, and platform. Diving deep into everything you need to know to succeed in that particular space. You can find all the information about the series, plus grab the entire set of books in a bundle directly from my website at a significant discount to purchasing each individually at retailers. Shop.theworldneedsyourpassion.com. Take our Author Ecosystems Quiz. The Author Ecosystems Quiz will give you more self-knowledge and help you identify what type of publishing business model is going to work best for you. Are you a nimble desert, an expansive grassland, a rolling tundra, an interconnected forest, or a dynamic aquatic? Dig deep into the new methodology developed by USA Today bestselling authors Monica Leonelle and Russell Noholti, creators of the Kickstarter Accelerator, Go Wide Grow Wide, Book Sales Supercharged, and more. Https://authorecosystem.com/ https://authorecosystems.substack.com/ Takeaways. Throughout the book, I'll offer takeaways and task checklists at the end of every chapter. I'll also post takeaways as they come within each section to help you solidify some of the material which can get dense and specific in places. Takeaways cover the big ideas, while the task checklist contains to-dos and action items that will move the needle forward for you on this platform. The takeaways for this chapter are: This book aims to help you better market and sell your books on Amazon. Over the course of 20+ chapters, we break down all the ins and outs of this platform in incredible detail found nowhere else. You'll know more about Amazon than 99% of authors traditionally or independently published. I am not a representative of Amazon or Amazon, so there is a level of speculation in this work. If you think I'm wrong, let me know at support@writermba.com. The books are just a starting point to understanding this platform. Books are inherently static objects, and the publishing world is changing rapidly, faster and faster every year. Please follow my newsletters and social media content to stay up to date on newest developments about Amazon. Task Checklist: Subscribe to the Substacks. Join our community. Follow me on social media channels and my podcast. Grab the books as a bundle and at a steep discount from my website. Keep on reading. Chapter 2: Amazon Basics. In this chapter, I'm going to share everything you need to know to get started with publishing on Amazon. I've also included some tips on topics that I know are among many authors' frequently asked questions about this platform. By the end of the chapter, you should have enough knowledge to get your catalog onto this retailer, and be ready to start making sales. How do I publish to Amazon? You can sign up for a single account under the Kindle Direct Publishing program. You are not allowed to have multiple accounts, and this can be grounds for account termination. Sign up here: kdp.amazon.com. To get your audiobooks on Amazon, you will go through the ACX program. Sign up here: https://www.acx.com/. You can also upload to Amazon through a distributor like Draft2Digital PublishDrive, StreetLib, IngramSpark, and Findaway Voices for audiobooks. Most independent authors go direct. There are so many benefits to going direct, including more control over your metadata and some merchandising opportunities. It can also be much more costly to use a distributor, as they often take a monthly fee or percentage. Takeaway: You can upload your print and ebook titles to Kindle Direct Publishing. You can upload your audiobook titles to ACX. You can also use a distributor to get your books to these platforms, but most authors go direct. Finding links on Amazon. It's fairly easy to grab links at Amazon, but one thing to note is that every country that Amazon has a retailer storefront for has a different link. It's important to grab links for all the major Amazon retailers. Unlike other storefronts, Amazon does not automatically forward the reader to their preferred storefront. This is called geo-linking. If you send a UK reader to the Amazon.com storefront,, they are likely to get a message that they can't purchase the book. They will then have to manually change the link, to point to the correct storefront. It's a pain, and many readers are happier to click away than to go through the trouble. To find these links, you need to know the retailer domain name. Everything about the link would be the same, otherwise. Here is an example of what the book links will look like, for different storefronts. United States: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RQQWH1W/. United Kingdom: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08RQQWH1W/. Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B08RQQWH1W/. Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08RQQWH1W/. Everything about the link is the same, aside from the retailer site. Clean links are important and often required to enter your books into third-party promotions and giveaways. To get a clean link, delete anything after the, as these are variables, usually tracking variables, that you don't need to pass along for the link to work. You may also want to include your links alongside links to the same book at other storefronts. A few universal links tools you could try include: GeniusLinks. Booklinker. Books2Read. BookFunnel. Many universal link tools will also allow you to add your own affiliate links, so be sure to do this. Takeaway: Give readers links to their correct storefront and make sure those links are clean. Having a landing page on your website or using a universal linker can help you organize your links. How do I sign up to be an affiliate? Affiliate programs are a great way to earn a little extra on links you are already using in your business. A lot of people sleep on signing up for this, but if you think about it, you can get another 4 to 7% commission on a product, which increases your royalty rate per book by a significant percentage. Amazon's affiliate program is unique because they sell other products besides ebooks, print books and audiobooks. You can get affiliate money on anything sold through the link, why not do so? Amazon sells many big-ticket items, and I have gotten huge payouts in the past, as a result of sending people to my books. You can sign up for the affiliate program here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/home Takeaway: Use the affiliate program at Amazon and every retailer you can qualify for to get an additional boost in revenue. How do I find my author page? You must sign up for an author page through Amazon's program, Amazon Author Central. You can sign up here: https://author.amazon.com/. Once you do, you can add your books to your author page and find many other tools that help you manage your presence on Amazon. We talk about some of these in the chapter on merchandising. You will need to create a new author page for each retailer site, which is the biggest downside of this feature, as there are about 20 retailer sites on Amazon. If you prioritize just the major English language sites, you still need several different pages. You can find the signup pages for these other Author Central accounts by changing the link to the correct retailer site. For example, the UK Author Central accounts are at author.amazon.co.uk instead of.com. You can also have up to 3 pen names under one account, but will need a second account if you have more than that. How do I find my series page? Amazon creates series pages based on you creating a series and adding books to it in Kindle Direct Publishing. You can do this as you create new book listings. There are a ton of benefits to having a series page that we discuss in later chapters. It's definitely worth putting your books in a series and creating your pages. Both the author page and series page are linked on every Amazon product page just below the title of the book, so you are able to check that your metadata is appearing correctly. Takeaway: Your author page and series pages have algorithmic advantages, and it is worthwhile to create and invest time in these pages. They are linked on every individual book product page you have, too. Additional Resources. In addition to this book, my company Writer MBA also has a section on Amazon in our course, Go Wide, Grow Wide. You can get the Go Wide, Grow Wide course à la carte, or you can access it month-to-month or year-to-year along with our community through the Writer MBA membership. The value of joining this course through any of the options is that a book is always going to be static, while our courses and membership are dynamic and constantly updated. You can also ask me, Monica Leonellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellellelle See pricing options at https://courses.writermba.com/. You can sign up for a single account under the Kindle Direct Publishing program. You are not allowed to have multiple accounts, and this can be grounds for account termination. Sign up here: kdp.amazon.com. To get your audiobooks on Amazon, you will go through the ACX program. Sign up here: https://www.acx.com/. You can sign up for the affiliate program here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/home/. You must sign up for an author page through Amazon's program, Amazon Author Central. Each retailer site has its own version of this. You can sign up for the US site here: https://author.amazon.com/. Takeaways. You have a surprising amount of control over your sales at Amazon, which makes it a dream for authors who like to check off boxes from their task lists. The best part is that when you do start to gain traction, it can really pay off in consistent 4- and 5-figure months. You can upload your print and ebook titles to Kindle Direct Publishing. You can upload your audiobook titles to ACX. You can also use a distributor to get your books to these platforms, but most authors go direct. Give readers links to their correct storefront and make sure those links are clean. Having a landing page on your website or using a universal linker can help you organize your links. Use the affiliate program at Amazon, and every retailer you can qualify for, to get an additional boost in revenue. Your author page and series pages have algorithmic advantages, and it is worthwhile to create and invest time in these pages. They are linked on every individual book product page you have, too. Task Checklist: Decide how you will upload to Amazon. Direct or distributor. Keep in mind that you can decide on a book level or series level as well. Most authors go direct. Sign up for the affiliate program at Amazon and update links across your universal links, your website, your social, and your advertising. Create a spreadsheet of Amazon links for your author page, series page, and book pages so that they are easy to access. Sign up for a universal links provider or create landing pages on your website for each book. Make sure to link to Amazon as one of the retailers on your website. Amazon prefers to be the first link and states that it is a factor for them in choosing your book for promotions and a consideration in acceptance to its affiliate program. Create an author page for each retailer or for several if you need to prioritize by using Amazon's Author Central platform. Create series pages for each of your series in the Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard. Keep reading, you have a ton of control over your sales at Amazon, and the rest of the book will help you get there. Chapter 3: Optimizing Your Amazon Metadata. One of the best ways to start at any retailer is to optimize your metadata. This means going back to your product pages and attempting to put the optimal content into the fields they ask for, including your book description, categories, keywords, and more. We will cover all of that in this chapter. There have also been several major changes for metadata on Amazon in 2023, and this chapter will also cover the most up-to-date information on those topics as of September 2023. Those two topics are: Categories. The New Eye Policy. Amazon is a unique retailer in that they ask for metadata that they may be using in the background. More than any of the other retailers, they get hit with scammers. Because of scammers, they have lots of checks and balances in place to defend the platform against people using the metadata fields to game the algorithms in disastrous ways. We discuss this in this chapter too. Choosing Categories. Categories have been through a ton of changes at Amazon in 2022-2023. After letting some of that dust settle, along with speaking to and researching the book catalogs of individual authors, I've put together 5 key points that I think can help cut through the noise of how authors should approach these changes. Number 1: You can only set 3 categories, sort of. You can technically still ask to be in more than 3 categories, up to 10 still it seems, by emailing Amazon. Unlike before, however, Amazon will only show your book in 3 categories at any given time. It seems like the new category changes are not a replacement for the big change that Amazon made previously, last September-ish, where it chose 3 categories for you and those were dynamic. Meaning they selected them based on internal metrics and data rather than anything you chose or submitted to them. Unfortunately, even when you choose your categories, you seem to get placed in whatever categories Amazon decides your book is about. I imagine this is to prevent scammers from flooding categories, but it results in Amazon giving authors less control over their placement in the store. This would not be an issue if its dynamic categorizing was foolproof, but it puts books in strange categories sometimes. This can cause them to lose visibility and rank in best-selling categories that may be a better fit. This is not the first instance of Amazon doing this. In fact, there is evidence that they already do this with your 7 keywords and possibly even your description, which is not indexed in their search, though it does seem to affect search ranking. The way the collective author community believes this works, AKA this is not confirmed by any representative, As your book changes rank, you get more keywords added or subtracted so your book can be found more or less in search. Categories appears to be doing something similar now, though there are not many details surrounding it thus far. You can see what categories your book is showing in by looking at your product page. Then you can click through and see what bestseller lists you are showing up on. One note that I have heard from many authors is that the automated system that Amazon has deployed seems to be getting categories wrong more often than not. Authors are complaining about being misplaced in irrelevant categories. Amazon has clarified two things: the support team cannot override the automated categories. The categorization is based on customer activity. I talk more about this below. Number 2: Authors might see limits on book or catalog visibility due to category changes. If your book can only be in 3 categories, it can also only be on 3 bestseller lists in the store at any given time. Something that further complicates the matter is that Amazon is auto-placing independent authors in 2 different types of categories: ebook only Mixed Format. Some authors don't realize that there are ebook-only categories, but those independent authors who know usually opt to place their books primarily in ebook-only categories. The mixed format categories include print, ebook, and audiobook. There is more competition for visibility on these bestseller lists, and print and, to some extent, audiobook formats, are going to favor traditionally published books over independent books. So not only is it impossible to be on a ton of bestseller lists, Amazon is also automatically putting books that primarily sell in ebook into these mixed format categories which are more competitive for ebooks. Understandably, a lot of authors on both the traditionally published and independent sides have complained about this. Amazon has stated the reason for this change, which is to stop category stuffing, which is putting a book in categories it doesn't really belong in. This has long been a practice of both scammers and seasoned authors alike, but it was clearly starting to affect the reader experience enough to get Amazon to take action. Amazon has also stated how these categories are determined, which is based on customer activity. While there is no further explanation on what that activity is, we can take an educated guess and assume it is based on the usual customer activity suspects. Also Bots. Also Views. Also Reads. As a reminder, all three of these customer activity carousels have been prominent on product pages before, but Amazon has slowly been hiding them from product pages. This is likely because the data is key, and if it is public, it can be scraped easily. I think the change could be a good thing for the average midlist author. If your books are in a smaller category that is usually dominated by books that don't belong there, your books now have a chance to be visible to the readers who are looking for them. The downside is that this change drastically affects visibility in the storefront., and it'll be harder and harder to be a 7-figure author on Amazon alone. It is a bad thing for authors with books that had high rank and thus could dominate the bestseller lists for 10+ categories they were in, so they might have been in categories that they didn't really belong in because it got them more visibility. Some series that I believe could be affected on the traditional publishing side, for example, are Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling) and A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J. Maas). Popular independent authors will likely also feel the challenges. Further, this may affect some popular KDP Select books because the readers who use the bestseller lists the most for discovery are going to be whale readers, who are often the primary target for authors mainly in Kindle Unlimited. For wide authors with mostly wide books, it probably doesn't affect you as much. That's because wide books can rarely hit bestseller lists in the category anyway. The math for how the lists are calculated heavily favors books in Kindle Unlimited due to treating one KDP Select borrow as one sale. It could still hit books that are in Kindle Unlimited but don't regularly hit bestseller lists. The biggest reason is also bots and personalized recommendations. If your book is frequently recommended to readers of books on these bestseller lists and they are not seeing as much traffic to their books anymore,, then you are likely not seeing as much traffic to your books either. While the category changes are bringing a massive reshuffling of the storefront, and authors will continue to see this in their catalogs as the store resettles. Number 3: Amazon is taking more measures to keep authors from mixing categories across age ranges. The other biggest challenge authors are having at the moment is that categories are separated by other factors, including age range. Adding an age range to your books is still optional. But in order to be placed in Children's, Middle Grade, and Young Adult vs Adult categories, it seems like you must add an age range that is appropriate for the genre. For example, if you write Young Adult crossover, it's fine to set the age to 14+ to get access to those YA categories. If you categorize as YA, and I would assume Children's or Middle Grade too, then you cannot join any of the adult categories. Your book may also get flagged for category adjustment if it crosses Young Adult and Adult categories. But it doesn't seem that Amazon forces you to change it, but rather just gives a warning. The good news is that YA readers, even adults, will find you more easily since YA is a smaller category than Adult and Adult books had flooded these categories previously. Of particular note on precedent around this in the industry, Barnes Noble is a retailer that requires you to set your book as either children's, middle grade, YA, adult, or erotica in order to access appropriate categories for your book. I believe that this is what Amazon is trying to achieve with this new category functionality. It makes sense on the whole for Amazon to do this, especially when categories set expectations for appropriateness for minors. #4 Amazon has made the adult content box explicit and clarified it. Before, Amazon had an adult content policy that put most of the erotica genre in the dungeon. Basically, if Amazon decided the book is inappropriate for 18 and under, usually due to cover image, title, and reviews, it removed it from search results for anyone who had not actively opted in to see adult "adult content." This meant that the main discovery tool was usually off of Amazon with a direct link to the book. More recently, Amazon has made this an explicit question they ask as part of the submission process. The company has updated their primary audience questions to reflect what they mean by "adult content." The question now reads: Does the book's cover or interior contain sexually explicit images "Or does the book's title contain sexually explicit language?" This isn't full clarification, but it does indicate that they are looking specifically for erotica, which will be removed from search results in the same way it was before. Having the option to click "No" is a good thing for romance authors. That said, the previous way of doing things still applies: if Amazon decides that the book belongs in the dungeon, it will make visibility adjustments. #5 Amazon categories are different across storefronts. Amazon categories have always been different across storefronts, which is one reason that I've always advised authors to look at what categories Amazon lists on product pages in key Amazon storefronts like US, UK, Canada, and Australia. In the past, you have been able to email Amazon to get your book into those categories for each store, not just the main US.com store. Now it seems that if you use the new categorization system that Amazon has, it messes up your categories in other storefronts. This is likely due to not having enough customer history on these storefronts to get your books in the right categories. Long story short, if you're having trouble getting into the right categories, you can most likely fix it by driving relevant sales to the book. And you have to do this by storefront. It won't necessarily take many sales, but that is my suspicion around this. #6 Amazon categories are otherwise unchanged. While there is a lot of change with categories on Amazon's storefront, it is not and has not substantially affected about 50% of independent authors based on my conversations with them. I'm always looking for the why around these things, and many of the things I mentioned primarily that it is going to more greatly affect authors who focused on bestseller list strategies for visibility, are the cause for this divide. It's also going to more greatly affect authors who wrote in genres that had low supply, high demand. Genres like clean, later-in-life, and women's fiction might have seen dips. The challenge is that for some authors, if it affects your books, it really affects your books. And it came out of nowhere. For many authors though, your greatest organic visibility on the storefront comes from personalized recommendations, which are the emails, carousels, and app push notifications that Amazon sends out to its individual users. For example, if you write paranormal royalty romance, Amazon has a list of readers who have bought and read paranormal royalty romance. When you submit your book, Amazon can tell by your title, subtitle, description, sample, and reviews that the book is a paranormal royalty romance. If your book has sales, it will get the book in front of paranormal royalty romance readers through personalized recommendations. The categories simply don't matter as much in this new era of Amazon's algorithms. More algorithmic conclusions we can draw from the category changes. While I do think categories can be a useful tool to aid in book discoverability, authors must keep in mind that Amazon has long been moving its metadata optimization fields to behind-the-scenes, automated algorithms. Some of the movements in the last decade that I can think of include: Keywords no longer used to determine search placement. Categories no longer controllable. Book descriptions no longer indexed. Many secondary connections that Amazon was analyzing also used to be in the foreground, but have now moved to the background, the most popular one being the "Also Bought" carousel. All of these pieces are still driving sales on the storefront, but Amazon is hiding or overruling them more and more so that they can't be gamed by scammers and spammers. Metadata optimization is one of the easiest ways for both seasoned and legitimate authors, as well as scammers, to game the system and propel a book through the algorithms. And there is a ton of money in doing so, at the Amazon storefront. So while many of these changes were rolled out and communicated poorly, they have been put in place to help readers find legitimate and professionally put-together books by real authors. On wide retailers, metadata optimization is still one of the best ways to find visibility in a storefront. Those of us on Amazon who play ball with the algorithms, or who ignore the algorithms, are naturally going to get caught in the crossfire of category changes. But the answer, or at least part of the answer, is probably to get as many relevant and tightly targeted sales as possible. And this is not that different than it ever has been. Takeaway: Categories have gone through a lot of changes. While it is helpful to get your books into the right categories, categories don't actually control as much of the visibility on Amazon's storefront as authors tend to believe. Categories are most closely tied to bestseller lists. Publisher Rocket releases new data on Amazon categories. One of the biggest changes is that Amazon has moved away from the standard BISAC categorization that is prominent in the United States. It's different for other countries and has now implemented its own categorization system that is more closely based on the categories it actually shows in its storefront. You can now choose 3 of these categories for each of your books. Number 1 to 54% are duplicate categories. Chesson notes that 54% of the new categories are actually duplicates. It took me a minute to understand what this meant, but my own understanding of it is that you can get to certain subcategories through two different category paths. The good news is that you can't select the same subcategory twice under two different paths. Amazon won't let you. So you don't actually have to worry about picking the same category twice. Chesson also notes that if your book is selling well and ranking high in the subcategory, Amazon could put you in adjacent subcategories in both paths. So it's not a bad thing when Amazon shows that your book is in the same subcategory with two different category paths. It's actually a feature in this new categorization system. If you want to know which categories are duplicates, you can now find that information in Publisher Rocket. Number 2: Over 27% are ghost, dead categories. This piece of information blew me away. 27% of the categories in the listings lead to absolutely nowhere. Chesson showed that these categories linked to pages that didn't actually have bestseller lists. I looked into his example, and I couldn't find the lists he used, just a broader category that contained mystery, thriller, and suspense instead of just mysteries. To identify these ghost categories, you will need to watch the video. Look to see if the name of the category is listed at the top, and if there is any information in the sidebar. The downside to selecting one of these categories is clear: if your book is listed in a non-bestseller list category, you can't rank on a bestseller list. This is going to affect Kindle Unlimited books much more than wide books, because they tend to focus on bestseller list visibility strategies, but it may also affect wide books that use bestseller list visibility to get sales. That said, I have a couple of my own theories on what these ghost categories actually are and how dead they actually are. It is my belief that Amazon has tightly segmented and automated lists of readers that like certain types of books. These lists are not visible on the storefront, but they drive a ton of the personalized recommendations via email, push notifications, and personalized carousels. If you have a strong bestseller list strategy on Amazon, then ghost categories may be something to avoid, but if you don't, I wouldn't be surprised if these categories still help to market your book through other areas of Amazon's algorithms. And if they are more relevant or more niched down, they could actually be a better choice for your book. Reminder: this is just a theory, and if you don't want to take the risk, it makes sense to avoid these categories altogether. If you want to know which categories are ghost categories, you can now find that information in Publisher Rocket. Number 3: Certain keywords are associated with how Amazon sorts your book into categories. Amazon has basically always had the policy of being able to remove or add you to categories keywords, and search terms throughout its store at will. More than any of the other retailers, it takes the stance that user-inputted data must be verified automatically before pushing it to the corresponding algorithmic mechanisms—and for good reason. Spammers, black and gray hatters, and even real authors with aggressive marketing tactics have spent decades trying to game Amazon's algorithms to increase visibility for their products in the storefront, Because of this, you can choose your categories, but Amazon will verify. They will check your category selections against title, subtitle, book description, keywords, and more. It's all gotta be in alignment, no surprise there. Publisher Rocket now gives keywords that you can use to strengthen your case for why you should be in various categories. This is awesome! You can use this to stay in your categories, and possibly get into new categories, according to Chesson. Takeaway: We're still learning about the new categories changes, and knowing how these duplicate and ghost categories work can save you a ton of headache. I also love Publisher Rocket's tool editions to find relevant categories and keywords. What metadata you should optimize at Amazon. Below are some additional tips for filling in Amazon's metadata when you list your book. Number 1, your book title, book subtitle, and series title. This is one of the most important ways you can get ranked for keywords. Amazon has confirmed that they index these things, though they imply that they don't treat this as more or less relevant than the keywords you enter in their 7 keyword section. One thing I always do is put the most important keyword for fiction, usually the main trope trope, into the official title, subtitle, or series. You are not supposed to have extraneous keywords in these fields, it's called keyword stuffing if you do, but it's fine to design these titles around your tropes, plus this then works on all other retailers pretty nicely too. For example, one of my series titles is Fairy Princess Spy Academy, and another is Napoli Vampire Royalty. The tropes are right there in the series titles. Which is helpful to readers while also being very helpful to Amazon's algorithms. If you didn't think to do this when coming up with your titles, that's okay. You can enter the same phrases into your keyword boxes, and it likely counts as much as having it in the title. Number 2: Your keyword section. There's a section in the backend for you to put your keywords. While it asks for 7 keywords, You can actually fill out multiple keywords in each box, totaling 50 characters per box. Amazon asks that you do not repeat words from your title, subtitle, and series, because those are already indexed. It wants new keywords, and you never need to repeat phrases within the keyword section either, like "teen," "teen," and "young adult," "young adult," for example. According to Chesson, Amazon mixes and matches your keywords to create new phrases, So, "vampire and royalty" might become "vampire royalty." But you may still prefer to use "vampire royalty" as a single phrase, especially if you know that it has a lot of traffic and you can rank well for it. He shares that information here: https://kindleprenuer.com/7-kindle-keyword/. Number 3: Your categories. You are only able to add 3 categories to your book on Amazon. It's imperative to choose only categories that are relevant to your book. Remember, relevancy is the most important thing to Amazon. Your categories will also become part of the keywords that you desire to rank on. Remember, the popularity lists, which are by category, are truly just a special view and sort order within search. Other Metadata Optimization. There's nothing else on the product page that specifically needs to be optimized, but I'll list a few tips and reminders below. Series Data. Make sure you have entered all of this in correctly, because it is likely one of the most important optimizations for the Kindle app. Series data is used in the end-of-book experience to take readers more readily into the next book in a series. Sample: Download your sample so you can check to see where the cutoff is and make sure it leaves readers wanting more. Reviews: You can get more reviews by offering advanced reader copies (ARCs) on BookSprout, NetGalley, and numerous other places. You don't need a ton of reviews, but it helps to have some as people do check them to make purchase decisions. Takeaway: Each piece of Amazon's metadata section is important. With Amazon being the largest book retailer in the world by a long shot, it makes sense to invest time into optimizing every piece to the fullest extent that you can. Amazon's AI Policy. Just a week or two before the second edition fo' this book came out, Amazon became the first major book retailer, and the first among the Big Five to announce an AI policy that focused on disclosure, There are a few key pieces to know about this policy. All book products require disclosure. It is required to fill out the information about your AI usage whenever you upload a new book. Honesty and compliance is part of the Terms of Service (TOS) agreement. Amazon is explicit that if they catch you breaking their disclosure rules, they consider it to be a violation of their TOS agreement. Which gives them further leeway to shut down your account. They can, of course, shut down anyone's account at any time, with or without reason, but it does seem like they intend to use disclosure violations to shut down scammer accounts. Amazon defines two terms around your disclosure requirements. You can find the official terms online, but I've summarized them below. AI-assisted works are those in which the creator is human, and AI is used to improve the product. AI-generated works are those in which all or part of the creation originated with AI, and a human performed or didn't perform additional work like editing on AI-generated content. The extent of the additional work does not matter for categorization. Amazon makes no judgment calls or bans on AI content. AI-generated content according to their definition is currently allowed on Amazon's storefront. You are allowed to sell it in the store. No public-facing information is disclosed. While this could change at any time, your answers to this question are not disclosed publicly at this time anywhere on the storefront. There is currently no separate section of the store and no indication of algorithmic penalty. There is no evidence of shadow banning. Shadow banning is a term used to indicate that something is suppressed algorithmically due to hidden factors. While this could change at any time, there is currently no evidence of AI-generated content being shadowbanned on the platform. Takeaway: This story is still developing, of course, and things could change at any time. This is true on any retailer, about anything. I always note that a book is static, so I'll repeat that here. For up-to-date information on this topic, my best resource is going to be Author Analyst. Where I keep authors informed in real time of what's happening on various publishing platforms. Make sure you sign up! AuthorAnalyst.substack.com. Additional Resources. Get Publisher Rocket. I'm not an affiliate, there's no exchange here, but I do own a personal license to Publisher Rocket, and it's pretty awesome. I recommend it regularly. These updates to the program are really cool, and I think it's worth grabbing the tool if you haven't done so already. For up-to-date information on this topic, my best resource is going to be Author Analyst, where I keep authors informed in real-time of what's happening on various publishing platforms. Make sure you sign up! authoranalyst.substack.com. Takeaways. Categories have gone through a lot of changes. While it is helpful to get your books into the right categories, categories don't actually control as much of the visibility on Amazon's storefront as authors tend to believe. Categories are most closely tied to bestseller lists. We're still learning about the new categories changes, and knowing how these duplicate and ghost categories work can save you a ton of headache. I also love Publisher Rocket's tool Additions to find relevant categories and keywords. Each piece of Amazon's metadata section is important. With Amazon being the largest book retailer in the world by a long shot, it makes sense to invest time into optimizing every piece to the fullest extent that you can. This story is still developing, of course, and things could change at any time. This is true on any retailer, about anything. I always note that a book is static, so I'll repeat that here. For up-to-date information on this topic, my best resource is going to be Author Analyst, where I keep authors informed in real time of what's happening on various publishing platforms. Make sure you sign up! authoranalyst.substack.com. Task Checklist. Do your best to select good categories, and use Publisher Rocket if you have it for more data, but don't stress too much over this change. Remember, categories mostly matter for a bestseller list strategy, and Amazon still distributes visibility based on a variety of factors that all revolve around relevancy. Amazon is not trying to harm your books or their placement. Do your best to optimize your metadata for other humans across the COVID Description, Sample, and Reviews. These 4 pieces have been shown to sell a lot of books. Keep reading for more detailed information on keyword research in the Advanced Search chapter. Stay in compliance with Amazon's Terms of Service by disclosing AIUs properly. Chapter 4: Amazon's Marketing and In-Store Promotions. Before we get into the algorithms, I want to quickly give an overview of 2 things that could be helpful to you as a wide Author: Amazon Marketing Tools and Amazon Deals. Amazon Marketing Tools. For a long time, I didn't spend much time on the tab called Marketing in the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) dashboard. To be honest, I sometimes felt resentful around this dashboard because it mostly used to house KDP Select program benefits, like free and discount countdown days. With the recent launch of A+ Content for indie authors though, I found myself browsing, and I was surprised to see that there is a bit more here for wide authors than I originally realized. Here are some of the programs that are available to authors. A+ Content. If you've ever seen those fancy images on the product pages of traditionally published books, you may have had envy around wanting to add your own images to your product pages. Well, now you can. And since this feature is fairly new at the time of this writing, it can help you look a lot more like a traditionally published book in Amazon's storefront. There is no word yet on how well A+ Content helps with sales conversion, as it's a fairly new feature and independent authors are just getting started with it. The best way to see what authors are doing is to find authors in your genre and spy on their product pages a bit. There are many templates to choose from too, so it's a good way to experiment. A few interesting uses I've seen are: First in series, usually permafree, of similar books from the author, using a comparison of products. 3 landscape images that give a 15-20 word synopsis of the story, e.g., "She's his best friend's sister, but now he's in love with her." And here comes baby! An image of all the books in the series with explanations around reading order, the world, related series, and more. Square quotes from the book, great for nonfiction too. Short or starred reviews with key references to tropes that readers might like. A list of the books in the series with a one-sentence synopsis about each of them. There's no right or wrong answer about how to use these at this point, So get creative and use this section as a chance to brand your book or pen name beyond the book itself. Takeaway: Add A+ Content to your ebook product pages and look at what other authors in your genre are doing for inspiration. Please note that you'll want to check how your A+ Content makes your product page look on the web, your mobile browser, and the Kindle app. Author Central. If you haven't created an official author page yet, this is the place to do it. There are some interesting features that you can find in Author Central, but the most important ones in my mind are: Creating an author page. Choose featured books for your author page and add author reviews that help readers find your books and others' books. Editing your content above the reviews on your product page, which includes "From the Author," "From the Inside of the Flap," "From the Back Cover," and "About the Author." To me, this is a fantastic way to use space to better sell your book. If you have a large catalog, you can also keep an eye on all your reviews at various retailers, as this can get a little stressful to check on Amazon's website, especially as your catalog grows. If you have a large catalog, and you want to keep an eye on your sales ranks without going to each product page, Author Central has a nice report listing on them. Which is really helpful for me when I want to take the general temperature of how my catalog is doing in sales in the stores. Takeaway: Use Author Central to build your author page, feature various books from your catalog, and add content above the reviews section of your product pages. You can also use Author Central to track your sales rank and reviews. Amazon Advertising. While I usually type advertising.amazon.com into my browser when I want to check out my ads dashboard, I use this section under Marketing to find the Advertising tab for other country marketplaces. It's not particularly hard to remember, but I prefer this method, so I don't have to remember all the country abbreviations off the top of my head. I have a chapter coming up about keywords, as well as a chapter at the end, about how you can use Amazon Advertising to support and ethically bend the algorithm algorithms to your will, so we will hit this topic again. For now, I just wanted to let you know that this tab existed right there in the KDP dashboard too. Takeaway: You can access Amazon's advertising platform through the Marketing tab on your KDP dashboard. This can be a handy way to check on, edit, and adjust your ads by country. Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select. You can enroll any ebook in the KDP Select program, which makes your book available exclusively to Kindle Unlimited readers, among other things. You can also run a price promotion by country if your ebook is in KDP Select. There are two options that you can select from once per enrollment period: Kindle Countdown Deal, price drop with the lowest allowed price of $0.99 for a period of 7 days, You can stack a promotion as well, dropping it to $0.99 for 2 days, then slowly raising the price every few days in increments until the deal ends. Free Book Promotion: You may make your book free for up to 5 days. Takeaway: If your ebook is enrolled in KDP Select, you can run price promotions once an enrollment period every 90 days under the Marketing tab. Editing by Country Marketplace. One of the less fun things about Amazon's offerings, in my opinion, is that you have to do the work on each country's marketplace, usually. For example, for your A+ content, you can upload your content for a single book, but then you have to copy that content— luckily Amazon gives you an easy way to do this— to each different country's marketplace. Keep this in mind, especially if you have a huge catalog. It may take some time to get your content up for each book. The benefit to this is that you can experiment with different text in different countries if you think they will respond differently to the content. It really depends on how much time you have to play with this. At the current time, I tend to copy and paste my content into only the English language retailers like the UK, Canada, and Australia. Canada. Although it is nice to be able to adjust content by country, I wish Amazon would offer an easy way to push one update to all other storefronts. Takeaway: Your content will update on one country retailer and will need to be copied and pasted to each other one. If you are short on time, focus on the English language countries: US, UK, Canada, and Australia, or if your book is a translation, make sure that your information is changed in the primary language countries first. Amazon In-Store Promotions (Merchandising). I often hear wide authors talking about Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes Noble and their in-store promotions. Did you know though, that Amazon has in-store promotions as well? And that you can nominate your book to them? Here are the deals that are offered: Kindle Monthly Deal. Kindle Daily Deal. Your book must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99 to be eligible for the Kindle deals, which currently only run to the United States. These deals are amazing to get, especially if you get the Kindle Daily Deal, which sends a ton of traffic to your book. For the Kindle Monthly Deal, there are more books chosen and they are usually chosen and ranked by popularity rank in emails. And filtered by categories that the reader might be interested in. To give you a sense of how hair-trigger this can be to predict, I was looking at a cluster of bully romance books while researching this book, and a few hours, hours later, I received an email of deals that included several bully romance books that are in the monthly deals promotion right now. They were not the same books that I had been browsing—those ones were not part of the promotion—but bully romance was a newcomer to my deals emails. As it's not a genre I read regularly. You may also see the Prime Reading deal, but wide books are not eligible for nomination. Takeaway: Amazon offers regular merchandising options, and while they are competitive, it is still worth applying to them, especially if you are a consistent seller at this storefront. Sales are a major factor in getting chosen. Most authors seem to believe that KDP Select authors have an advantage in Kindle deals,, but my suspicion is that Amazon is not looking for KDP Select books, but rather books that sell a ton of copies and that they think they could move more copies for. I frequently see non-exclusive books in my own personalized emails. I'm not a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, so I know they not only accept them, but they are looking for them for people like me who prefer to buy all my books. It takes a few seconds to apply for these in-house promotions,— and you never know! That said, you're more likely to get one if you have solid sales already. Takeaway: Apply for Amazon's in-store promotions whenever you can— who knows what might happen! Additional Resources. You can find the Marketing tab in your Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) dashboard here: kdp.amazon.com/marketing/manager. Amazon offers an entire help section on A+ Content, including guidelines, FAQ, and examples of what they expect and approve. kdp.amazon.com/en_us/help/topic/GHL7P99B7A543CN. Takeaways: Add A+ Content to your ebook product pages, and look at what other authors in your genre are doing for inspiration. Please note that you'll want to check how your A+ Content makes your product page look on the web, your mobile browser, and the Kindle app. Use Author Central to build your author page, feature various books from your catalog, and add content above the reviews section of your product pages. You can also use Author Central to track your sales rank and reviews. You can access Amazon's advertising platform through the Marketing tab on your KDP dashboard. This can be a handy way to check on, edit, and adjust your ads by country. If your ebook is enrolled in KDP Select, you can run price promotions once an enrollment period, every 90 days, under the Marketing tab. Amazon offers regular merchandising options, and while they are competitive, it is still worth applying to them, especially if you are a consistent seller at this storefront. Apply for Amazon's in-store promotions whenever you can, who knows what might happen. Your content will update on one country retailer, and will need to be copied and pasted to each other one. If you are short on time, focus on the English language countries, US, UK, Canada, and Australia, or if your book is a translation, make sure that your information is changed in the primary language countries first. Task Checklist: Add A+ Content to Your eBook Product Pages. You can apply the content to multiple ASINs, but you will need to copy it between country storefronts. Set Up Your Author Page in Each Country. Apply for Amazon's In-Store Promotions on a Regular Basis—Check In Monthly or Quarterly. Chapter 5: A Primer for Studying Amazon's Algorithms. I'm going to be explaining some key Amazon algorithms in the coming chapters, which will create the foundation of what we're talking about for the rest of the book. Before I do that, I want to establish some terminology around how the algorithms behave differently based on genre, which largely has to do with competition and demand. To me, this is incredibly important, and why there are so many different takes on how Amazon's algorithms work. It's also why someone can share their personal experience with tickling the algorithms, and someone else can try it, and it doesn't work. I'll also be talking about how Amazon balances its KDP Select program with book sales. Amazon has had to balance a lot as it designed its algorithms, because the algorithms have to work in 4 scenarios: High Sales Competitive, High Sales Nascent, Low Sales Competitive, and Low Sales Nascent. For those who don't know, nascent just means an up-and-coming or developing genre with little competition. At any given time, most genres are going to fall under High Sales Competitive or Low Sales Nascent. There are some genres in Low Sales Competitive, and few genres in High Sales Nascent. We'll dive more into how each of these categories of genre responds to Amazon's algorithms slightly differently throughout this book. Balancing Amazon's Algorithms with Their Goals. Let's break down how the Amazon algorithms perform differently across these 4 categories, along with what it means for authors in those categories. High Sales Competitive. In this genre, there are a lot of readers and a lot of authors competing for attention. Contemporary romance, and most of its subcategories, are a great example, but really, most major genres are going to follow this trend, because writing fiction as a profession in general follows this trend. There are always more people who want to be fiction authors, than there will be people who are able to succeed at it, and build a strong audience. And even when those authors become less active in the space or stop publishing, their books still remain,, and many of them continue running ads to keep those books selling at whatever level they're able to achieve. This category tends to fall into a "winner takes all" scenario, and have a lot of churn, as the winner at any given moment will usually be unseated shortly into the future. Hopefully their millions in sales and dollars is of some comfort to them, but often it is not if they aren't aware of how this category of genres works. High Sales Nascent. In this genre, there are a lot of readers and relatively few authors who are meeting the demand. These are those genres where you can show up first and build your readership quickly and easily. Usually these genres don't stay secret for long, and often authors enter them for some quick money, which pushes the genre out of this category quickly. But not always. The challenge Amazon faces with these genres is that new and/or lower-quality entrants have too easy a time getting to the top of these charts because there aren't enough high-quality entrants to satisfy demand. The algorithms need a way to sink those books and help the best ones get recommended. Amazon also doesn't want to show a lower-priced, lower-quality book in place of the high-quality, high-priced book that is already selling well. A great example of a set of subgenres I've been following for several years now is clean mature romance and clean mature women's fiction, which are subgenres dedicated to female characters in their mid-30s and up. Several of the authors who write in these genres, often writing in both and other tangential ones, are cleaning up in sales, making their millions and hopefully tucking at least some of that money away because the genres won't remain in this category forever. Low Sales Competitive. In this genre, there are relatively few readers and sales, and many authors trying to compete for attention. You may be wondering, why would anyone write in a genre like this? But when you consider that most of nonfiction falls into this category, it makes a bit more sense. There's money to be had in these genres, if you can create loyalty among your readers. I write nonfiction, and that has been a large part of my success. I show up and have done so for about 7 years. I'm smart and insightful most of the time, and people follow me from book to book even though my books are priced at a significant premium over most of my competition. The challenge Amazon has with genres like this is that there are often not any clear winners or top hits that serve the entire genre. The genre gets more fragmented but not less competitive. Amazon has to serve a mix of books that are evergreen, tried, and tested, while also giving new entrants a chance to succeed or find visibility. This does not just apply to nonfiction, but also to several genres of fiction. Often, a trend takes off, sees a bunch of writers jump in, finds out that the genre can't support so many books, and ends up saturated for months or years. In these scenarios, you need to be among the biggest or most recommended authors, need to hit the tropes of the larger genre, or need to wait it out until demand for your type of book rises again. This is the danger of writing to trend—your books may not survive long-term. Low sales nascent. In this genre, there are relatively few readers and also relatively few committed authors. The reason you might write in this genre is because you enjoy it, or your brain is wired for it, or you have specialized knowledge in it. The way you would make a living in the genre is by owning it and becoming the go-to person for books in it. You may also try to market your books to the broader genre and be the only type of that book that they are reading. Low sales could still mean there are many millions of readers for this genre. Which means you could make a healthy 6 or 7 figures writing in the genre. The challenge Amazon faces with this category is that they want readers to be able to find it when they're looking for it. This is a category of genres that are highly dependent on search. If Amazon can deliver a book that actually matches their query, that's a very good thing for Amazon's reputation. While the long tail isn't particularly profitable in any one genre, the aggregate of many, many genres does add up to a sizable chunk of the market. But more importantly, people begin to see Amazon as a destination to find anything, which is likely more important to the company than making a profit. In many ways, low-sales nascent genres are loss leaders for Amazon. For these categories, they make money on the loyalty, not the books. Literary fiction could be argued to be in this category, though that's a bit too broad for our purposes. Some examples of authors I would consider in this category are Libby Hawker and Laura Morelli, both of whom started as independent authors and now have hybrid publishing deals. This is not unusual for this category of genre, which is why we often have the least data on it. They both write what I might describe as literary historical fiction, and they both specialize in their chosen time periods and areas of the world. I'm going to be using this terminology throughout the rest of this book, so please bookmark this section to refer back to if needed. Takeaway: There are 4 categories of genre: high-sales competitive, high-sales nascent, low-sales competitive, and low-sales nascent. Genres move fluidly through these categories until they stabilize. The last thing to know about these categories is that competition and demand are fluid and relative. At any given time, most categories in fiction are high-sales competitive or low-sales nascent. A low-sales nascent becomes a high-sales nascent when there is unrealized demand for a certain type of book that starts to take off. Right now, mature fiction, written about women in their mid-thirties and up, is having a moment, because readers got tired of reading about teenage and 20-something protagonists. The genre barely existed on the independent publishing side, but the demand potential did. Now the genre is growing, and authors are rushing to meet demand. Eventually, there may be enough authors to meet demand, but the pendulum may also swing too far, to where there are too many books and not enough demand. Eventually, every genre will stabilize, usually in high-sales competitive. I have seen genres though that were too trendy. They came and went, and burned out their audiences so badly that it may take them several years to recover. In the meantime, those books aren't selling anymore. Most undiscovered genres start out as low-sales nascent genres, and people buy K-lytics to discover them and dominate them before everyone else figures it out. Some of these genres then go on to become high-sales competitive genres like LitRPG and cozy mystery, because demand was underserved before, and now increases along with competition. Others end up as low-sales competitive genres because demand had a ceiling, and there really isn't a huge underserved and hungry niche. Those genres level level out to only the people who really wanted to write in them. An example from recent years is superheroes. Finally, some genres have so much demand because the market has swung one way that they grow at a reasonable rate, and the authors experience riches for many years before they have to switch things up. Right now, clean women's fiction and romance are experiencing high demand with relatively few author entrants still. But that will change soon enough and is already starting to. All of this is to say that the reason I give you these terms is not to put every genre in its categorical box where it will stay forever, but to help you discern how Amazon's algorithms will respond to various genres differently depending on their maturation in competition and demand. Also, the implications of this are that most people observing or studying the algorithms will gravitate toward how they behave for genres that fall under the high-sales competitive category. Because I'm a nonfiction author (low-sales competitive), in addition to writing fiction in a high-sales competitive genre, I tend to study different, less-trodden parts of the store. The algorithms behave differently on the outskirts of the top-selling books, which is fascinating and teaches me more about the algorithm. Algorithms. You can also see a lot of interesting things about Amazon's algorithms when you study the genres that are not in the high sales competitive category. Which category of genre do you write in? Before we move on, I encourage you to take a few minutes and see if you can figure out which category your genres and subgenres fall under. Remember, this is based on a current point in time, which for the purposes of this book is now, because I'm assuming you want to apply your knowledge of algorithms to getting your book selling more soonish, right? So we need to know where your genre is right now, and where you think it might hit a stabilization point. For example, reverse harem academy paranormal romance as a subgenre, has hit a stabilization point in the high sales competitive category. Some would argue that it's now in the low sales competitive category, But remember, sales is relative and we are just coming off of the surge of Academy PNR flooding the marketplace. There will be some authors who leave, or rather, who move on to the next trend in UFPNR, and there will be some authors who stay and double down, and it's my belief that the subgenre will stabilize in the high sales competitive category after it completes its slight swing into low sales competitive, and all the authors looking to make a Quick Buck Hop Out. You'll hear authors describe this subgenre as evergreen eventually, meaning that the basic underlying emotional makeup of the tropes in RHPNR Academy are inherent to the larger genre of urban fantasy and paranormal romance where a lot of these authors write. Authors will continue to throw some Academy in there or throw some RH in there as they write their upcoming books., and it will keep working because demand is high enough. This is a good thing for backlist opportunities, especially since it takes time to produce audiobooks, translations, and more. Speaking of other formats, you can also use this framework to determine where your subgenres hit in other countries and in other formats. It may be different, giving you your first clues of where to put your focus for the next several years in terms of maximizing your catalog. Takeaway: Each category of genre niche responds to Amazon's algorithms slightly differently, which means that different things work or don't depending on your genre category. Amazon's algorithms must work for all 4 categories. The trouble with reading about any individual's experiences, even when they are very successful, is that it often doesn't take all of this into account. If you take a strategy based on how the algorithms respond in any one of these categories and try to apply it to another, it just doesn't work. I hear this anecdotally all the time and usually don't have the spoons to explain why in detail, aside from "maturation of genre matters," which in itself is not an easy-to-digest phrase. So now I have explained it in detail., and we can see how it applies to Amazon's algorithms. The big picture of that is that Amazon's algorithms must work for all 4 categories. The system as a whole must do a dance to make sure that no one of these 4 categories dominates their charts, nor that any of the categories gets completely left behind. For example, if they built algorithms that just took into account sales, there would be no visibility on books or genres in the low-sales nascent and low-sales competitive categories. As such, Amazon, and basically everyone else, though none of the other retailers are nearly as sophisticated at this, builds competing-with-each-other pairs of algorithms that they then tweak until the balance of these 4 categories is appropriate and expected for the demand of the 4 categories. When they are doing well at this very, very strategically difficult problem, They are making customers happy, rewarding the legitimate and hardworking authors, mostly keeping the scammers, hackers, and gamers out of the system, and growing book sales for everyone. When they misstep in the dance, let's just say they hear about it loudly and clearly. Luckily, Amazon is pretty good at this dance, and it's a big part of why they have been so successful at dominating the marketplace, particularly in ebooks. But they haven't always been that way, as is demonstrated by Edward W. Robertson's blog post from Chapter 1. It took a lot of trial and error to get them to this point, but understanding their ultimate goals, paired with the history of how they built it up, gives us a lot of insight into their thinking and implementation of solutions. By the way, these solutions are elegant and beautiful, which is the main reason I've been attracted to writing about them. Takeaway: Amazon's algorithms are designed to work for all categories so that no one category dominates the others. A genre may fall in a different category of genre across different platforms, which means the marketing changes. Balancing the KDP Select program with book sales. There is one other major thing that Amazon has to balance, and that is visibility of books in its KDP Select program versus visibility of books that are not in the program, which is a sizable chunk of independently published books and the vast majority of traditionally published books. To do this, Amazon uses 3 major concepts in its algorithms: Infinite news. Infinite stores. Infinite recommendations. Most Kindle Unlimited readers are whale readers who read multiple books a week, Thus saving a ton of money by having a fixed monthly price for an all-you-can-read buffet. To serve them, Amazon created a major algorithm that purposely has a ton of churn, creating infinite news of which book is best-selling this hour, in the bestseller lists. It created a counterbalance for the non-whale readers, the majority of readers, creating infinite stores so people can find what they're really excited about. In the popularity lists and search. The last major lever, Infinite Recommendations, which is powered by also bots, serves both whale readers and non-whale readers, which means it also serves both KDP Select and wide readers. Takeaway: Amazon balances KDP Select books with books that are only for sale. This is largely so that traditionally published books get solid love at Amazon,, but it greatly benefits independent authors who are published wide, and thus only aiming for sales at Amazon rather than page reads and sales as well. Few books on Amazon provide information about how to succeed with just book sales, but this book will cover the topic in detail. Additional Resources. If you are trying to figure out which category your genre is in for a specific platform, make sure you join our Writer MBA community and/or sign up for the Go Wide, Grow Wide Course. These are the places where we can give genre and situation-specific help that would be impossible to give in a book. https://go.writermba.com/ https://courses.writermba.com/ Takeaways. There are 4 categories of genre: high sales competitive, high sales nascent, low sales competitive, and low sales nascent. Each category of genre niche responds to Amazon's algorithms slightly differently, which means that different things work or don't depending on your genre category. Amazon's algorithms are designed to work for all categories so that no one category dominates the others. A genre may fall in a different category of genre across different platforms, which means the marketing changes. Amazon balances KDP Select books with books that are only for sale. This is largely so that traditionally published books get solid love at Amazon, but it greatly benefits independent authors who are published wide, and thus only aiming for sales at Amazon rather than page reads and sales as well. Few books on Amazon provide information about how to succeed with just book sales, but this book will cover the topic in detail. Task Checklist: Figure out where your genre lies. Which of the 4 categories of genre does it belong to? Use this knowledge as a filter through which you run all well-meaning advice from other authors. What works for one category will bomb in a different one. Almost guaranteed. Chapter 6: Primer on Artificial Intelligence. This chapter is an edited excerpt from my 2023 series of essays on generative artificial intelligence. It appears across many of my books to provide necessary context for the changes happening on retailers and platforms. If you have read this chapter elsewhere, you do not need to read it again unless you want to. I have so much to say about artificial intelligence, AI, and how it is likely to affect publishing in the near future, but it's a struggle because everything I want to say requires so much context about artificial intelligence and how it has evolved to become a major force in the evolution of publishing. So I wanted to offer a quick history of AI and how it led to where we are today in publishing, based on my own understanding of the topic. I wanted to provide this chapter on AI because the topic affects the publishing industry and specifically retailers and platforms. Without this context, I'm unable to talk about the really interesting things regarding AI. How AI has evolved as related to the publishing industry. I'm not much of a historian, but I think the historical context of artificial intelligence science, along with a detailed explanation of what it even is, is needed in these conversations about AI in publishing. So many people misunderstand the technology and the progression of the technology, and then purport misinformation to others about it. And so, while again, I don't claim to be perfect or get every part of this right, I did want to write a good and solid explanation on these concepts. And put those explanations in the context of publishing specifically. For our purposes, there are essentially 4 major notches or turning points on the timeline of AI: rule-based programming, machine learning, deep learning, generative AI. Let's talk about what each one is and how it relates to publishing. Number 1, rule-based programming, The original AI. The original AI is rule-based programming, which by today's standards would probably just be called programming. Most programs contain rules. Rule-based programming is rooted in the basic building blocks of math and symbolic logic, and includes structures that our brains use and think in every day, like if-then-else statements. At its most basic level, this statement tells the machine that if certain defined criteria is met, then it should execute the code within the statement. If it is not met, then it either executes the code under "else" or it skips the code completely. This is your basic decision tree logic. For loops, at its most basic level, this loop tells the machine that for a list of items, it should execute the code within the loop. When the list is done, exit the loop and move on. While loops, at its most basic level, This loop tells the machine that while certain defined criteria is met, while the state is true, then it should execute the code within the loop. When the state turns false, quit executing the code. It's basically an if-then statement, but on repeat, as opposed to an actual if-then statement that only executes once. These building blocks can get more specialized and complicated, of course, especially when combined. You can think of rule-based programming as a series of decision trees that are executed in a specified order, usually top-down, the same way one would read. Rule-based programming by itself can usually only handle structured data, data that is defined and can be stored in a database structure. It does not know how to handle other types of data, which I'll talk about in the next section. The majority of websites use these building blocks to display a web page. If this is the homepage, display this block of text using this style defined by CSS. If this is the blog page, display this block of text using this style. If you want to better understand rule-based programming and you are not a software engineer, one of the best ways to do so is to use a no-code product like Zapier, or better yet, some of the advanced processing functions on a spreadsheet. Number 2: Machine learning. The next evolution and a sub-branch of rule-based programming is machine learning. Machine learning is all about developing algorithms that can learn patterns from data and make predictions or decisions. Machines are able to "learn from experience," consuming more data, and this has led to significant advancements in areas like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. Data can be categorized as: Structured: The algorithm learns from a labeled dataset, which contains both input features and corresponding output labels. Usually this data is quantitative and can be managed with a database. A spreadsheet is a type of database. We use structured data for thousands of everyday things, like booking tickets online, storing complex lists, and all aspects of accounting. If the content can be organized in a matrix of rows and columns, then it's easily classified as structured data. Unstructured: The algorithm learns from an unlabeled dataset. It focuses on finding patterns or structures within the data without guidance. Most data falls into this category. An example might be a stack of anonymous college application essays, which is qualitative data. Semi-structured: The algorithm learns from a mix of structured and unstructured data. An example might be text messages. The contents of a text message are unstructured, but things like the date, time, sender, receiver, and the message itself can all be stored in rows and columns. To me, the biggest difference between structured and unstructured data is that structured data must have schema (structure) defined when it is inputted for storage. Going back to the example of a spreadsheet, before you can fill it with data, you usually need to label rows and columns, which requires some decision-making before you start. With unstructured data, you can collect it in any format, but when you want to read or interpret it, you must define the schema (structure) as part of the query (the question you ask the computer to answer), which can look like reporting, calculations, and more. Even something like time series or Internet of Things data, like the metrics your Fitbit collects, or your book sales over time at the hour-by-hour resolution, is usually still considered structured data. The time series is stored as a sequence, and you basically have a row-column matrix, or several, within a row-column matrix, or several. You could simulate this on a small scale with multiple spreadsheet tabs that feed into one large spreadsheet. Both structured and unstructured data require a high degree of human input under machine learning models. The human brain is still making a lot of decisions about how to organize the data. Machine learning is the first major AI evolution that allowed us to store and interpret unstructured data, which made our world much easier to make decisions about or predictions on. In publishing, Some examples of machine learning include: Any algorithm that is used to distribute visibility in a retailer storefront. Many efforts to understand or predict consumer behavior at retailers. Patterns in sales data over time, which is used to support bestseller lists, category lists, and more on any storefront. Any automated efforts to handle support requests, which is often done through chatbots,, but can also be done to route support requests to the right department. There is a lot of confusion in the author community that when machine learning is listed in terms of service (ToS), it means that the platform is training its generative AI tools, if it has any, on all uploaded content. It's not really true, or at least it shouldn't be assumed. Nearly every platform has discoverability tools driven by algorithms, And if it doesn't, it almost certainly uses user data to forecast, predict, and make decisions about how to move forward as a business. Number 3: Deep Learning. The next evolution and a sub-branch of machine learning is deep learning. Deep learning is focused on building neural networks, and specifically, as humanity is applying it, building neural networks that can mimic what we can observe about how human brains work. The reason it's called deep learning is specifically because it's structured as layers of learning, which is a learning approach that is observable in humans as young as a year or two old. Toddlers, for example, learn colors as one layer. They also learn shapes as another layer. Then all of a sudden they point and tell mama, "Red circle," despite having never studied different colored shapes before. How do they do it? Neural networks. As mentioned, both rule-based programming and machine learning require a high degree of human input to organize the data, whether it's structured, unstructured, or semi-structured. Deep learning attempts to automate this process by helping the machine learn to make these categorization decisions the way a human would. Rather than using a straightforward decision tree or series of decision trees, It uses connections between these layers to bounce the input around until it can come to a clear and accurate conclusion. In order to train the machine using deep learning, you have to first give it a lot of labeled data. You may tell the machine, "Here are a ton of text messages that contain a breakup message, and here are a ton that don't." The more labeled data you give it, the better it is able to identify texts that contain breakup messages versus texts that don't contain breakup messages. Now it can look at segments of unlabeled data and say, "This is a breakup message." You can further train the machine by having a human reviewer say, "Yes, that's correct. It is a breakup message," or "Nope, that's a false positive." I have no doubt that someone on the internet has figured out a way to make money from being able to tell a breakup message from a non-breakup message probably multiple someones. But to me, the more interesting use of this level of AI is across spaces like healthcare and the environment. Being able to use this technology to spot pre-cancerous cells, or separate growing food from the weeds that surround it, or identifying recyclable materials from waste, are critical processes that support modern life on this planet. Machines can do this better than humans, and the technology has already saved countless lives. This is the advancement we will need if we hope to keep humanity and our planet alive. To me, the biggest difference between machine learning and deep learning is the human intervention around categorization. You can give a deep learning model unstructured, unlabeled data and ask it to perform what is called feature extraction, basically asking it to create its own schema or categorization system. If you were given a closet full of clothes and asked to come up with categories for them, you might say, "I'll group them by function: pants versus shirts versus dresses, then by sleeve pant length, then by style, then by color." And someone else might group them by the same set of features, but in a different order. And yet someone else might say, "The material the clothing is made out of is an important feature, and that gets added." With rule-based programming, a human has to figure out the features and what order to process the data. Do we sort by color first? Or by style of clothing? Or by purpose of clothing? There's both linear prioritization and rigid and opinionated schema set forth. With machine learning, a human has to figure out the features only. They have to tell the machine sort by color, style, purpose, material. This allows for nonlinear prioritization but still offers a rigid and opinionated schema design. With deep learning, the machine is just given the closet. It compares the first two items and notices that the materials are different or the shape is different. It doesn't necessarily know that a sleeve is a sleeve, but it knows that for one item, the shape of the clothing has shorter extended tube thingies near the top than for another. This allows for both nonlinear prioritization and a looser schema design. The machine may also identify new patterns, new features or categorizations that a human or group of humans might miss. When it comes to more complex problems than a closet full of clothes, this is exactly how this technology is used. In publishing, some examples of deep learning include: flagged accounts on all platforms, flagged content and content moderation on all platforms, facial or fingerprint recognition, speech-to-text, which readers already use to get books accessibly or conveniently when there's no audiobook, advanced spell check for less common words and other languages, Object detection in a photograph, Photoshop and other graphic editors. #4: Generative AI. Now we come to generative AI, hot topic, media darling, and according to some people, the last straw that is finally going to destroy humanity forever. The next evolution and a sub-branch of deep learning is generative AI. While it seems like something completely new and coming out of nowhere, it is truly just the natural extension of what has come before it. To give you a sense of the progression toward generative AI, consider: Rule-based programming inputted structured data and outputted structured data with structured schema. Machine learning inputted unstructured data and outputted structured data with structured schema. This advancement allowed us to capture, store, and interpret data that we couldn't quantify and classify by hand in a database. This type of data is most of the data in the world. Deep learning inputted unstructured data and outputted structured data with unstructured schema. This advancement automated much of the human component that was once required to define the structure of the output. It helped us find patterns that we couldn't have found before, and it did so by processing big data, the buzzword of the last two decades that really just means millions of data points. Given all of this, the next logical step is generative AI, which takes an input of unstructured data and produces an output of unstructured data with unstructured schema. I say this because there is nothing particularly new about generative AI, and it is, was, and always has been the next logical step down this branch of approach that we are on. People often say that generative AI is a solution looking for a problem. But it's absolutely not. It's simply the next obvious step in the research, development, and evolution of artificial intelligence. And there are tons of important, nay critical, problems that we can solve by making this output of unstructured data significantly better and more affordable to generate. So what is generative AI anyway? How does it work? When people use this term, they are really talking about two different and innovative approaches for getting better results in artificial intelligence applications: Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). What is a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)? A Variational Autoencoder is basically a neural network that allows you to estimate something that has clear pattern, in order to create something new that follows the pattern. With a VAE, you would still input thousands to millions of data points, just like with deep learning, except this time, instead of categorizing the raw data, you are actually estimating the raw data, to create a pattern or recipe for outputting things that look like the raw data but are not. In other words, you are putting in unstructured data, and getting out generating unstructured data as well. Hence why this technology is classified under generative AI in the timeline. The way it works is not far off from what you might do in a graduate-level statistics course. A VAE has an underlying process that we've been using to solve business problems for decades, but as computers get faster, we've been able to feed them more and more data, and computationally solve bigger and bigger problems. And when combining this technology with deep learning methods that allow unstructured data and unstructured schema, we can solve the next major challenge of getting unstructured output. To build a pattern or recipe, you basically take a large dataset, made up of individual data points, and fit a curve, also called a distribution, to it. You are basically estimating, or taking the average, of what the thing in the large dataset is. The most common curve to fit to the data is a Gaussian, but you could test other options. If you happen to take graduate-level or maybe undergraduate-level statistics, you'll remember looking at a set of data points and trying on different distributions to approximate a curve that described the data well. This is what a VAE is doing, just on an orders of magnitude more complex level. For clarity, please note that a VAE is not supposed to store the original data. Instead, it stores the estimated curves/distributions of the data, also known as the pattern or recipe of the data. It then uses this to generate more data that looks like the pattern. As an example of how this works, if you had 1,000 people write the letter 'A', deep learning models would help a machine classify that these 1,000 data points that the inputs do indeed contain an A, and then a VAE would be able to estimate what an A usually looks like, and share that as an output by drawing the letter A. Most VAEs are multimodal. That means they might fit multiple curves to the same object. Take for example, the letter Z. Some people draw a Z with 3 connected lines. But some people also draw a 4th line horizontally through the center. A VAE would be able to model both the 3-line Z and the 4-line Z, and would be able to output both versions. When the VAE outputs an A or a Z, it allows for and introduces variance, which is basically bounded randomness. This provides the VAE with endless unique ways to write an A or a Z. Now, take this idea and extrapolate it by replacing these letters with something like an I. Or a hand. Or a background. Or a whole portrait. This is effectively what a tool like Midjourney is doing. It's literally just performing graduate-level statistics on a concept like eyes, and saying, "I studied millions of images and this is what an eye looks like. Now I can draw an eye, but I can also draw infinite eyes that never quite look the same as each other because I'm allowed to add variance." too. Let's say that the VAE has a large swath of data to train on, like, perhaps, the entire Getty Images catalog with its watermarks. The same watermark across hundreds of thousands of photos is statistically significant, so the machine will believe that it is an important feature to study, classify, and eventually draw. Kind of like how the fourth line of a Z might be a less used variant, but still statistically significant, given a large enough sample size. While VAEs have "encoder" in the name, please note that the name is a little misleading. VAEs are actually encoders, the estimator described above, plus decoders, the method used to generate new creations. Other ways that VAEs are explained include saying that the encoder compresses the data, which is true. The math above inherently demonstrates a loss of data, and the decoder expands the data, or fills in the missing gaps through guessing as it tries to recreate the look or nature of the original data. You may also hear the term latent space, which just means the place where the compressed data, the encoded data, or the pattern or recipe is stored. And finally, it may be important to note that most encoders and decoders are trained to recreate the data that was lost. But VAEs are Variational Autoencoders, with emphasis on the "auto." These encoders are specifically designed so that the decoder can create new data automatically. That means the model has been tweaked specifically for a niche generative AI purpose. In other words, this is not general intelligence, nor are we anywhere close to achieving that. The models need to be fed fairly similar data and need to be told to spit out fairly similar data. That's why you can't give ChatGPT an image and text and get back both. At least not yet. Let's move on to the second AI learning approach that's classified under generative AI. What is a generative adversarial network (GAN)? A generative adversarial network is the other half of the generative AI equation, at least for the moment. There may be more beyond this, as the technology evolves. The concept is this: you have two machines that are essentially playing Pong with data. One machine is programmed to come up with human-looking output, and the other machine is programmed to spot the difference between human-looking output and actual human output. In doing so, both machines get better and learn at their specific goal. The first machine makes better human-looking output, and the second machine becomes a better detector of human-looking versus actual human output. When people say things like, "OpenAI is building a synthetic generated text detector," it's important to understand that they likely already have one that trained the system. They've just never put only unlabeled data through it before. And as the internet gets flooded with synthetic text and images, GANs will attempt to sort one from the other. The whole of the internet is the unlabeled data in this case. A GAN is both: a check and balance to make sure OpenAI's output doesn't become lowest common denominator, aka the dad joke of the internet, and a training program to make generative output better and better. Companies with huge funding also have a huge financial incentive to continue building and testing GANs. So we will start seeing more consumer products around this in the next year or two. Some people believe that we'll never be able to create AI detectors that are accurate enough. On this, I'm not sure. It certainly seems like tweaking the output material even just a little should throw a detector for a loop. But again, there is going to be billions of dollars thrown at this problem in the next 5 years. It's a critical problem to solve, to make generative AI commercially viable, and the tools will only get more sophisticated. Call me a cynic, but I tend to believe that time, money, and energy spent on advancements predicts their success pretty well. And I don't think Big Tech has gone this far down the generative AI rabbit hole to fail at this clear and critical piece. So there you have it. VAEs and GANs, both of which have been around for around a decade in data science, are the two major pieces of this timeline notches puzzle and are what make generative AI possible on a wide scale right now. Is generative AI a subset of AI, machine learning, and deep learning? Yes. Technically, it is a subset. And that can be confusing in publishing, given that the terms "machine learning" and "deep learning" can be and often are used in terms of service agreements dating back to before generative AI tools became public for consumer use. That said, calling generative AI a subset of machine learning is a bit like calling the trunk of a tree a subset of tree branches. Because Big Tech is driving this technology forward, humanity is effectively putting all its energy into this one branch in particular. While there are arguments to be made that generative AI is a subset of machine learning, a more apt description is that it's an evolution of machine learning, or an advancement in machine learning, or built upon the foundations of machine learning. And given that, we have been allowing companies to train on our data for a very long time, and for very large purposes. So much of the debate around generative AI is around consent, which is one of my 6 Cs of moral evaluation of AI. And the reality is, all of us definitely consented to this training and have done so for decades. What is the next logical step after generative AI? And how will it affect publishing? For me, some of the doom and gloom of "where the industry is going, right into the crapper" is a bit hilarious and a bit exhausting at the same time. Sci-fi writers have been predicting the future for years, and painting it with the most dystopian paintbrush they can find if possible. Piercelzio. The dystopian worst-case scenarios described almost never actually play out the way the author imagines, usually because the one thing is taken to the simplistic extreme, in a near vacuum, based on the present world, that ignores any of the numerous counterbalances that the complex and real world is surely already putting in motion. To me, the next logical step after generative AI as it applies to publishing is not that books are written by robots. That ignores the counterbalance that all of this technology requires human input to get better and better. It's literally "the one thing is taken to the simplistic extreme in a near vacuum based on the present world scenario" that is plaguing so many creatives in their thinking right now. Now. This thinking has a predictive shelf life of a year or two max. Instead, I think the future will likely be quite a bit rosier than the doomsday predictions. I believe the next step after generative AI is being able to input multiple points of unstructured data and getting an output of multiple points of unstructured data. An example might be being able to generate text, images, audio, video, games, 3D visualizations, and more from a long prompt or series of prompts that includes multimedia inputs. Specialists in all of these areas may be helpful or required to perfect and build upon each of these experiences, and it will be cost-effective to create not just audiobooks, but also movies, 3D characters, interactive games, and more from your stories. Storytelling is only going to become more visceral. And if you are a good or great storyteller, you are going to have a natural edge on creating an immersive experience for your audience. So do not fear for your own career or your children's and grandchildren's careers. It's actually about to get interesting and exciting, as both a consumer of stories and a creator of stories. And this, of course, is just how generative AI can make books and storytelling better.— it does not account for other things that will get better, for example, the very real and scary crises that humanity is facing, that if we don't solve quickly, likely with the power of generative AI and its evolution, that there won't be a very happy or sustainable world for storytellers anyway. I'm sure my thoughts on this will evolve over time, but this is my current prediction, and there is a decent amount of evidence of companies, that are already trying to make this natural next step a reality. Artificial intelligence is a moving target. One last point to wrap this up. Just like products of creative fields—music, movies, television, books—eventually, what was cool artificial intelligence once upon a time becomes trite, obvious, and baseline. Artificial intelligence is a moving target and a product of a specific time period, not unlike art itself. What's amazing today, generative AI, will become commonplace and a part of the fabric of life for us and our descendants in the near future. And the tools will be used to create art that we couldn't dream of before, at an effective and accessible cost. It will also be used in life-sustaining fields and will solve problems we don't even know we have. Faster than we could have solved them ourselves. All of this is to say that generative AI is just a major notch on the broader AI timeline. We are going to keep evolving, and so will this technology. The 6 Cs of Moral Evaluation of AI. With emotions running high at even the mention of artificial intelligence, I've found it necessary to develop my own framework for understanding the moral and ethical arguments, both for and against some of the newest technologies emerging from the field. Specifically: Auto-narration tools: Google Play Books, Apple Books, ElevenLabs. Visual creation and completion tools: Midjourney, DALL·E, Stable Fusion. Writing and chatbot tools: ChatGPT, OpenAI Playground, Google's Bard. I put forward for your consideration: The 6 C's of moral evaluation of AI: consent, copyright, contracts, compensation, creativity, and capitalism. As new technology enters the field rapidly, it's worth considering these 6 C's to decide whether you consider the technology immoral or unethical, and whether you want to use the technology in your business or not. What are the 6 C's of moral evaluation of AI? The 6 Cs are: Consent. Consent asks questions around if we gave permission to use our content, if that permission was inadvertent due to generally worded terms of service and contracts, and if we should give consent going forward. Copyright. Copyright deals with legal definitions as defined by the U.S. Copyright Office. As a U.S. citizen, this is where I'll focus. Feel free to substitute your own country's copyright laws. Copyright is a tricky subject as it's tied closely to both plagiarism and fair use, so we'll be discussing those too. Contracts. Contracts deals with both how creators should approach contracts with publishers and other industry companies that may offer a contract on rights, as well as platform contracts, usually called terms of service agreements. TOS agreements that creators must agree to in order to use a platform. Compensation: Compensation focuses on whether creatives should be paid for contributions, how compensation would work, and where the line should be drawn. Creativity: Creativity asks whether we should be replacing human work, specifically art, with machines capable of doing it faster and better than we can. What is sacred to humans? And what is okay to use AI for. Capitalism: Capitalism ties commercial use of AI to morals and ethics. Is it greedy? Is it stealing? Is it like the Industrial Revolution, in terms of how it affects the job landscape? Is it going to destroy our societal structures? As new publishing technology emerges, these 6 C's are the criteria upon which I'll be analyzing the ethics and moral of that technology. Using this framework will help me to better cover different angles of emerging publishing technology and platforms, so that I can start to unpack the many concerns and arguments both for and against this technology. Additional Resources. I write about generative AI regularly on my Substack, which is a bit like a living extension of the Book Sales Supercharged series. You can subscribe to this Substack and get updates and articles for free. https://authoranalyst.substack.com. Because the 6 C's are so important, I've cross-posted many of the same articles to my Medium profile for freer consumption. https://medium.com/@monicaleonelle. Takeaways. There are essentially four major notches, or turning points, on the timeline of AI: Rule-based programming. Machine learning. Deep learning. Generative AI. Rule-based programming is rooted in the basic building blocks of math and symbolic logic. Machine learning is all about developing algorithms that can learn patterns from data. And make predictions or decisions. Machines are able to learn from experience, consuming more data, and this has led to significant advancements in areas like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. Deep learning is focused on building neural networks, and specifically, as humanity is applying it, building neural networks that can mimic what we can observe about how human brains work. The reason it's called deep learning is specifically because it's structured as layers of learning, which is a learning approach that is observable in humans as young as a year or two old. Generative AI is two different and innovative approaches for getting better results in artificial intelligence applications: Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). To give you a sense of the progression toward generative AI, consider: Rule-based programming inputted structured data and outputted structured data with structured schema. Machine learning inputted unstructured data and outputted structured data with structured schema. This advancement allowed us to capture, store, and interpret data that we couldn't quantify and classify by hand in a database. This type of data is most of the data in the world. Deep learning inputted unstructured data and outputted structured data with unstructured schema. This advancement automated much of the human component that was once required to define the structure of the output. It helped us find patterns that we couldn't have found before, and it did so by processing big data, the buzzword of the last two decades that really just means millions of data points. Given all of this, the next logical step is generative AI, which takes an input of unstructured data and produces an output of unstructured data with unstructured schema. Artificial intelligence is a moving target and a product of a specific time period, not unlike art itself. What's amazing today, generative AI, will become commonplace and a part of the fabric of life for us and our descendants in the near future. As new publishing technology emerges, these 6 Cs are the criteria upon which I'll be analyzing the ethics and morals of that technology. Using this framework will help me to better cover different angles of emerging publishing technology and platforms, so that I can start to unpack the many concerns and arguments both for and against this technology. Task Checklist. Familiarize yourself with the differences between the 4 types of artificial intelligence: rule-based programming, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI. These terms come up explicitly in publishing contracts and terms of service (ToS) agreements at many of the platforms. Education makes it far easier to ask smart questions and gain clarity on what these terms mean for you at each platform., so you can make better decisions for your author career. Read more about the Six Cs, including my essays on the topic, on my Substack. These essays untangle and bring clarity to much of the debate around artificial intelligence technology, especially as it applies to publishing. authoranalyst.substack.com. Chapter 7: Introduction to the Amazon Algorithms. In this chapter, we'll be diving deep into Amazon's algorithmic inner workings. That said, I don't really like redoing work that is already done, which is why there are a few smart people that I need to shout out to and recommend in the next section, because without them, we wouldn't know what we know today about Amazon's algorithms. Building on What Other Smart People Figured Out. I have to hand it to independent authors because we are a scrappy bunch who know how to hack and game systems. Especially when those systems spit out money the way Amazon does. Back in 2012, you couldn't throw a rock in the indie community without hitting a site called Kindleboards, which eventually rebranded to KBoards. A lot of the discussion has moved to large private groups on Facebook. A decade ago, however, Kindleboards was the premier place to find indie author information, similar to how the Facebook groups 20 Books to 50K and Wide for the Win are now. And just like now, there were some seriously smart people who led the rest of us to better marketing decisions. One of those people was Edward W. Robertson, who wrote a series of 9 blog posts that changed my life—well, all of our lives. He followed a woman named Phoenix Sullivan, who was also prominent in the indie world at the time, though she's since deleted all records of her incredible contributions to understanding Amazon's algorithms. Phoenix ran marketing for several of the big-name authors at the time, so she had quite a bit of data to follow algorithmic trends with. Edward W. Robertson is still around, and to my great happiness and delight, still has his original blog posts from 2012 available on his blog, which is still running the same web design from back in 2012, so rereading these live on his blog is transportative back to a fun time in my indie publishing career when I was a baby indie having just published my first fiction book a year prior. I'm going to link to them below, in hopes that I don't scare him off or cause him to delete his incredible work. I have read these 9 blog posts many times, first several times when they came out and then over the years since. Every time I read them, I feel like I understand them and their implications on a deeper level. I want you to read these 9 blog posts because they will give you incredible insight into how exactly the Amazon algorithms and KDP Select as they are today came about. Here they are: http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-kindle-select-the-popularity-list —and—y—free—books—no—longer—guarantees—fat—stacks/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-2-oops-they-did-it-again/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/self-publishing/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms Algorithms Part 3 Why Lower Prices Might Give You Lesser Sales. http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-4-getting-sticky. http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-5. —part-4-5-getting-sticky-part-2/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-5-eating-cliff/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-5-5-eating-cliff-part-2/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/c-y-did-amazon-change-how-they-sell-book/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/did-amazon-change-algorithms-2-protect-the-readers-the-10,000-gatekeepers-of-kdp-selection If you don't have time to read these, or if they are for some reason unavailable to you, don't worry. I summarize everything that is important throughout this book, so you won't miss out on anything huge, aside from how exciting and Wild West-ishly romantic this time period was for indie authors. I don't know Edward W. Robertson personally, and I didn't reach out to him in the process of writing this book. Book, but he is still actively writing science fiction, so it's possible he still lurks within the indie author community as we know it today. It's also possible, and probable, that he's not particularly interested in falling into a trap of teaching fiction authors how to do things that would take away from his own fiction writing, which is more than understandable. Still, he was a bit of a mini-celebrity for me when I was getting started, So it's ironic to me that you're reading this book about Amazon's algorithms rather than reading one by him. Most of my thinking about Amazon's algorithms are thanks to him. These 9 blog posts are the first place to start when it comes to these algorithms. Again, if they are not available anymore for some reason, there's nothing to fear because David Goran, who you probably have heard of, has captured everything we know about Amazon's algorithms from this time period in his book Amazon Decoded: A Marketing Guide to the Kindle Store. Let's Get Publishing Book 4. This book is required reading for being an independent author. It amazes me that anyone would enter this career without dancing wild with glee that a book like this even exists, because Goran did not have to write all of this down for us. It blows my mind when people don't buy it, and read it cover to cover several times as I have. My second shout-out is to David Goran, who really took the knowledge from Edward W. Robertson, and others who played on Kindle boards back in the day, and brought it to the masses of indie authors. This book is legit and careful in every way, as well as battle-tested. The content of it has been proven out time and time again for years, by everyone who attempts to speculate on how the algorithms work. Much like Robertson's blog posts, I have read this book and previous iterations many times. Buy it. Read it. Read it again. Literally, put this book down and read that book instead if you only have time for one. Finally, my last shout-out goes to Dave Chesson, a software developer who you may know as the Kindlepreneur or from his successful startups, Publisher Rocket which helps you find keywords for Amazon, and Atticus, which is a new and growing project of his that I don't dare attempt to shoehorn at the moment. Chesson is pioneering even more knowledge of the Amazon algorithms, and through his company, running experiments to provide evidence of his findings. He is the person who, in my mind, is breaking down what is widely known as the A9 algorithm, or Amazon search algorithm. Algorithm. A9 is the company that originally wrote the search bar for Amazon, and we can glean a lot about how Amazon uses keywords for discoverability and visibility in its algorithms, not just in search but overall. You can find all of his work on his blog at Kindlepreneur.com. Takeaway: The algorithm work shared in this book goes into great detail and length about Amazon's algorithm. Rhythms. It wouldn't be possible without the work of 3 specific people: Edward W. Robertson, David Goran, and Dave Chesson, who generously shared their findings. Further, they each worked with many unnamed people, who have also contributed a great deal to these findings. Make sure you drop them a note of thanks at some point, or better yet, pick up some of their books. I have made every effort to extend these findings further, —to keep paying it forward to other authors. My Amazon Algorithms Methodology. The right way to write this book is to get a group of wide authors together, set up clear experiments, and test all of my theories through rigid experimentation. So of course, I'm going to quickly defy all expectations and say that it's not going to happen. There's nothing definitive written in this book, nor will I ever commit to attempting to offer that. Despite my passion and desire to help authors, I do mostly still want to write fiction and do visual art for the rest of my life, so this is largely a personal decision around what I feel I want to give regarding this. It's not that I don't know or couldn't figure out how to do it. My undergraduate degree is in computer science, I'm a former software developer for tech startups, I'm married to a current software developer for tech startups. I mathed up even more with an MBA from a top 5 business school, and I've been indie publishing since 2009 and followed Amazon's algorithm developments fairly religiously for the last 12 years. It's not that it's too much work either, or that I don't have the connections to do so. I have about 4,000 of you who have joined my email list from the links in these books, and that grows every year. It's just that it's not the way my brain works. Throughout my school years, I was quite good at subjects like math, physics, languages, statistics, and computer science, but over time I noticed that my understanding of them was not at all how my classmates and professors seemed to approach them. Instead, what I was seeing in my mind was extremely visual, which doesn't lend itself well to the rigorous proofs It's hard to explain what this really means, but the best words I can come up with are that I don't really see math in numbers, but rather abstract patterns and fractional relationships. It's likely a neurodivergent understanding and approach, whatever that means, because I was often top of my class in those subjects either way. But long story short, taking the visualizations in my head and translating those down to numbers is possible but exhausting for me, so I'm just not going to do it. Instead, I'm going to say that this is what I think is going on with Amazon, and most of it has been proven out by the other people I've listed already, and the rest of it is something you can and should test for yourself with your own work. Now for some reason, saying, "I think it's probably this that's happening but I'm not 100% sure," evokes a special kind of hatred in the indie author community. Sometimes people want you to do things like them, process and spit out information like them, or be something that you are not and have never claimed to be. To these people, I'll also add that it's also okay to tell yourself, "This book isn't for me," and then just put it down and move on with your life. That's why I'm putting all of this in the first chapter, so you know if my approach to this subject is for you or not. One of the things that has helped me greatly in understanding Amazon's algorithms is mapping them all out by goals and purpose. It helped me see the elegance of how Amazon balances competing goals in its bookstore. It also helped me see that there are only 5 major levers to pull at Amazon to sell more books, which each create a rough percentage of the algorithmic visibility at the store. These 5 levers are the first tier of the algorithms, and they drive the hidden visibility that is personalized recommendations underneath, in the second tier. The final tier, the invisible tier, is off-site data which Amazon tracks but we have little control over. It is included in the graphic mostly for completeness. In this chapter, I'll share with you my own understanding of how Amazon's algorithms work at a high level, because until we can really understand what's going on at Amazon, and tease out the various pieces, we can't really do much to pull those levers for the benefit of getting our books in front of the right readers. I want to say that I could be wrong about the algorithms, or I may be misplacing details, and I'm okay with that. The reason I'm okay is because I don't expect to know everything about the algorithms, nor do I expect to always get everything right, nor do I think that these algorithms are not going to evolve in the future. There are 3 other assurances I have about teaching and sharing this without knowing 100% of the nitty-gritty details. The following description does align and is in fact built upon the knowledge of other very smart people who have studied Amazon's algorithms for themselves. There is nothing here that's wildly out of alignment with everything we already know. And have verified about Amazon's algorithms. The detailed specifics of Amazon's algorithms are not necessary to see success at our true goal, which is selling more books. If I were a software engineer at Amazon, I would need to have a much deeper understanding of how the algorithms work. Since I'm not, and you're not, I only need to understand roughly how the algorithms work because that's enough to start pulling levers and seeing what happens. If I'm wrong, we'll find out pretty immediately and I can revise the book. There are so many people who make their livelihood on Amazon, so if there's something wrong, I'm sure I'll hear about it soon enough, through people who have better data and information than me, and through people who experiment with various aspects of the algorithms and collect data as a result. I've been pulling levers to see what happens for over a decade, and have followed a number of smart people who have done the same. So while I hope what I'm presenting is as accurate as possible, I know what I'm presenting is incredibly useful, even if it's not 100% accurate. It's especially useful to wide authors. So with that said, let's continue to the algorithms. Takeaway: There are 5 major levers that authors can pull to get the Amazon algorithms working for them. These 5 major levers are part of the first tier of collective data, but are heavily responsible for driving the second tier of personalized data that drives a lot of traffic to Amazon's site through carousels, email recommendations, and in-app push notifications. Infinite news, infinite stores, infinite recommendations. The best way I've found to categorize these 5 levers is by their purposes: Infinite News, Infinite Stores, Two Levers, and Infinite Recommendations. Amazon wants to be a destination to check regularly (Infinite News), so it has bestseller lists that update every hour. This is the front table of the bookstore, where the whale readers, the readers who read a lot of books per week, month, and year, are going to visit frequently to find new reads. Unlike a brick-and-mortar bookstore, these readers could not be satisfied with updates once every few weeks. Infinite news means more traffic, which means infinite relevancy, which has been a big part of Amazon's general success to date. Amazon wants to have storefronts that serve literally everybody— infinite stores— so it has the popularity list lists and search where anyone can type in a phrase and find a list of books that suits their jam, whether their jam is the most popular thing in the world or hyper-niche. Their reputation is in the long tail. You go to Amazon because Amazon doesn't let you down. You can order anything on Amazon. Indeed, I've said this exact sentence to family and friends, and they've said it to me too. This is like the comfort, of going to your favorite genre shelf at the bookstore and picking up the latest release, or if you can't find it, heading over to the lookup computer where you may be able to special order it. Amazon wants to put the next thing you want in front of you before you even realize you want it— infinite recommendations— so it tracks also bots which tells it what you are most likely to want to buy next. This is like having a bookstore owner who knows you so well and orders cool books because they know you'll love them. I think of these three pillars as collective data, or rather, what everybody sees and uses when they experience Amazon's store. In the second tier, you have personalized data, or what only a single person sees and uses when they experience Amazon's store. Amazon recommends things to you based on how you've interacted with them. They combine what's popular in Books at Amazon and what book you're most likely to buy next at Amazon with what categories you've frequented, what web pages you've viewed, what books you've bought, what books you've read, what authors you followed. For all authors, the first tier has all the levers you can pull, while the second tier is where the magic and visibility comes after you put pull all the levers. Most of the magic is in the personalized visibility that Amazon orchestrates for you in the background. For wide authors, there are slightly fewer levers to work with in the first tier, but there are still many that make a massive impact. And while KDP Select books may be picking up extra website traffic, most of the second tier is driven by the popularity lists and also bots. The sales rank and the bestseller lists are red herrings. The biggest problem is that most of these levers are out of sight of all authors, and it's hard to visualize exactly what we're missing out on in terms of working with the flow of the algorithms. Amazon might understandably want to keep it that way, not to spite authors, but to protect them from scammers and hackers. The downside of all of this is that most authors focus entirely on what we can see, which is sales rank and bestseller lists, the first box in the top left of my diagram, which probably only accounts for about 15% of the total visibility around book sales through Amazon. Wide authors know that we can't compete as easily on the bestseller lists because of KDP Select and how a borrow from that program counts as a sale. We know that we can't compete as easily on sales rank, hence why Wide for the Win founder Aaron Wright coined the phrase bank over rank. As I studied these algorithms though, I realized that most wide authors are missing out on the other 85% of visibility that is up for grabs and an even playing field for all books, whether exclusive or not. My breakdown of the 5 levers and how they drive algorithmic visibility throughout the store are: Bestseller lists based on sales rank: 15% of visibility. Popularity lists, based on popularity rank, not visible, 35% of visibility, much of which is on the backend with personalization. Search, based on popularity rank, not visible, 15% of visibility. Also bots, including also-views and also-reads, 15% of visibility, much of which is on the backend with personalization. Series 20% of visibility, much of which is on the backend with personalization. One thing to note about this breakdown: an author with most of their books in KDP Select is going to see a greater value in the bestseller lists because they are based on sales rank, where KDP Select authors have an advantage through borrows. KDP Select authors should effectively ignore these numbers Keep doing what they are doing for the bestseller lists, and use this book to figure out how to increase their visibility in the other 4 areas. Takeaway: Sales rank and the bestseller lists are important but hardly the most important part of Amazon's algorithms, especially if you're a wide author. Both wide and KDP Select authors should look to the other 4 areas to figure out how to increase book sales. Sales, as studying the bestseller lists is the best way to increase page reads only. KDP Select Page Reads vs. Book Sales. I want to be reiterate, these numbers look very different for KDP Select authors because page reads are a huge factor of sales for those books. For a KDP Select author, the bestseller lists are a much larger portion of the pie of visibility. They can make up for lackluster or low sales through page reads., and many authors with KDP Select books focus on page reads, so they can get all-star bonuses and other benefits of the program. But for a wide author looking just at sales, since we've already foregone the page reads, these estimates are about right. The bestseller lists do not drive much, if any, of the personalization behind the scenes at Amazon. They are not intended to. Their goal is to provide a fresh front of house for frequent shoppers, Instead, rankings through emails and push notifications are usually driven by popularity lists, which are ranked by popularity rank, an invisible ranking that shares with sales rank the important factor of sales as one determinant. Also bots, which are themselves carousels, but which also drive all the carousels on the site, as well as many of the roundup and solo personalized notifications. Modifications behind the scenes. After digging through the algorithms to come up with this rough map of how they work, I realized that wide authors are staring at a small piece of ice above the water, thinking that they can't compete for visibility, without realizing that 85% of the visibility is still available to them on Amazon. 85%. This is just an estimate, again. But even if my estimates are wildly off, that's a lot of visibility out there that's on an even playing field for the taking. The next chapters are going to take you through: The Bestseller Lists. The Popularity Lists. Amazon Search. Carousels. The Also Boughts. The Personalized Recommendations. While I'm very nerdy about this stuff, I definitely hope to also give you real and practical takeaways in each chapter, not only about how to think about pulling the levers for your specific books, but also about how to build a book and writing strategy that works for the algorithms as a whole. Takeaway: Wide authors are on a level playing field for roughly 85% of Amazon's visibility. Most of the in-store, in-app, and email personalization is driven by the popularity lists and also bots. Visibility comes in many forms. There are tons of ways to get visibility. You can use any means of not-on-Amazon marketing to drive traffic to your Amazon product pages. You can commit to having stellar sell-through and read-through and share the heck out of your book number 1. All of these things can help you in Amazon's algorithms. Because Amazon's algorithms are aligned to the best practices of book publishing. They want to make their readers happy. When we talk about visibility and discoverability in this book, we are specifically talking about algorithmic love from Amazon. In other words, we are talking about the ways Amazon will give you visibility based solely on their algorithms. This is going to enhance your awesome book catalog,, and help you sell a lot more books. And if your book catalog is not as awesome just yet, it's going to help you sell a few more books, plus tell you where your sales and product funnels are breaking. The great thing about Amazon is that it doesn't hold grudges. You can fix your books and then fix your algorithms. Understanding the algorithms and, if you really want to accelerate, using Amazon Ads can help you get there faster. All of this is to say that, if what you're doing for visibility on Amazon is currently working for you, more power to you. The work around algorithms is just to help you go with the flow of how Amazon works, and enhance what's already working for you. Algorithmic visibility isn't of interest to everyone, but it's definitely one major and important way to gain visibility on Amazon. And at the same time, most books that are succeeding at Amazon are not there because authors understand the intricacies of Amazon's algorithms. Amazon's algorithms help great books rise to the top organically too. This is just a way to help your book rise higher or rise faster than it might do on its own. Takeaway: Amazon's algorithms can enhance and accelerate the visibility efforts that you're already making. Wherever the traffic you are sending is coming from. The algorithms by country marketplace. I'm going to put this reminder in this chapter so I don't have to put it in every chapter for the rest of the book. Just for your additional exhaustion, the algorithms are completely independent by country marketplace. That means that the algorithms for the US and the UK don't talk to each other. And this rolls out across all the countries and territories where Amazon has its own retailer storefront for books. This is why it's even more important to understand how the algorithms work, because you are going to have to study each individual marketplace to understand how to succeed in it. This is not a small undertaking, and you should take it step by step and focus on the marketplaces where you sell well first. You'll probably want to optimize the US and the UK at the beginning of your journey, and then proceed to the other English language markets, unless you have a ton of translations in say, German. Keep in mind that for each country, there are different categories, different books, lots of people writing books in their native language and lots of translations, and different ways in which the Amazon algorithms respond to your category. To succeed, you will need to look at the potential categories and keywords for each store, check out where you stand on the bestseller lists, popularity lists, and also bots, and basically complete the entire process I'm about to show you all over again for each store. You should probably figure out which category of genre you land in: high sales competitive, high sales nascent, low sales competitive. Low Sales Nascent, for each country's marketplace before you assume that something that works in one country will work in another. It's very possible that your books are designed with high success factors for one country, but low success factors for another. It's very possible that your books are in a high sales competitive genre in the US, but those same books are in a low sales competitive genre in the UK. For example, For example, contemporary royalty romance does very well in the US, but does not do well in the UK, where they actually have a royal family as part of their political and governing systems. What's romantic in the US is real in the UK. Similarly, comedy is going to change from country to country as well. The thing that blows is also the thing that is awesome, because the reverse is true too. Maybe you are in a high-sales competitive genre in the US, but it's a high-sales nascent genre in another country, and you can totally own the algorithms there. Christmas came early this year. Get your multi-hundred thousands while they're still being handed to you on a silver platter. And by the way, welcome to WIDE, where opportunities abound and multiply while you continue to remain a single human. Whenever you figure out a way to clone yourself, let me know. I have a whole Wide for the Win Facebook group of Widelings who would like to make a purchase from you. We are tired too. Now that I've said this, please keep it in mind for the next several chapters so I don't have to repeat it again and again. Because it is really, really important to your success at Amazon, and it makes this information about algorithms that much more valuable. Takeaway: Amazon's algorithms are roughly the same across all country marketplaces but apply to each country individually. Yay, more work! Additional Resources. Edward W. Robertson's blog series will give you an understanding of Amazon's algorithms circa 2012. Amazon rarely changes their algorithms, as many authors often say. What they do instead is build layers on top of what they already have, and add weight to those layers, which by definition is going to take weight from previous features. Understanding the layers that the algorithms were originally built on is a great way to better understand how the algorithms work today, even if the weight of these layers have changed. Here is the blog series: http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-blog— algorithms— Kindle— select— the— popularity— lists— and— why— free— books— no— longer— guarantees— fat— stack— /http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-2-oops-they-did-it-again/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/self-publishing/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms —part-3-y-lower-prices-might-give-u-lesser-sales. http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-4-getting-sticky. http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms -algorithms-part-4-5-getting-sticky-part-2/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-5-eating-cliff/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/amazons-ever-changing-algorithms-part-5-5-eating-cliff-part-2/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/so-why-did-amazon-change-how-they-sell-books/ http://edwardwrobertson.com/amazon/did-amazon-change-algorithms-to-protect-the-readers-the-10,000-gatekeepers-of-KDP/ https://www.amazon.com/dp-select/. David Goran's book, Amazon Decoded: A Marketing Guide to the Kindle Store: Let's Get Publishing Book 4, is available at all major retailers in print and ebook. Dave Chesson, Jason Hamilton, and the rest of the Kindlepreneur team keep their blog updated with regular updates on Amazon's algorithmic changes. Kindlepreneur.com. If you have questions about anything in this chapter, make sure you join our Writer MBA community and/or sign up for the Go Go Wide, Grow Wide course. These are the places where we can give genre- and situation-specific help that would be impossible to give in a book. https://go.writermba.com/ https://courses.writermba.com/ Takeaways. The algorithm work shared in this book goes into great detail and length about Amazon's algorithms. It wouldn't be possible without the work of 3 specific people: Edward W. Robertson, David Goran, and Dave Chesson, who generously shared their findings. Further, they each worked with many unnamed people, who have also contributed a great deal to these findings. Make sure you drop them a note of thanks at some point, or better yet, pick up some of their books. I have made every effort to extend these findings further,, to keep paying it forward to other authors. There are 5 major levers that authors can pull to get the Amazon algorithms working for them. These 5 major levers are part of the first tier of collective data, but are heavily responsible for driving the second tier of personalized data that drives a lot of traffic to Amazon's site through carousels, email recommendations, and in-app push notifications. Sales rank and the bestseller lists are important, but hardly the most important part of Amazon's algorithms, especially if you're a wide author. Both wide and KDP Select authors should look to the other 4 areas to figure out how to increase book sales, as studying the bestseller lists is the best way to increase page reads only. Wide authors are on a level playing field for roughly 85% of Amazon's visibility. Most of the in-store, in-app, and email personalization is driven by the popularity lists and also bots. Amazon's algorithms can enhance and accelerate the visibility efforts that you're already making, wherever the traffic you are sending is coming from. Amazon's algorithms are roughly the same across all country marketplaces but apply to each country individually, Yay, more work! Task Checklist: Read Edward W. Robertson's blog series. Read David Goran's book. Subscribe to Kindlepreneur. Decide which country storefronts you're going to optimize for first. Study the algorithm story I've laid out regarding Amazon. What questions do you have? Come to Free Writer MBA forum to ask. Note differences in book categories, category of genre, and search terms in each of the country storefronts that you are targeting as we continue the book. Chapter 8: The Best Seller Lists. The best seller lists are not really a list; they are large sets of lists that behave the same. David Goran estimates that there are 13,000 categories and subcategories in the Amazon store. 4, and I'm neither inclined to count for myself nor disagree with him, so let's go with that number as the estimate for how many of these lists there really are. To be clear, that means there are 13,000-ish bestseller lists and popularity lists on Amazon. And then under all of those categories, there are also free lists and new release lists, in addition to the paid lists. And knowing Amazon's goal to remain the best recommendation engine on the planet, that number is probably a low estimate by now, because Amazon is adding more categories, keywords, and tags every day. I'm going to highly recommend again that you read David Goran's excellent book on the topic called Amazon Decoded: A Marketing Guide to the Kindle Store, Let's Get Publishing Book 4. He talks a lot about the bestseller lists, as well as the popularity lists from the next chapter. I know it's irritating to some people that I'm going to keep referring back to this book, but from my perspective, I can't and don't want to rehash what he has already perfectly said and explained. I'll of course have to talk about a few of the same things, but I'm going to do as little of that as possible. So if you're feeling a little confused, go get this book. Go read it. Go reread it. If you've already read it. It's so important, and this material isn't easy, so give yourself the support of multiple resources to better understand how this works. The Best Seller Lists. You can find the best seller lists by clicking on Best Sellers, then Books in the sidebar, then drilling down to the category or subcategory of interest. You can also find the best seller lists by clicking on any of the links under Sales Rank on any ebook product page, then navigating in the sidebar. These lists tell you exactly what Amazon states they tell you, which is our most popular products based on sales, updated hourly. Every bestseller list is a ranking of sales plus borrows from readers of books in the Kindle Unlimited program for the category or subcategory in question, and over time, usually rolled up in about 24-hour increments. Performance. That's all. Sometimes people think there is more to this ranking, but there isn't. There's a visible number attached to this, called sales rank, and every book that has a history of one purchased book will have an ever-fluctuating rank assigned to it. As stated by Amazon, the rank officially changes every hour, though the visibility on that can be delayed, as most authors who have ever launched a book or had a promotion probably noticed. There are a few other things that are of note around how these lists work. The lists are separated into Paid, Free, New Release. Free can never show up on the Paid or New Release lists, while New Releases can overlap on the Paid list for 30 days after publication. There is also a top 100 list for the entire store called Movers and Shakers, but it's not rolled out to categories yet, and may never be. Price is not a factor at all. Amazon doesn't care if you drop your price to 99 cents to rise in sales rank. The lists are ranked by ASIN rather than as a roll-up of ASINs. Takeaway: The bestseller lists are ranked by sales rank and separated into paid, free, new release tabs for each category. Only the top 100 books in each category are ranked. There are 13,000+ categories in the Amazon.com storefront, and the categories change on their international storefronts. Interesting mathematical features of the bestseller lists. While I've said that sales plus borrows are the main determinant of the bestseller lists, the way Amazon degrades those sales over time gives the lists an interesting property, which is that it only takes about half the sales to maintain a sales rank that it took to get to the sales rank in the first place. Sales degrade by about 50% a day. I want to give you the curves and trajectory, the math, of how this algorithm looks across a few different scenarios. Scenario #1: A one-off spike. In the following scenario, the book is falling down the ranks pretty quickly. It has a burst of 20 sales in a day that is worth almost nothing by day 6. Day 1 to 20 sales. Day 2 to 10 sales. Day 3 to 5 sales. Day 4 to 2.5 sales. Day 5 to 1.25 sales. Scenario number 2: A front-loaded launch. In the following scenario, the book is able to maintain a ranking that they hit at 20 sales on day 1 by continuing to get 10 sales in the following days. Day 1 to 20 sales. Day 2 to 10 sales plus 10 sales equals 20 sales. Day 3 to 5 sales plus 5 sales plus 10 sales equals 20 sales. Day 4 to 2.5 sales plus 2.5 sales plus 5 sales plus 10 sales equals 20 sales. Day 5 to 1.25 sales plus 1.25 sales plus 2.5 sales plus 5 sales plus 10 sales equals 20 sales. Sales. Scenario #3: Consistent Sales. What if you do as David Goran suggests, and keep sales consistent and slightly rising for 4-5 days? In this scenario, the book rises in rank over a period of 4-6 days, as it approaches its end ranking. Day 1-10 sales. Day 2-5 sales 10 sales 15 sales. Day 3-2.5 sales 5 sales 10 sales 17.5 sales. Day 4 to 1.25 sales, plus 2.5 sales, plus 5 sales, plus 10 sales, equals 18.75 sales. Day 5 to 0.625 sales, plus 1.25 sales, plus 2.5 sales, plus 5 sales, plus 10 sales, equals 19.375 sales. Day 6 to 0.3125 sales, plus 0.625 sales, plus 1.25 sales, plus 2.5 sales, plus 5 sales, plus 10 sales, equals 19.6875 sales. Day 7 to 0.15625 sales plus 0.3125 sales plus 0.625 sales plus 1.25 sales plus 2.5 sales plus 5 sales plus 10 sales equals 19.84375 sales. As you can see, if you had a book with 4 to 6 days of consistent sales at 10 sales a day, the sales form a curve over time that will continue to the edge of an equivalent 20 sales a day infinitely. Definitely. I'm venturing into calculus, so apologies if you're a little confused. In I-don't-have-a-master's-degree-in-math terms, what this means is that if you simply start selling 10 books a day, you will quickly, within 5 to 6 days, have a sales rank that effectively looks like you hit 20 sales a day first, then followed with 10 sales a day consistently thereafter. The reason I'm sharing this is because most sales rank calculators get it wrong due to them counting the hash of sales it takes to get to a sales rank versus the number of sales it takes to maintain a sales rank. But the number it takes to maintain a sales rank, about 50% of what it takes to hit it, is always the right number to go by. Why? Because as demonstrated, sales rank will level out within just a few days, as long as sales on the back end are consistent. Because of this, Goran's scenario number 3 is a better approach to taking your sales rank to a new level. Scenario number 1 will produce very few results. You'll spike then sink within a few days. Scenario number 2 creates a spike then a level out, similar to a launch or possibly a newsletter promotion stack. And scenario number 3 creates a rising sales rank over 4 to 6 days. Scenario number 3 looks really good to Amazon, especially as you stretch out the consistency to 7 to 10 days, if possible. At this point, Amazon will see the book as a consistent seller and start to send it through personalized recommendations. You'll also start to appear in the also-boughts of other books. All of this will, of course, add to your sales numbers, hopefully, because we do this in conjunction with several other efforts that appeal to other Amazon algorithms, algorithms, specifically also bots, which we'll get into in later chapters. It's worth it to pay for consistent sales in advertising, because if you can establish a pattern of consistent sales for about a week, you can teach Amazon who to recommend your book to next, and get Amazon's algorithms to take over some of your marketing. This is the theory and the math behind how sales rank works, but it doesn't always work out exactly as smoothly in implementation. However, if you can get to a sales rank using promotion or advertising, you should be able to maintain that sales rank with consistent sales (or borrows) per day at about half the level. All of this is to say, authors tend to focus a bit too hard on sales rank, when in reality consistent sales are far more important. Sales rank can't tell you anything about your own books that your sales dashboard wouldn't be able to tell you far better. The same is true for anyone else, so if you're estimating someone's sales, success, or profits based on sales rank, please stop. Sales rank can't tell you those things. Takeaway: If you are launching or promoting a book, you want to have slowly rising daily sales numbers over the course of 5 to 10 days. This helps you achieve a stable sales rank and gets your book into personalized recommendations, automated email, push notifications, and personalized carousels that are a major part of Amazon's algorithms. Consistent or rising sales is key to maintain sales rank. Sales rank and the bestseller lists. If KDP Select didn't exist, the bestseller lists would be far more straightforward and a true representation of how many sales a book has. While there would be books spiking in the system at any given time, more books would be selling at a consistent level that corresponded to their sales rank, Because of KDP Select and borrows being counted at 1 borrow to 1 sale though, the system gets a little more convoluted. An author could be selling 10 books a day, or they could be selling as low as 0 books, and instead be getting 10 borrows. And while that would be an unusual scenario, it's not terribly far off from what many books are actually doing. You'll hear authors who say that most of their income comes from Kindle Unlimited page reads, which means they aren't selling many books at all. You'll also hear about authors who say page reads make up very little of their income, which means they are mostly selling books. The math on this means there's a major missing variable in sales rank, which is the spread between sales and borrows. Thus, the bestseller lists are not much of an indicator of what's actually selling, nor how much money a book or author is making. The calculators out there that attempt to estimate this are cute, but I would discard every single one of them because of the math I just shared. Usually, they work by attempting to estimate the spread at a certain number, e.g., 50% sales and 50% borrows, and this assumption is wrong. KDP Select books are all over the place on this spread. It depends a lot on genre and the author's writing style and ability. Is this an author who can: Command sales at regular price? Usually people buy books at full price only from the authors they love, or in nonfiction, from authors with a solid reputation or great reviews. Command sales at a discount price? Pricing doesn't factor into sales rank, and usually people like the author or are willing to try them out at this price. Command lots of borrows from KDP Select? Usually people like the awesome cover, description, and other packaging. Command lots of page reads from KDP Select? Usually people are whale readers and go through dozens of books a month, and their books are thrilling, hooking, and more so people keep reading. The best-selling authors nail all 4 of these, obviously, while the rest of authors may be significantly stronger in one area over others.. This creates an effect where at the top, particularly in high-sales competitive genres, we don't really have to question whether an author belongs there on merit. They are definitely doing a lot of things right from this list. As the rankings go down, things get murkier, as two authors can hold the same sales rank and have entirely different sales, borrows, income, and more behind the scenes. In fact, an author can hold a sales rank that indicates they are selling 10 books a day, but in the backend they are making barely any money. This would happen if they were getting a lot of borrows, which drives sales rank, while getting very few page reads, which drives revenue. And in truth, there are plenty of these books out there, though they can rarely hold their sales rank over time, so they eventually fall away. Hopefully this has convinced you that sales rank is not a particularly good indicator of how a book is selling. Nor are the bestseller lists a particularly good indicator of what books are doing best on Amazon's retailer site. This is true whether your books are in KDP Select or wide, but it's particularly relevant to wide authors because wide authors can't compete easily on sales rank or the bestseller lists anyway. So there is a metric out there, sales rank, that is not particularly useful in indicating anything, that is also not particularly easy for wide authors to compete with other books on, because KDP Select books will have borrows factored in and counted one-for-one with sales. Have I convinced anyone to completely ignore this and get out of the game of sales rank comparisonitis yet? If not, let me next attempt to persuade you even more by talking about what the bestseller lists and sales rank can do for your visibility. Takeaway: Sales rank and the bestseller lists are not good indicators of what is actually selling on Amazon. A book can have a high sales rank and make very little money. That's why many authors say "bank over rank." More importantly, Amazon knows this and balances it with other algorithmic mechanisms that are better indicators, to them, of what is selling in the storefront. What does your sales rank determine? Most authors tend to think that most visibility on Amazon is created by an improved sales rank, but I firmly disagree. I just don't see it in my studies of the algorithms. The bestseller lists, popularity lists and search, and the also-boughts ecosystem are built on 3 completely different underlying concepts. The mathematical structures behind the algorithms look different. What I believe is true instead is that all three of these concepts have one major determinant in common, which is sales. So yes, when your book sales go up and stay at a new, consistent level, your visibility across all three structures goes up as well. There's no question that all three structures use sales as a foundational determinant for movement and resorting of books. But Sales Rank is not sales, and the bestseller lists move way too quickly, Remember, their primary goal is infinite news or churn, to be highly relevant in things like email campaigns, push notifications, and more that are rolled out over time. If sales rank and the bestseller lists were able to trigger a ton of personalized recommendations, then anyone could spend a ton of money to shoot a book to the top of the list and ride those PR follow-ups to the bank. In reality, if you manipulate your book's ranking using a ton of traffic in a small time period, you quickly drop off the list with very little sales afterward. The fact that authors are not trying to do this is a good indicator that it's not how the algorithms work. Because Popularity Rank, which is somewhat invisible to authors, though I'll show you how to figure it out in the next chapter, is a far more stable indicator of consistent sales, it is almost exclusively the metric used in building various personalized recommendations by category. The other structure used is also bots. The bestseller lists and sales rank aren't a big part of the personalized recommendations that go out at all. Takeaway: Sales rank is a red herring of sorts that gets the lion's share of indie authors' attention. Popularity rank is a far better indicator of the long-term health of a book and a far better predictor of how well the book is going to sell in the store. It's also the place where all indie authors should put their focus. What Sales Rank Can Do for You for Visibility. The main area where this ranking helps you get visibility is the bestseller lists. And this is not a small piece of visibility because the most voracious readers on Amazon, whale readers, frequent these lists searching for their next read. But it is a small percentage of the whole of visibility. Despite getting nearly 100% of the visibility amongst authors talking about sales and marketing. Being high on these bestseller lists will get you more sales, and more borrows if you are exclusive, but the other thing it can get you is web history. More people might click and view your book, which does trigger some of the personalization recommendations, though these are democratic in that the sales rank is not determining anything behind the means, it's just getting you more visibility on the website, which creates an indirect feedback loop in the PRs. If you're an author with primarily KDP Select books, you will probably see more visibility, due to being in front of your target audience, whale readers, with books that they want, Kindle Unlimited books that give you something to make you even more visible, sales plus borrows, and something you can get paid for, page reads. When it comes to book sales, though, Sales Rank does not create massive visibility. I wouldn't bet my child's college fund on it, and I'm open to being proven or shown wrong. But it's fairly observable to see that Amazon's algorithms are divided into 4 major levers, and the Sales Rank bestseller list concept is not connected to the others, nor the personalized recommendations beyond what I've mentioned. It's fairly observable to see that the invisible popularity rank drives more visibility in personalized recommendations too. Sales rank going up does not determine how the majority of visibility on Amazon's store is spent. It's correlation, not causation. And this is really useful for wide authors. Takeaway: Sales rank plays a role in Amazon storefront, You are visible to readers who browse best-selling categories or who read primarily in Kindle Unlimited. That said, sales rank going up does not determine how the majority of visibility on Amazon's store is spent. This is a good thing for authors who have decided to publish wide. The Bestseller Lists for Wide Authors. For the most part, I think wide authors should ignore both sales rank and the bestseller There's no point in looking at either of them, because they are games you can't win easily. Anything you lost in borrows, you'd have to make up for in sales. And that takes advertising usually. It might be hard to break even under the circumstances within which you'd need to compete—lowered prices, high spend. And even if it isn't now, it will be someday, because think about it, a KDP Select author could always outspend a wide author,, as they can make it up in borrows and page reads. Instead, wide authors should focus on the popularity lists and the popularity rank, which we'll discuss in the next chapter. I'm also all for hitting the tops of the bestseller lists for your most important and highly targeted genres. This is less about the bestseller lists themselves, and more about how you can dominate your category consistently, which will give you visibility through also bots and personalized recommendations. There are also a few unique cases around the bestseller lists that may also be interesting to wide authors. Free rank. Does the free rank work the same way as sales rank? It is my understanding that yes, perma-frees are ranked with this same pattern of downloads degrading by about 50% per day. And given the same 3 scenarios as above, Scenario number 1: a one-off spike. Scenario number 2: a front-loaded launch. Scenario number 3: consistent sales. What curve might you guess that most permafree books match? If you answered scenario number 1, ding ding ding! You get a BookBub. I mean, a cookie. Something like that. Most wide indie authors are creating promotions for themselves that look a lot like a spike on the free bestseller lists for their category. This means that they get a ton of downloads all at once, but after the promotion is over, they don't get Amazon to consistently recommend their book beyond the spike. Remember, Amazon is not interested in spikes in their algorithms because it's too easy to game. They protect those personalized recommendations by basing them largely on the popularity lists. Which are what's selling consistently, and the also-boughts, which are what most people also bought. If you send a spike of free downloads, you can expect that spike to completely disappear within about 8 days, in my experience. Your freebie will return to its baseline of sales before the spike. As I mentioned before, visibility comes in many forms, and most authors are not judging a BookBub perma-free promotion based on how well it tickled the algorithms at Amazon. Instead, they are looking at other strategies of visibility, which usually revolve around sell-through, read-through, and more. And they are usually looking at all retailers, rather than just Amazon, anyway. BookBub is a fantastic way to get more visibility on paid books, and to be clear, if you get a BookBub, take the BookBub, despite how Amazon's algorithms react to it. The algorithms are not everything. But I bring this up in the interesting case of, what if you can't or don't get a BookBub? How do you promote your permafree then? This is where the algorithms come in. Now before I get into this, please know there are several not-so-small wrenches in the plans for freebie list domination. As I've stated several times, the bestseller lists only account for about 15% of visibility at Amazon. On. For the freebie bestseller lists, this is significantly less, because readers have to tab over from the paid lists for each category, and on mobile, it's nearly impossible to find the freebie list to begin with. I don't know how to begin estimating how much visibility these lists get, so I won't. But I would say a significant fraction of the paid bestseller lists. Freebies sink on the popularity lists, which drive many personalized recommendations, because price is a factor. I go into much more detail about the mechanics of this in the next chapter. Freebies also struggle to stick in the also-boughts carousels of most product pages. If they are there, which is rare on paid books, it's usually toward page 11 out of 17, and it's often a freebie with a lot of ad dollars on it. There are carousels like also-views which do seem to have significantly more freebies, but usually still on a product page for a freebie. Amazon continues to change the visibility on free in part because free is not aligned with its goals. Free competes with paid books, and Amazon's answer to free is borrowing from KDP Select's Kindle Unlimited library. When this is in the retailer's best interests, it does mean that the algorithms keep free books on the sidelines algorithmically. All of this is to say that Amazon doesn't make it easy on those of us who make use of permafree and freebie pulsing in our marketing strategies. Still, most personalized recommendations carousels, along with a few others I've mentioned, do seem to have free books in them, and free books do get sent out through email and push notifications. If you're so inclined, it's worth trying to boost your freebies' organic baseline downloads using the same pattern described in scenario number 3 for the paid list. Playlists. Goran suggests you need about 5,000 free downloads to start getting recommended behind the scenes. You could do an ad stack for 6 to 8 days, trying to get 500-1,000 downloads each day to see what happens to your ranks. Takeaway: If you use permafree or freebie pulsing strategies to bring visibility to your series, you may want to try a time-sensitive promotion that looks a lot like the best practices for running a paid New releases and pre-orders. The new release bestseller lists have two unique cases of books on them. Pre-orders. New releases 30 days or less. This means that the longest a book can be on the charts is 13 months, which is 12 months as a pre-order and 1 month as a new release. These bestseller lists are far easier to rank on than the regular paid lists. Especially since many subcategories don't even have 100 books on preorder or new release at any given time. This is a great place to get visibility for your series by having long preorders. Amazon does send out preorders in personalized recommendations first to your followers, but then if they're seeing conversion, to category readers too. Preorders also appear to show up, possibly with no suppression, in carousels like also viewed which drive more personalized recommendations. Finally, when a preorder releases, Amazon will send a special email to all your followers that includes other books in your series or catalog. When my preorders launch, especially when they're at $9.99, I see a huge bump in sales across my whole catalog, 2 to 3x my usual sales numbers for several days because of these emails. There are a few reasons that there's very little competition on Amazon for preorders. The first is that there are never going to be more new books at any given time than older books. The second is that sales toward sales rank count at time of order rather than at launch, so KDP Select authors who want to drive up their sales rank at launch for visibility and page reads won't put up long preorders as often. This is an area where wide authors have an advantage, so take it. That said, there is a caveat around preorders, which is that they are suppressed on the popularity lists up until shortly before they launch. This means that even if you are selling well in preorders, you may not get as much visibility through personalized recommendations until just a few weeks before your preorder drops, though I've seen evidence of this shifting as Amazon expands their personalized recommendation carousels and notifications. Still, I'm a big fan of using long preorders, and there are many wide authors who have made their careers on racking up lots of sales on long preorders prior to launch. Ignore the advice not to use them, as it's usually specific to KDP Select authors. Wide authors can do well with preorders, especially when they're combined with something else. New releases stay on the charts for the first 30 days after release, with the added feature of also being eligible for the top 100 paid charts during this same time. This is true regardless of whether you use a preorder or not, and new releases are automatically added to this additional list when you are in a category. There is additional evidence that Dave Chesson has uncovered that Amazon gives you a boost in popularity rank search for the first 30 days your book is on sale. Hence why release month is an important month to try to make money on your book. Don't squander this extra visibility. Use pre-orders to set up your new release for visibility success within Amazon's store. Takeaway: If your book is wide, a long pre-order makes a ton of sense and can boost your visibility in the storefront. This happens specifically through the new releases list. Where a book can live for the first 30 days of its launch plus the preorder period, which can be up to 12 months. Take advantage of this and get your books on preorder early. Additional Resources. The very best reading on this is David Goran's excellent book on the topic called Amazon Decoded: A Marketing Guide to the Kindle Store. Let's Get Publishing Book 4. Dave Chesson. Jason Hamilton, and the rest of the Kindlepreneur team keep their blog updated with regular updates on Amazon's algorithmic changes. Kindlepreneur.com. Takeaways. The bestseller lists are ranked by sales rank and separated into paid, free, new release tabs for each category. Only the top 100 books in each category are ranked. There are 13,000+ categories in the Amazon.com storefront and the categories change on their international storefronts. If you are launching or promoting a book, you want to have slowly rising daily sales numbers over the course of 5 to 10 days. This helps you achieve a stable sales rank and gets your book into personalized recommendations, automated email, push notifications, and personalized carousels that are a major part of Amazon's algorithms. Consistent or rising sales is key to maintain sales rank, The bestseller lists and popularity lists are two important places of visibility in the store, both focusing on rank. The best way to achieve a new sales rank level for an author is to figure out how many sales it takes to maintain a rank and hit that consistently from day one for at least 6 to 8 days in a row. Sales rank and the bestseller lists are not good indicators of what is actually selling on Amazon. A book can have a high sales rank and make very little money. That's why many authors say "bank over rank." More importantly, Amazon knows this and balances it with other algorithmic mechanisms that are better indicators, to them, of what is selling in the storefront. Sales rank is a red herring of sorts that gets the lion's share of indie authors' attention. Popularity rank, is a far better indicator of the long-term health of a book, and a far better predictor of how well the book is going to sell in the store. It's also the place where all indie authors should put their focus. Sales rank plays a role in Amazon's storefront. You are visible to readers who browse best-selling categories or who read primarily in Kindle Unlimited. That said, sales rank going up does not determine how the majority of visibility on Amazon's store is spent. This is a good thing for authors who have decided to publish wide. If you use permafree or freebie pulsing strategies to bring visibility to your series, you may want to try a time-sensitive promotion that looks a lot like the best practices for running a paid launch. If your book is wide, a long preorder makes a ton of sense months, and can boost your visibility in the storefront. This happens specifically through the New Releases list, where a book can live for the first 30 days of its launch plus the pre-order period, which can be up to 12 months. Take advantage of this, and get your books on pre-order early! Task Checklist. Plan a book launch or time-sensitive promotion using the knowledge from this chapter. Work on getting 5 to 10 days of consistent and rising sales. If you use permafree or freebie pulsing strategies to bring visibility to your series, plan a time-sensitive promotion using the knowledge from this chapter. Work on getting 5 to 10 days of consistent and rising downloads. If you use preorders, set up preorders for your books as soon as possible, up to 12 months out. Chapter 9: The Popularity Lists. If you are scratching your head thinking, "What is the popularity list again?" you can find the popularity lists, a term coined by Edward W. Robertson, in Amazon's sidebar. Click on the icon in the left corner of their website, navigate to books, and drill down to the list you want to look at, which may take several clicks, like Kindle Books Reference Writing Research and Publishing Guides, Publishing Books Authorship, Then, you have to scroll past all the carousels until you come to a list of books. You will see something like "1-12 of over 4x results for category" when you finally get to the list. The books below that phrase are the popularity list for the category you selected. Side note: the word "results" should give you a massive hint that the popularity list is indeed closely tied to the search algorithms on Amazon.. In fact, you can also find the popularity lists by navigating in the search bar to Kindle Store, putting nothing in the search bar and hitting enter. Hint hint hint hint hint. These lists will tell you what is bringing in revenue consistently at Amazon. And yes, I worded that very purposefully, you'll see why. Before we continue, I also want to be clear that what I'm calling popularity rank The ranking order in the popularity lists throughout this chapter is not a visible ranking like sales rank is. It exists though, and it is the default ranking for most things in the store, from recommendations to search to the popularity lists. The popularity lists are based on a lot of things, not all of which I or anyone seems to have fully figured out. Here are the things that the smart people I listed in Chapter 1 mostly, Agree it is based on: the last 30 days of sales with no further degradation over that time period, e.g., sales from yesterday aren't weighted higher in the algorithms than sales from, say, 19 days ago. All ASINs in the category, in this case paid, free, and preorder books, though the latter two are weighted heavily. For free books, it takes about 100 downloads to equal one paid sale, so 5,000 free downloads Downloads is worth about 50 sales. For preorders, it's not clear how they are weighted, but it's significant to where they are nowhere near the top of this list. Price, in that higher prices do better in the rankings for these lists. No borrows, they are just not factored into this list at all. If I were to summarize this, I'd say that the rankings for this list are based on some semblance of sales x price, aka revenue, in the last 30 days. And I think this is pretty accurate for most genres, but I also saw a number of things across multiple genres, usually ones not in the category of high sales competitive, that simply did not match up to this description. These discrepancies were frequent enough that I found myself looking for explanations for why one book might be higher than another on the popularity lists. Takeaway: The popularity lists are harder to find, but they are incredibly important, probably more important than the bestseller lists in terms of algorithmic visibility and sales. Popularity rank is invisible, but is also the default sorting order for most things in the store. The popularity lists are closely tied to search. The rankings for this list are based on some semblance of sales x price, aka revenue,— in the last 30 days, though there is nuance and detail to this. My Theories About the Popularity Lists. This is the point where I depart from what others know and have verified, into what I think could be happening, and why I think it. If you are not big on theory, based on one woman's obsessive observations of algorithms over years of being an indie publisher, then that's cool. I really do get it. But I'm still going to put forth my theories here. There are a few refinements that I would add to this summary. Number 1: Does a long consistent sales pattern matter? I don't think popularity rank is based exactly on the last 30 days of sales only. I think 30 days is one major point of degradation, as is 90 days, and Amazon practically confirms this in their sidebar for many of the big categories of these lists. There have long been rumors about a 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day cliff, where sales essentially fall off after launch or a big promotion. The reason I believe that the sales history could be longer, maybe even significantly longer, is because 30 days is likely too arbitrary and short-lived to fit Amazon's goals, which is to recommend the best-selling, safe books without having to sort them manually.. In high-sales nascent genres in particular, I saw books that could not possibly be at the top of these rankings for their category if the limit was 30 days or even 90 days. They simply had way too many preorders that would have been counted on day 1, and their publish date was too far beyond 30 days or 90 days for it to make sense. When I noticed this, I started to see the 30-day theory breaking down all over the place. Amazon states explicitly on their information about sales rank—not the same rank, but bear with me—that they consider the entire history of a book's activity, and the ranking for books with consistent activity histories that have been available on Amazon for a long time may fluctuate less than the ranking of new books or books whose histories aren't as stable. I've explained in the last chapter how this is not really how sales rank works, and that Sales Rank is very much a reflection of what has been selling in the last 7 or so days. It's my belief that this page is carefully worded to attribute some of the aspects of Popularity Rank to Sales Rank, to obscure some of what Amazon is really doing behind the scenes. And for good reason. I want to be clear that I don't doubt that 30 days is an inflection point, and I don't doubt the people who did the work to come to that Conclusion. Amazon has refined their algorithms over the years to meet their goals, for which 30 days rolling with no degradation would make little sense, when you think about it. I also believe that the cliffs, whether they be 30 days, 90 days, whatever, have been smoothed out a bit in the last 5 years or so. If you think about it, once you have the general concept of degraded sales proved out, it would be easy enough, though computationally orders of magnitude more, to add more inflection points, say at 15 days, 30 days, 45 days, 60 days, and so on. I'm not saying these are the inflection points. I'm just saying that there's no reason to think the last 30 days of sales are set in stone. Takeaway: Ranking on the right popularity lists for your book category depends a lot on your most recent sales history, about 30 days. The length of days, is going to more specifically depend on your genre or niche. Less competitive ones may seem to weigh a longer sales history, while more competitive ones may seem to weigh a shorter sales history of 15 or 20 days. Understanding this length for your genre can help you keep a steady stream of promotions going so your books stay popular. Number 2: Does Amazon rank popularity based on all formats? It took me a long time to work out that some of the discrepancies I was seeing involved a book that had a very poor sales rank in ebook but was highly ranked in another format like print or audiobook. I eventually figured out that this book might have been required reading for a few college courses because I saw a massive spike in print while no other format went up. At first, I thought the discrepancy was because I was using sales rank, which is literally only a snapshot of 1 hour according to Amazon. On, to make assumptions about the sales for the past 30 days. But over time, I saw this over and over again, especially in low-sales competitive genres like my own, authorship. As I started to do the mental math on this, I noticed a pattern, which was that the rough revenue that a book was bringing in across all formats seemed to place it a little higher on the popularity lists than other books. Even a difference of a dollar or two mattered in placement, especially when the books were effectively at the same rough sales rank across multiple formats. This was especially interesting when the books I was looking at in the Kindle ebook section of the store were priced the same, e.g., both at $9.99, and had a similar rank but were at wildly different places in the popularity lists. I also started checking the books that were not high on the popularity lists despite their standing on the bestseller lists, which I thought was because they were in Kindle Unlimited or because they were priced indie style at $3.99 or below. But then I started to notice something else they had in common: that most of them didn't have an audiobook, and some of them didn't even have a print book. I did not think it was possible, and had never heard of anything like it from any of the smart people who study this stuff, or also anyone ever. If the rankings for the popularity lists were not based on a single ASIN, but rather a grouping of ASINs, we would know, right? Also, the bestseller lists are definitely 100% based on a single ASIN. 100%. But as I thought about it more, it made more and more sense. Here are some of the reasons why Amazon would do this. The most obvious one is that Amazon wants to make money, so they want to show their customers the books that will make them money. Remember, tech companies develop algorithms in pairs to counterbalance competing goals. So while the bestseller lists show what is getting the most sales plus borrows at any given time, it would make sense to have a counterbalance algorithm algorithm that showed what is making the most money for Amazon at any given time. Of course, they can't post a headline that says, "Books that you are most likely to buy at the highest price point to make the most money for us. Updated hourly." But we know that Amazon does this. They are the biggest e-commerce company in the world by a lot for a reason, after all. The second smaller clue about this is that the popularity lists are, at their core, a search result to a search query. No, you didn't type "teen and young adult books" or "military science fiction books" into a box, but you did search that query through clicking on a series of categories that told Amazon what you are looking for. Well, if you think about how Amazon returns queries, and the way we want them to return queries, it is by showing us the book. Not 4 of the same book, all in different formats. The third clue is not one we can see on the website, but rather a thought exercise in, "How would I design this algorithm if I were making decisions about this?" And my personal answer would be that if I were going to send recommendations to my precious customer list via email and app, I would want to take into account a book's total popularity, not popularity in a specific format. If that book is shooting up in sales rankings for ebooks, book, but not also for print and audiobook, and doesn't even have a print book and audiobook listed on my site, then I don't want to start showing that book to a ton of customers just yet. I also don't want to show that book to customers instead of the book that is doing just as well in ebook sales, but also doing well in print and audiobook sales. What is my personal answer worth? Honestly, not much. While I have been a software developer, have written algorithms, and have studied algorithms, I'm pretty much just making an educated guess about how this should work, if it doesn't already work that way. Again, this is just a suspicion, and I could be wrong. But I think the popularity lists are not for a specific ASIN, but rather for all the ASINs of the same edition of a book. And from the discrepancies I saw, I think it could be based on revenue or something similar. This doesn't account for the fact that Amazon's popularity lists drill down to print book, audiobook, and ebook anyway. Wouldn't the ebook list only look at ebook ASINs, you might ask? As I write this, I am looking at a book that is on the coming soon popularity list and also has customer reviews. I check the date, and it's still weeks into the future. How is this possible? Well, we know that Amazon links between formats of the same edition of a book, as well as past editions if you ask them via email. It turns out that this particular book is available in ebook now, and will be launched in hardcover and audiobook, about 6 weeks after the ebook release, which is about 2 weeks from now when I'm writing this. This. The popularity lists specific to Kindle were showing it under "coming soon" still, based on a publication date of the hardcover and audiobook. If I look for the ebook on the bestseller lists, it's not on the top 100 new release list, even though it should be based on sales rank. This was a little bit more evidence for me that the popularity lists combine ASINs based on book, whereas the bestseller lists reflect a single ASIN and rank based on something very visible which is sales rank. Takeaway: The popularity lists seem to rank all formats of the book together, which means that even if one format does not have a good sales rank or is not hitting its top 100 bestseller list, it may still be getting a ton of love and personalized recommendations. eBook push notifications and carousels. A book could be performing poorly in eBook but performing very well in print,, and the ebook could be recommended. Authors can use this to rank higher on launch day by publishing and selling in multiple formats on that day, and can also run print, audiobook, and ebook promotions at the same time for bigger impact in the storefront. Number 3: Is the right length of promo still 4 to 5 days? Goran specifically states in Amazon Decoded that the popularity lists have about a 4-day delay to catch up to the sales data changes.. I went back to check this out and studied the sales bumps in my own KDP dashboard after a promotion to see what I could find. I noticed that I would see a surge around closer to 6-8 days later rather than the 4-5 I expected. I saw this repeatedly and was honestly pretty confused about it. That said, I assumed I had just done my promotions wrong because again, I mostly write nonfiction right now, which doesn't get a ton of big promotion, and my fiction is in the process of being relaunched, so I'm not doing much promotion on that. Then I saw in an article from Dave Chesson that he also noticed it took 6 to 8 days of consistent new sales before Amazon would start to show any notice. https://kindleprenuer.com/amazon-popularity-effect-how-amazon-treats-a-new-author book-discoverability/. I have no idea what the answer is to this, or if books and authors at different level of success might see different results. Goran does also say in his book that sometimes Amazon's algorithms take time to catch up, especially when there's been very little activity for them to index and update your rankings with. I share this because if you are able to, you might want to attempt to run your promotions of consistent sales sales, which Goran talks about in Amazon Decoded, for 7-10 days to be safe, even if it means that you have to send fewer sales per day. Takeaway: The popularity lists are particularly important during a launch or time-sensitive promotions window. The best practice used to be that you should promote your launch for its first 4-5 days, but my data showed that you should instead look at a longer window of 6-10 days of increasing sales. This becomes more true for books that are published wide. Interesting mathematical features of the popularity lists. Some of my theories, particularly that revenue might be how the books are ranked in popularity, don't account for the obvious, which is that free books and preorders are ranked on all popularity lists but may not have revenue. Even if I'm wrong about the intricacies of the revenue calculation, most smart people who study this agree that the ranking is somehow dependent on price. At a price of $0, and we can't legally charge you money yet, how exactly are these special cases ranked? Here are my guesses and speculations. Pre-orders. Let's say someone got 10,000 pre-orders, meaning they got roughly 10,000 sales on day 1 in the popularity rank algorithm. Them, probably more like 9,000 after returns, but let's say 10,000 for simplicity. They then would shoot to number 1 on the popularity list for their various categories. If not their main one, at least a few subcategories, and especially in genres that fit into the high sales nascent category. The reason would be that they brought in a ton of sales and revenue in a very short period of time. For example, if revenue, also known as sales times price in its most basic form, is a major factor that determines a book's ranking on the charts, which most people studying these algorithms agree on at some level, though the details of that implementation have varying theories, then preorders shouldn't be in the rankings at all, or at the least, they should be at the end of the rankings or before all the books that have had zero sales until they are released. This simply doesn't happen though. If you look at categories and subcategories of any popularity list, they rarely have newly released books at the top—by design. In fact, the only place where I've ever seen newly released books seem to hit toward the top of the lists at launch are in genres that are high sales competitive, which has a higher churn across all lists. In genres that are high sales nascent, the popularity lists are far more static. And the top of those popularity lists are more likely to be a book that was recently released in the last 6 months to 2 years. Again, there are very few of these categories to study because they usually move to high sales competitive or low sales competitive pretty quickly. So without question, there's no massive boost in sales rank or popularity rank for long preorders that have racked up a ton of sales for day 1. Because otherwise we would all be using this over and over again to bend the algorithms. Instead, most of the indie author community is against long preorders, even outside of KDP Select, and it's largely because they don't help boost your sales rank on launch day nor your popularity rank for the first several weeks. Instead, what I think is happening is that there is a special piece of this algorithm that dampens the effect of preorder sales on launch specifically, and there is evidence of that too. It's reasonable to think that preorders are a special case, and one of the clues I found for that is a little filter on the sidebar of the popularity lists called "Coming Soon." It doesn't always appear, but when it does, it is under a heading called "New Releases," and it is next to two other filters which are "Last 90 Days" and "Last 30 Days." In fact, if you click on you will see a popularity list for all pre-orders that functions almost exactly like the list for all books in terms of pricing, sales, and so on. What I think could be happening is that Amazon suppresses pre-orders until shortly before their release, and when they release, doesn't count all the sales on day one but rather still counts them at the time of order. That means that if you have a short pre-order, less than 30 days, the popularity rank juice of your pre-order sticks around during launch week., as the 30-day cliff is the first fall-off around rank and visibility in this algorithm. If you have a long preorder, the juice is spread out more, and while those sales still count, they are significantly discounted by the time your preorder pops into visibility again. This is again, basically in line with David Goran's thinking on the matter, particularly his observation that preorders are suppressed until shortly before launch. Does this change my thinking on doing long preorders? Not really. For KDP Select authors, the answer is clear: no or short preorders only. For most wide authors, longer preorders are still going to give you the strongest visibility, especially as those personalized recommendations go out in the backend. And if you are releasing regularly, several times a year,, then long preorders can help you build your career and visibility throughout the store. The only wide authors I think this pop of preorder visibility will matter for are authors who are very established in their niche. If you are one of the top authors, a shorter preorder, less than 30 days, can give you a massive boost on the popularity lists because you can own your category. It can also give you a fantastic launch sales rank because you have enough sales to compete with KDP Select titles. Will it work better, necessarily? It's hard to say at that level, where sales can fluctuate by tens and hundreds a day. My suspicions are that there are many fine details to manage in a campaign at that level, and that it's a good thing to test. For most wide authors, I think the longer preorder will give you better results, though, especially if you are driving consistent, targeted, relevant sales to the preorder. Takeaway: Amazon suppresses preorders until shortly before their release and counts each sale at the time of order rather than at the time of sale, which would be launch day. Because of this, a KDP Select book is better off with no preorder or a short preorder window of 25 days or fewer, while a wide book is better off with the longest preorder possible, up to 1 year. The only exception might be a KDP Select or Wide author that is well-versed in hitting the top of Amazon's bestseller lists for their category or overall on a regular basis. Temporarily free and perma-free. Very few books are completely free over time. You can set something free on Amazon through their completely legit price matching effort, where you make the book available for free at other ebook retailers and they price match to free on Amazon. But even so, you'll still have territories for which it isn't free for, along with random bouts of it reverting to paid in their system. If you want to keep your book free on Amazon, you can. Set the book for free at Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo, and Barnes Noble. While you only technically need to do it at one, it helps to do it everywhere. Make sure your metadata matches, including book title, book subtitle, series title, edition number, and pricing in other territories. If needed, set the book to 99 cents on Amazon first, then try to make it free. Amazon sometimes does not want to discount a book of mine that's at $5.99 or $9.99 for reasons unknown to me, but they will always do it if I drop the price first. Other smart people estimate that about 100 free downloads equals 1 paid sale for free books. In fact, if you set a free book's price to a penny in these algorithms, that would play out pretty nicely against a book that's 99 cents. It would also react a certain way to a sea of 99 cents books from the indie community, back in the day when 99 cents was a common price for a starter book. Things have changed quite a bit, and free doesn't have the same impact that it used to on Amazon. But I'm not convinced that anything in the algorithms has changed. I'm also not convinced that it's because of competition, at least not in the way that most people think about it, which is that there are too many free books in the store, and they are competing with KDP Select for an estimated 12 to 14 million readers who have a subscription. Here's what I think happened: Amazon originally set free books to equal 10 cents in their popularity lists algorithm. In the algorithms. That proved to be too high, and free books were still dominating the lists, so they then lowered free books to equal 1 cent in the algorithms, where it has remained. Why would Amazon do this? Why not just set the price of a free book to zero in the algorithms? I believe they want to separate free books that get a ton of downloads from paid books that get zero sales. Algorithmically, it makes sense. I also think that there are some large companies (cough BookBub) that have accumulated massive influence over Amazon's algorithms. In fact, if you've read Get Your Book Selling on Apple Books: Book Sales Supercharged #2, you know that BookBub is the #1 marketing strategy there, because Apple Books' algorithms look so much like Amazon's circa 2012-2016. It used to be that BookBub determined the top 10 on the paid and free lists back in 2013-2015 or so, until Amazon tweaks something to end that. Amazon has also changed its affiliate policy in the past to keep sites like BookBub from using their affiliate links to free books through their newsletter. As the years have passed since this change to 1 cent, the effect of free on Amazon keeps sinking. The narratives around why this is happening are feel-good and validate plenty of indie author "woe is me" energy. "Too much competition," "Amazon's screwing us over," etc., but the mathematical evidence for those narratives is not there. Instead, indie authors have actually shied away from free and 99 cents. They have raised their opening prices from 99 cents to $2.99, $3.99, and $4.99. So on the popularity lists, Freebies are sinking even further than they did when Indies priced at 99 cents, because now instead of needing roughly 100 free downloads to equal a paid sale, you now need roughly 300, 400, or 500 free downloads to equal a paid sale. So yes, competition killed the freebie. But it's actually that Indie authors raised their prices. We killed our own freebie marketing tactics. Again, this is just my theory, but the math adds up. All of this is to say that if I'm right that a freebie is worth a penny rather than 100 freebie downloads is worth a single paid sale, then it takes a heck of a lot more free downloads to make an impact on most popularity lists today than it did back in 2012 because most indie authors are now pricing higher than 99 cents. As always, when something swings too far one way in Amazon's algorithm, algorithms, they add a new algorithm to counterbalance it, and we can see that in their personalized recommendations, where an unusual amount of free books are starting to show up prominently in the carousels. I write more about this later, but those carousels do get rounded up and sent out in emails too. Point being that freebies are gaining more visibility in the store again, but the mechanics of it are working a little differently than they did the last time it was a big big part of most indie authors' strategies. The last thing I'll say about freebies is that if I'm right about the popularity lists using some roll-up of ASINs across format, then having paperbacks, hardcovers, and audiobooks attached to your freebie could be helpful. On my own perma-freeze, I definitely saw a clear pattern of a bump in ebook downloads that was as high as 4-5x every time I sold paperbacks. I don't sell one a day of these, so the pattern was clear and obvious, especially in the early days of the book. This bump came 8 days after the paperback sales like clockwork. I don't exactly know what to attribute this to, aside from the theories I've already put forth in this chapter, but something around format is definitely happening to increase freebie downloads. Takeaway: If you are using a perma-free or price-pulsed free strategy at Amazon, you want to coordinate a steady and frequent drip of newsletter promotions, probably a new push twice a month. You may also want to coordinate these promotions with a print book or audiobook promotion on the same title, as that can really drive up the visibility of your ebook freebie. And finally, if you are doing a push, it makes a lot of sense to promote your next book, usually the second book in the series, at 99 cents at the same time, because you will simply get a much a much bigger boost that lasts longer on a paid title than you would on a free one. What does your popularity rank determine? There are two important things that the popularity rank and lists decide. Personalized recommendations. Personalized recommendations are driven almost entirely by popularity rank, with my estimate being about 50/50 of the emails and push notifications going to reach. Appearance in search. Search and the popularity lists are closely tied together. Dave Chesson's work in the field demonstrates this, and David Goran's work confirms it. The way these algorithms work is also widely known in greater Amazon circles, beyond the author community. This is a really big chunk of visibility at Amazon, making the popularity lists one of the most important concepts that you should understand after reading this book. There's a lot of visibility on the line here, so definitely read this chapter again if you're not clear on how this works and how to take advantage of it for your books. Takeaway: The popularity lists are incredibly valuable and often get neglected, as bestseller lists are visible and prominent in the storefront. Popularity lists are the key driver of sales behind the scenes. Master the popularity lists, and you master your ability to launch, run a time-sensitive promotion, and get more visibility for your books on Amazon Storefront. Additional Resources. For more about how to launch books across many different platforms, check out Plan Your Book Launch. Take the guesswork out of marketing your book and make it easy, fun, and profitable. The Productive Novelist. Number 8: BookBub has been surprisingly influential on Amazon's algorithms over the years. If you want to understand why, check out my article about it on Author Analyst called "Amazon Has Now Replicated Every Major Feature on BookBub: Why? 5 Possible Reasons and 1 Big, Larger Implication." https://authoranalyst.substack.com/p/amazon-has-now-replicated-every-major Takeaways. The popularity lists are harder to find, but they are incredibly important—probably more important than the bestseller lists, in terms of algorithmic visibility and sales. Popularity rank is invisible, but is also the default sorting order for most things in the store. The popularity lists are closely tied to search. The rankings for this list are based on some semblance of sales × price (aka revenue), in the last 30 days, though there is nuance and detail to this. Monica has a lot of theories about how this works, and has specifically studied how it applies to wide authors, but results may vary and testing is required. Ranking on the right popularity lists for your book category depends a lot on your most recent sales history, about 30 days. The length of days is going to more specifically depend on your genre or niche. Less competitive ones may seem to weigh a longer sales history, while more competitive ones may seem to weigh a shorter sales history of 15 or 20 days. Understanding this length for your genre can help you keep a steady stream of promotions going so your books stay popular. The popularity lists seem to rank all formats of the book together, which means that even if one format does not have a good sales rank, rank or is not hitting its top 100 bestseller list, it may still be getting a ton of love in personalized recommendations, ebook push notifications, and carousels. A book could be performing poorly in ebook but performing very well in print, and the ebook could be recommended. Authors can use this to rank higher on launch day by publishing and selling in multiple formats on that day, and can also run print audiobook, and ebook promotions at the same time for bigger impact in the storefront. The popularity lists are particularly important during a launch or time-sensitive promotions window. The best practice used to be that you should promote your launch for its first 4 to 5 days, but my data showed that you should instead look at a longer window of 6 to 10 days of increasing sales. This becomes more true for books that are published wide. Amazon suppresses preorders until shortly before their release, and counts each sale at the time of order rather than at the time of sale, which would be launch day. Because of this, a KDP Select book is better off with no preorder or a short preorder window of 25 days or fewer, while a wide book is better off with the longest preorder possible up to 1 year. The only exception might be a KDP Select or wide author, that is well-versed in hitting the top of Amazon's bestseller lists for their category or overall on a regular basis. If you are using a perma-free or price-pulsed-free strategy at Amazon, you want to coordinate a steady and frequent drip of newsletter promotions, probably a new push twice a month. You may also want to coordinate these promotions with a print book or audiobook promotion on the same title, as that can really drive up the visibility of your ebook freebie. And finally, if you are doing a push, it makes a lot of sense to promote your next book, usually the second book in the series, at 99 cents at the same time, because you will simply get a much bigger boost that lasts longer on a paid title than you would on a free one. The popularity lists are incredibly valuable, and often get neglected as bestseller lists are visible and prominent in the storefront. Popularity lists are the key driver of sales behind the scenes. Master the popularity lists, and you master your ability to launch, run a time-sensitive promotion, and get more visibility for your books on Amazon's storefront. Task Checklist: Locate the popularity lists that are relevant to your book catalog and titles. Bookmark them if needed. They can be harder to find than the bestseller lists, but they are still important. Use launches and time-sensitive promotions to create positive feedback loops for your book on the popularity lists. These should extend 6 to 10 days long and happen roughly every 30 days, though your mileage may vary depending on your niche or genre. For freebies, you may want to run these every 2 weeks instead. Or pair them with a promotion of the paid book in the same series. When you launch, release in as many formats as possible as sales of books in each format will contribute to whether your book is recommended in personalized recommendations channels. For evergreen promotions, look at the popularity lists to find valuable comps that you wouldn't necessarily find on the bestseller lists. It is my belief that Amazon knows a great deal about its audience, and what types of books each individual likes to buy. Even if a category doesn't technically exist on Amazon, that doesn't mean that it isn't a segmentation of their email list. A book that's high in popularity ranking is going to be featured more in the personalized recommendations channels, which we cover in later chapters. Use preorders if they make sense for your strategy. Whether your book is in KDP Select versus wide is going to matter quite a bit when deciding this. Chapter 10: Advanced Search Optimization. This is the part of the book where I tell you how to optimize your metadata to show up better in search results. The irony of this chapter is that I've already been telling you exactly how search works, because it's the same algorithms as the popularity lists. In fact, you can get to the popularity lists by choosing a category, like "Kindle Store," in the search bar, then hitting enter. The popularity lists are basically just the default sort for search. When we click on a category, our query, we get the search results in default sort order. This is the essence of what the popularity lists are. You might ask, why or how do these pages have stuff at the category carousels, personalized recommendation carousels, even special banners if they are search-focused. But most search engines have some implementation of special case pages. For example, during an election, Google doesn't return the most popular page for any of the candidates' names. Instead, it returns election results. If you Google a movie, search returns a bar at the top labeled "Movies," along with a sidebar listing Wikipedia-like information about the title. The goal of search is always to return a landing page of the best results for what the person is trying to query. The goal of Amazon is for search to return infinite storefronts of best-selling books so that when readers come, they always find exactly what they are looking for. There's no question that the popularity lists are a special portion of the search bar, are, uniquely designed to be landing pages of the best-selling books on the site. Chesson's Research on Search. But alas, this doesn't necessarily matter, as long as you understand that how books are ranked in the popularity lists will be how they are ranked in search queries. The first thing to notice about search is that it is not personalized in any way. You can log in to your account log out of it, go to a different browser under private or incognito mode, check on a different device, it doesn't matter at all. I hear this myth all the time from authors, not just about Amazon but also about other retailers, particularly Google Play Books and Kobo. So definitely no, this is not happening. Let's clear that up now and put a pin in it. Now, that doesn't mean that the search results don't change regularly. They absolutely do change over time, and they change as new books get published and books shift around in popularity. In fact, Dave Chesson of Publisher Rocket has done some experimentation around this. Here is the article: https://kindleprenuer.com/amazon-popularity-effect-how-amazon-treats-book-discoverability/ What he discovered through the data is that as a book makes more sales, Amazon gave the book more keywords and keyphrases in groupings (word clouds) that reflected what Chesson himself classifies as broad and tertiary terms. He found that Amazon uses the keywords you provide and starts adding more similar terms, then starts adding tertiary terms, then starts adding broader terms. As a book drops in sales (stops converting as well for the terms), Amazon removes those word clouds on the way down. For example, if you are ranking for terms like "LitRPG" and "dungeon adventure," Amazon will first add similar terms like "dungeon master" and "Dungeon Dragons," then terms like "orcs and goblins" and "Arthurian fantasy," then add broader terms like "epic fantasy" and "free fantasy books." On the way down in popularity rankings, Amazon will taketh away what it has giveth. Death, so you will slowly stop showing up in searches, or you will show up lower in searches. Anyone who has a dead pen name or book title that is too common a phrase has probably noticed this, especially when they search Amazon for their books. I'm sad to say I can verify this myself, as I'm condensing all my fiction pen names into one right now, and a few of them have gotten some cobwebs in the interim. Chesson actually wrote some software to pull the data and verify his results, plus explained why he thought they are word clouds and not individual keywords. So I'm going to strongly suggest you read the article one listed and listen to everything Dave Chesson says about how Amazon's keywords and search algorithm works. Chesson has also found a number of other cool things about keywords, many of which we will talk about in this chapter. However, I recommend heading over to Kindlepreneur.com and gobbling up everything he has posted about this topic. This is yet another case where if you can only read this book or his blog, I'm going to say you should read his blog. Search changes based on what's selling. For now, I'm just going to put forth that search changes significantly based on the popularity lists. This is pretty common across all ebook retailers But it means a lot more at Amazon because we know a lot about the popularity lists, and they change over at a significantly greater churn than any of the other ebook retailers seem to. It also means that while your metadata is really important, optimizing your metadata is not necessarily going to get you a ton of visibility on Amazon by itself. You need sales on Amazon. You need to rank higher in the popularity lists at Amazon. We're going to talk about how to optimize some other parts of your metadata so that when you do rise in the popularity ranks, you will be prepared for success. Takeaway: Search results are ranked using the same algorithms as the popularity lists. As your popularity rank goes up, you get indexed for more terms and show up in more search results. 7 ways to come up with relevant keywords. One of the confusions in talking about search is that we don't know what someone might put in that search box. Again, infinite storefronts. Luckily, there are many ways to find keywords that might work for your books. Use Chesson's methodology that he shares here: https://kindleprenuer.com/7-kindle-keywords "/". Use Chesson software Publisher Rocket. Type keywords into the search bar and see what autofill brings up. Search for an established author's full name. On the sidebar, you may see the tropes most associated with them, as long as they have a bigger backlist. Use a general free SEO tool like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, or Answer the Public to expand your keywords. Check these in Publisher Rocket to make sure they get traffic on Amazon specifically. Use Amazon Ads to find keywords, which you can do with auto-generated ads. Look under "Search Terms," and you can see which keywords are converting for you. Spend some of your own time brainstorming keywords. You know your books best. If you are looking for more keywords, whether it be for metadata optimization or for Amazon advertising, advertising, Brian Cohen runs a free challenge called the 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge. The challenge walks you through a lot of the setup for Amazon Ads, including helping you find target audiences, write copy, and more. You can learn more about the challenge here: https://advertising.amazon.com/library/case-study/brian-cohen Takeaway: There are lots of ways you can find new keywords for your book title, book subtitle, series title, author name, book description, and keywords. You can type in more than 7 keywords by using the full 50 characters per text box. Are you ranking for a keyword? What does it mean to rank, anyway? It essentially means that you are showing up in search results for a specific keyword. Ideally, you are ranked highly in search for this keyword, rankings based on your place in the popularity lists compared to other search query results. Naturally, you want to rank for as many relevant keywords and keyphrases as possible because that helps you appear on more pages. You can check to see your ranking by searching for the keyword or keyphrase and seeing what comes up. Are you there? The results of search are filtered by keyword ranked in part by popularity rank, and probably sorted by something more around relevancy, how relevant the book is for the specific term. Keywords by country. If you really want to optimize, you have to do it by country. There are special categories in each country that you can look at by going to that country's website. There are also different keywords that rank better or worse across country stores. While you probably don't want to go overboard to optimize your keywords by country, you can make sure that at least a portion of your keywords overlap to each country, since this helps determine a large portion of visibility at each retailer. Here's a tool you can use to find the categories of other authors: https://www.bklnk.com/categories5.php PHP. Takeaway: Optimize your categories and keywords for each country so you can show up in each country store's algorithms too. Author, Series, and Title Keywords. When you use an author name or a well-known series as your keyword in the search bar, Amazon does something that we want it to do, which is return books by the author that matches. It also does something unique, which is after it runs out of books by that author that rank for the search term, it begins to show you books closely related to the author's books you just typed in. For example, if you search for Monica Leonelle in Amazon search, you'll find a bunch of my well-selling books, and then it will start returning books by other closely related authors to me, like Becca Syme, Becca Puglisi, and Angela Ackerman and Chris Fox. Here's what it doesn't show results for: other authors named Monica, other authors named Leonelle, or book titles with descriptions containing these names. The reverse is true when I search some of their names, though it will never be a 1-to-1 for this, because remember, some books are ranked for more keywords due to their popularity rank. This is one important reason why you need a pen name for each major category you are in. Amazon has a lexicon of keywords behind the scenes that it is ranking you for, without you adding those keywords to your metadata. In fact, you are not allowed to add author names or series that Amazon recognizes to your keywords anyway. In addition to the authors I mentioned, you may also see some other books. I can tell you, because I know my books and their audiences very well at this point, that these books do not truly belong in my search results. If you are familiar with my books, these books will stick out like a sore thumb. And that's where it gets interesting. If it's August or September, for example, then a big reason they are there is because they are expensive college textbooks that are assigned reading, so they have had a spurt of sales in paperback or hardcover. These books are usually tangentially related to writing or creativity, but they are really only there because of their popularity rank. This happens throughout the year, and will happen to your books at times specific to your catalog and genre. I always know that August and September will be harder sales months for my writing books, because my category has a lot of textbooks in it during back-to-school. During these months, I try to lean into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) prep, because my books are perfectly designed for that challenge. You can see this same effect to varying degrees when typing in a well-known title or series in the search bar. If you have a similar and highly relevant book, you'll sometimes come up in search even before the author's other books in the series. For example, if you type in "dark protectors," you'll first see romance books with the phrase in the title or series, but then you'll see other romance books that are considered dark and use the bodyguard trope, which is exactly what you'd want this search to return. As you can see, Amazon's search algorithms are sophisticated and unparalleled. Hopefully this explains more about why Dave Chesson is probably right about the clouds, or clusters of keywords that Amazon adds to books. The reason they do it is because their search algorithms are at this level of elegance. They want to show you the absolute best books that match your queries. So now that you understand how keywords work in practice, head on back to your list and evaluate how you can make it stronger. To help your books appear where you want in search. What are the perfect books to include next to yours on the bookshelf? You can use these keywords in your Amazon ads too. Takeaway: Keywords go in the book title, book subtitle, and series title, as well as the keywords section. You can use them in your advertising too. Keywords in the book description. Despite what some authors believe, I don't believe Amazon indexes book descriptions. I could be wrong, but they state clearly what they index, which is title metadata and keywords. There's also evidence that they build keyword clouds of data that are based on a structure they have developed, rather than a structure that we as authors give them. While we think that our books have unique keywords, it may actually be that our books have a baseline of unique keywords, and more keyword clouds attach to that baseline. Headline as the book rises in popularity rank. Still, there are authors who have tested this and seen that adding keywords to their descriptions have then had them showing up in search results for that keyword or key phrase when before they weren't. I don't discount that experience, and I definitely could be wrong. That said, no one has ever been able to demonstrate that putting keywords in your book description will help your book rank for those keywords every time. If this were happening, the author world would notice immediately and start gaming it immediately, which is why I think it isn't happening, and why I think the description isn't indexed. I do think that Amazon uses the description in the backend in some way to verify that the keywords you've imputed match what the book is actually about. Chesson has data that they will not index you for keywords that don't match the actual Regardless of whether the book description is indexed or not, you should still try to put your keywords into your description, not because it's going to get you search rankings, but because humans are also good at picking up on keywords in their decision-making process. Furthermore, your titles and book descriptions are used on every ebook retailer, and some of them, like Apple Books and Google Play Books, have been verified to index these keywords for search. So why wouldn't you optimize this ahead of time so your titles and description can be consistent everywhere? Takeaway: While book descriptions are not indexed, they are likely used as checks and balances to make sure your book actually belongs with the categories and keywords that you say it does. Additional Resources. If you'd like to get my guide to writing the ultimate book description that is optimized for the 5 largest retailers, make sure you enroll in the course for free! https://writermba.teachable.com/p/go-wide-grow-wide-bootcamp. Dave Chesson's research on Amazon's algorithms can be found here: https://kindleprenuer.com/how-to-choose-kindle-keyword/ https://kindleprenuer.com/7-kindle-keyword/ Publisher Rocket from Chesson's Company is a fantastic tool for keyword and search research. https://publisherrocket.com/ Takeaways: Search results are ranked using the same algorithms as the popularity lists. As your popularity rank goes up, you get indexed for more terms and show up in more search results. There are lots of ways you can find new keywords for your book title, book subtitle, series title, author name, book description, and keywords. You can type in more than 7 keywords by using the full 50 characters per text box. Optimize your categories and keywords for each country so you can show up in each country store's algorithms too. Keywords go in the book title, book subtitle, and series title, as well as the keywords section. You can use them in your advertising too. While book descriptions are not indexed, they are likely used as checks and balances to make sure your book actually belongs with the categories and keywords that you say it does. Task Checklist: Use the 7 Ways to Find Keywords plus the Go Wide, Grow Wide Bootcamp resources to gather your keywords for each book you have. You'll likely be able to repeat many across series, connected worlds and characters, and so on. Repeat the keywords process for various countries that your books are in. Prioritize based on the most important audiences for that book or series. Set up advertising to work with the keywords you found. When you increase sales, you rise in search rank and get more and more keywords added to your book. It becomes a positive feedback loop on Amazon. Chapter 11: Amazon's Carousels. Carousels are a basic building block of a retailer storefront across all of the Big Five retailers—Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes Noble, and Google Play Books—and a basic feature of all modern e-commerce. These basic building blocks feature products in a row and may have arrows to the left and right so that you can keep browsing to find more books. There is also often a link where you can view all, which redirects you to a page layout of rows and columns of books. Amazon uses carousels extensively on its retailer sites, product pages, series pages, author pages, and more. And it is always changing these up by testing new carousels with new algorithms, relabeling old carousels with new headers, and moving them around the product pages to the point where you can't keep track of them. There are some consistencies. There are usually at least 4 carousels on your individual book product pages, including at least 2 Sponsored Product carousels and a Series carousel. Author pages usually have Author Also Bought carousels. Series pages usually have Series Also Bought carousels. Even with these consistencies, Amazon as a storefront is constantly testing new carousels. In most of my retailer books, I provide a list of the most popular and common carousels, but since Amazon is constantly moving on this front, I've decided to instead provide a list of the types of carousels that you are likely to see on Amazon's storefront. Types of carousels. Bestseller carousels: When you are browsing various product pages, you may see other bestsellers in the same category. You'll also find these bestseller carousels all over the storefront. Merchandised carousels: While few and far between, Amazon uses these carousels to do some merchandising and push specific, often bestselling books in their storefront. Some examples of these carousels include Editor's Picks and Page to Screen. Category carousels: When Amazon figures out that you've viewed/purchased multiple books in a particular category, it starts showing you that category with the "More to Explore in" category header. These carousels are personalized to your browsing and buying history. Series Carousels: These carousels primarily feature on product pages and are a newer addition to Amazon's storefront. Series carousels are specifically in response to how independent authors sell books and how readers read them. You can also find series carousels that urge the reader to continue reading in the series they have started already. Also bought carousels: The main 3 carousels in this category are also bought, also viewed, and also read. However, there are only the main ones. Others include because you have been reading similar books and based on your reading. This category of carousel is covered more thoroughly in the chapter on also bots. Personalized recommendation carousels. Some of the carousels I've already mentioned, like the category carousels, are a type of personalized recommendation as well. I've also seen carousels like inspired by your wishlist. This category of carousel is covered more thoroughly in the chapter on personalized recommendations. Advertising carousels. Much of Amazon's profits now come from their advertising platform, and it would be difficult to miss that sponsored product carousels have featured prominently on product pages for the last half decade. This category of carousel is covered more thoroughly in the chapter on advertising. Takeaway: Carousels are both a big part of Amazon's storefront and they are changing all the time. The best way to understand how they affect visibility is to group them and see how each group drives sales at the storefront. The next several chapters of the book help to clarify that. Carousel have driven major changes in visibility at Amazon over the years. One of the most frustrating pain points I hear from authors about Amazon's algorithms is that they are always changing. I often push back on this because, as demonstrated in previous chapters, the algorithms are actually quite similar to how they have been for the last decade or more. So what is it that authors are observing? Often, they are observing the introduction of new carousels, in prominent positioning at Amazon. When this happens, it's not really that the algorithms have changed, but that the distribution of visibility has shifted to different books. Some might say that this is the same thing. I make a distinction because it's not that the previous algorithmic mechanisms are taken away, but rather layered on top of. There isn't something different to look at, just something new to look at, and that feels like an important distinction to me. You can mark a lot of Amazon's algorithmic eras by the introduction of various prominent carousel types to the storefront. The Also Bought era: For as long as I can remember until about 2016, Amazon's recommendation engine was heavily driven by a concept called "also bots"—the pairing of products based on customer data and activity. The Sponsored Ads Era: Amazon's advertising platform launched for authors in 2015, and sponsored ad carousels became a prominent feature on product pages in the years after. To this day, these carousels will not be leaving the platform anytime soon, though Amazon is constantly moving and adjusting the them to meet a delicate balance between customer experience and profit. The series era. The series carousel was introduced in 2020 and made a huge impact on visibility because it took top billing on the product page, showing as the first and most prominent carousel just after the section with the COVID and product description. Since the introduction of series carousels has been a fairly recent but major change in the last several years, Let's take a look at how it has affected book visibility in Amazon's storefront. How the Book Series Carousel Increases Traffic to Amazon. In 2020, Amazon added a major new feature on its site with series pages. Authors rejoiced; the pages were advertising-free, and there was a one-click button to buy the entire series, which readers seemed to use. Over time, series also bots appeared on the page, which provided new data points for authors. And also over time, the series carousel grew larger and more prominent on product pages. But also over time, also bots also started changing. Anytime a major new feature is added to a platform, it's going to change the other major features on the platform. The algorithms will change, not because something was recalculated or taken away, necessarily, but simply because something else else is getting attention and visibility. It's a bit like how people lose weight by simply eating more vegetables. It's a strategy of crowding out the junk food rather than banning it from one's diet. The book series Carousel organically changed the nature of also-bots. For years, I believed that although also-bots were no longer on the product pages, they were working hard behind the scenes to drive sales through personalized emails and notifications. But in the last few years, there have been shifts in the types and formatting of personalized emails, as well as push notifications from the Kindle app, to lessen the impact of also-bots. One of the chief changes has been the book series carousel, which links to a book series page where readers can one-click an entire series. But even if the series page has few one-clicks, just the prominence of the book series carousel on the product page has pretty much ensured that the also-bots for each book are other books in the series. So even when also-bots are used on Amazon's site, they are effectively a series list rather than a cross-pollination of similar books by other authors. This is true for every book on the platform, except those that aren't in a series. Takeaway: The shift between eras from the also-bots era to the sponsored ads era to the series era has changed how to succeed at Amazon. With each era, new 7-figure authors are crowned, while other authors find their books in a tailspin down the bestseller charts. Like any platform, it's valuable to use the new tools you are given; most of the time they are released for a reason. Is this good for authors in the short term? This seems like a good thing, right? And it is, for many authors. It means that no other authors can easily buy their way into your Also Bots carousel, and that time-sensitive promotions, like a BookBub, don't shake up your carousel too much. When you can find your Also Bots carousel for a particular book, which usually requires an incognito window, you probably notice that it's all your own books. And for organic sales after someone buys your book, that matters. For years, there were personalized emails and push notifications that recommended the first book in the "Also Bought" carousel. If that book belonged to someone else, you were, in many ways, sending traffic to your own book only for Amazon to later funnel it to someone else's book. This mattered a lot if you had a big series or catalog, and very little if you only had a single book. Who is this bad for? It's bad for authors who were once able to dominate their category. 3 to 5 years ago, if a book dominated the witches and wizards category, it would be prominent in every also bought carousel, often in the first slot for books in the witches and wizards category. Now those slots will be filled with next in series instead. Is this good for authors in the long term? Who else is this bad for? In some ways, all authors. The good news is that if you can drive traffic to your books, that traffic is less likely to flow to whatever hot series is dominating your category right now. The bad news is that you have to drive all the traffic to your books. In other words, you have to send traffic to Amazon, and no matter how high you climb, they send less traffic to your catalog. Before, there was a lot of cross-promotion and discovery between books by different authors on the platform. Now that is largely relegated to sponsored ads carousels, and personalized carousels that are focused on actions you've already taken. There is less opportunity for organic cross-promotion. If you are a wide author, this will be familiar to you, since this is how many of the wide retailers work as well. And is one of the reasons it can be harder to gain traction wide versus Amazon. And if you believe that Amazon has only become more pay-to-play over the years, this will validate your suspicions. It is not just competition that is causing this. Amazon has made real changes to its algorithms to reward authors that spend more money on advertising, driving more traffic to Amazon's site. Takeaway: The Series Era brings changes to Amazon's platform and makes it much more like other wide retailers, where authors have to send traffic to their books, rather than Amazon finding books and boosting them through their algorithms. The latter still happens; it's just not as easy to get it started or maintain it as it was before. The Following Era: The Series Carousel increases visibility once someone is in your series., but decreases discoverability on the storefront overall. And I predict that Amazon's new author profiles may start to have a similar effect in the next several years, especially now that author pages prioritize Author Also Bots and the Amazon Follow button. There is a larger change in the Amazon storefront, though. It's a shift away from promoting individual books and a shift toward promoting brands particularly author brands and series brands. In the age of TikTok, where much of search will be dominated by these types of keywords, it makes sense. From a data standpoint, it's better to have series and authors become more prominent on the website. As a former software engineer, it seems almost obvious that series and author pages should have had more prominence on Amazon's website from the beginning. Instead, Amazon focused on the relationship between two products, in this case two books, despite readers no longer really thinking of books in that way. Focusing on the relationship between two products still serves Amazon on most other parts of the site. And it used to serve the bookselling space as well when they were largely dealing with traditionally published authors and schedules, where every book launch truly was an event. And individual books were clear products. Independent authors have set a new standard, publishing books too quickly, to the point where readers cannot remember character names and individual book titles. Often, readers think in terms of series or author names instead. Overall, I believe this helps Amazon present a more organized set of data to readers. I also believe that authors can use these tools to their advantage to perform well on Amazon. And finally, I believe this improves opportunity for wide authors. Some suggested experiments you can try are: Building your following on Amazon with targeted readers from your genre. Sending traffic to your series pages, which are advertising-free and now include pre-orders. Sending traffic to your author pages, which are advertising-free and now include book recommendations. To help readers get started with your catalog, you can set in the Reports and Marketing tab in Author Central. I suspect the next breakout list of high-earning authors will embrace the idea of sending as much traffic as possible to these relatively new Amazon pages, as well as racking up as many follows as possible. There are other indications that Amazon is shifting to becoming a more social platform. Author profiles are one way that this shift affects the publishing industry. Several of these topics will continue to unwind over the coming chapters, as we look at how Amazon's storefront and algorithms are changing, and attempt to point to where they are going, while acknowledging the many places they've been that are still underlying driving mechanisms of visibility. Takeaway: After the Series Era, are we entering the Following Era? It's hard to say. It takes years of data and adoption to see how an algorithmic change affects the storefront long-term, so it'll only be in hindsight that we see whether author popularity and following is a side feature or something that irrevocably shapes how Amazon's algorithms work. Additional Resources. Get Your Book Selling with Advanced Amazon Advertising: Book Sales Supercharged #17 by Monica Leonelle. I write frequently about Amazon algorithms changes and updates on Author Analyst. Many of the chapters in this book started as posts there. https://authoranalyst.substack.com. Takeaways. Carousels are both a big part of Amazon's storefront, and they are changing all the time. The best way to understand how they affect visibility is to group them and see how each group drives sales at the storefront. The next several chapters of the book help to clarify that. The shift between eras, from the also-bots era to the sponsored ads era to the series era, has changed how to succeed at Amazon. With each era, new 7-figure authors are crowned, while other authors find their books in a tailspin down the bestseller charts. Like any platform, it's valuable to use the new tools you are given. Most of the time they are released for a reason. The series era brings changes to Amazon's platform and makes it much more like other wide retailers, where authors have to send traffic to their books, rather than Amazon finding books and boosting them through their algorithms. The latter still happens; it's just not as easy to get it started or maintain it as it was before. After the series era, are we entering the following era? It's hard to say. It takes years of data and adoption to see how an algorithmic change affects the storefront long-term, so it'll only be in hindsight that we see whether author popularity and following is a side feature or something that irrevocably shapes how Amazon's algorithms work. Task Checklist. You probably know that carousels are important on Amazon, but have you ever studied or looked at them. Familiarize yourself with carousels across all the different pages on Amazon. Most authors only focus on the product page and bestseller lists, but there is so much more to the bookstore front than that. Build your following on Amazon with targeted readers from your genre. More ideas on how in the coming chapters. Send traffic to your series pages, which have no advertising on them. Them. Pre-orders are now included in these series pages, and readers can one-click buy your series, even if you have pre-orders up. Selling books in a series can help you drastically improve your appearance in personalized recommendations emails and push notifications. Send traffic to your author pages, which are advertising-free and now include author-suggested book recommendations to help readers get started with your catalog. Catalog. You can set your book recommendations in the "Reports and Marketing" tab in Author Central. Chapter 12: Amazon's Also Bots. I've shared that Amazon's Also Bots are the last major section of the algorithms that feed the personalized recommendations in-store, in-app, and in email. It's really important to get your Also Bots right, because this is one of the main factors that tells Amazon who else to recommend your your book to. They look at what the people who have bought your book have also bought and start recommending your book to people who bought those books but didn't buy yours. Read that sentence again if you need to. I almost got confused typing it. There are 3 carousels to discuss: also bought, also viewed, and also read. At the time of this writing, and it may change in the future, they live on your product page where you may also see other carousels throughout the like "Related to items you viewed," but these other carousels are all personalized recommendation carousels. The 3 carousels that I listed, which I'll just lump under the terms "also bots" if I'm talking about them as a group, are the only 3 carousels that I know of that speak specifically to how products are connected to each other. You can find these 3 carousels, which don't all appear on the same product page at once, carousels, so hop around the site to see them all, by scrolling down any book product page. They are labeled "Customers who bought this also bought," and you can't miss them. Here's what each carousel is: Also Boughts: Determined by multiple customers buying 2 books in close proximity to each other. Also Reads: Determined by multiple customers reading 2 books in a small time frame. Determined by web browsing history and multiple customers viewing two books in small time frame. It's not easy to say exactly how also-boughts are determined, but I have observed over the years that for the specific also-bought carousel, it usually doesn't take much—10 to 20 customers buying both—to establish a connection between two books, which then gets the recommendation engine rolling. Now, I'm sure that number of 10 to 20 customers buying both —changes significantly—in the top 10,000 in the store, and then again in the top 100 in the store. The greater the sales volume, the more it's going to take. This carousel specifically updates twice a week, usually around Wednesday and Saturday. The time window for these customers to buy both books is such that you would almost have to have a cross-promotion to make it happen, or single-sidedly put your your books next to theirs in your highly responsive email list. I don't know as much about the other two, as they are newer in recent years. I believe that the Also Read carousel is possibly based on finishing a book, but it may also just be a delayed reaction from buying the book. Takeaway: Also Bots are an important visibility mechanism in Amazon's algorithms because they drive a lot the personalized recommendations in-store, in-app, and in email. There are 3 types of this kind of carousel: Also Bots, Also Views, and Also Reads. Interesting mathematical features of Also Bots. As far as I can tell, these 3 carousels are all based on the same concept, which is the connection between 2 books, and in the larger picture, the clusters of books. Every category in the store is going to have a cluster of books in the top tier that are selling regularly, and that define the category in some way. It descends from there, with a second-tier cluster, third-tier cluster. You get where this is going. Within these clusters, there are books that are frequently recommended, for the category as well as recommended to people who have bought the other. This creates an effect of the cluster moving up and down the popularity lists together, releasing deadweight. As some books in the cluster don't convert to sales well enough, and picking up new and relevant books that start to sell better. The clusters also grow closer to each other and further away from each other. As they grow closer to each other, there may be some crossover, as Amazon tests recommending a popular book in one cluster to people who bought any of the books in the other cluster, and vice versa. The clusters will then move closer to each other, eventually merging, or will move further away from each other, where they can find other clusters to interact with. Sometimes a cluster will become a cluster of clusters, and you really want to be at the center of that, because it means Amazon will be recommending the main cluster's books to anyone who read from all the other clusters. Eventually, a cluster dissolves. The books have all been recommended to each other's original audiences, and now they are not converting as well. It's a dance over time where clusters form and fade. This is, of course, just how AlsoBots work in theory. In practice, a book may have a lot more movement from cluster to cluster, and the clusters may also not grow to huge sizes. I think this visualization is important, however, because a lot of authors think that your book is moving solo through AlsoBots. Mathematically, this isn't the case. Books start to cluster together, due to the feedback loop, and then the clusters start to cluster together. While all of this is presented to you in a flat row across your screen, that's not at all what it looks like behind the scenes. Knowing that books cluster up like this, it's easier to understand the next steps of building your Also Bots. When you first launch a book, or when you have a bigger promotion, you are likely to get attached to a cluster, or in the case of the promotion, detach from your current cluster and attach to the new cluster you are cross-promoting with. Do you want to be in this cluster? If not, then you need to do another promotion, or you need to rework the cluster in some way. Which cluster do you want to be in? You can map all of this out by looking at also-bots for various books in your category. What you are looking for is a group of relevant books that seem to all be in each other's also-bots. This is a cluster where the feedback loop is such that all the books are selling to all the other books' audiences. And this is where you want to be. Attach to one of these clusters so that you can get in on all that personalized recommendation action. While I do think you can create clusters using all sorts of cross-promotion, that often requires the other authors to be willing participants. If you are like me and don't want to talk to anyone or organize something like that, you can instead use Amazon ads, which help you laser-target different clusters so you can position your book exactly where you want it to be. I talk about this a little more in Chapter 11 on Amazon advertising. That is also bots. Takeaway: Also bots create clusters of books that move through Amazon's ranking and recommendation systems. You can train Amazon on who to cluster you with through cross-promotion or advertising. Author and Series Also Bots. There are also author and series also bots, but there's not much to cover there. I believe they work very similarly to individual book also bots. And the author abs are particularly interesting, because when I studied this, it seemed like clusters of authors may move together through the rankings too. The implications would be interesting, but it's hard to study without much data, so I have nothing definitive to say about these or how to use them to your advantage at this time. You also can't target an author or a series with the same specificity that you can a book, book, so the best way to affect either of these is likely to climb in popularity rank and let things otherwise sort themselves out. There have always been author also bots, but now they are featured more prominently, and that Amazon follow button is highlighted. And it's possible that Amazon has similar reasons for wanting author profiles to become destinations on its website. Takeaway: Author also bots are more prominent on the site than they ever have been, so you can see some of your author clusters. Keep in mind that just because someone is showing on your page doesn't mean that you are showing on theirs. The good news is that the connection already exists one way, so it's easier to create the connection the other way too. Just get more book sales from that person's audience. Notes on the importance of also bots. All algorithms are opinionated. They weigh a variety of factors and calculate a score, a rank, a sales rank on Amazon, and then distribute visibility and discoverability accordingly. And Amazon's algorithms have always been complicated. But did we mistake that for being good? Also, bots used to be the gold standard of recommendation engines. Over the years, Amazon has shifted in this direction algorithmically, moving further and further away from also bots. It makes sense, given that it is collecting data from its ad platform, where authors focus largely on things like author names, categories, and series titles anyway. Perhaps the data points to how readers truly discover books, which still remains to be by genre, author name, and series name. And perhaps also bots were not how readers discover books best. For years, I believed that although also bots were no longer on the product pages, they were working hard behind the scenes to drive sales through personalized emails and notifications. But in the last few years, there have been shifts in personalized emails and notifications to lessen the impact of also bots there, too. There was once a time when also bots were believed to be the best book recommendations to drive sales. Over time, it became clear that also bots could be gamed with coordinated efforts, and also broke down when the price point was zero. On the ebook side, Amazon seems to be shifting their focus to series sales, as well as tracking reader data, like browsing and reading history and giving readers more control over what they are recommended through follows. I believe that the next wave of high-earning authors on the platform could be those who focus on building their Amazon following, going, along with those who find ways to contend with Amazon's possible future focus on author also bots, as opposed to book also bots. I also think that Amazon is going to favor more deal-like promotional efforts in the future. The nature of its behind-the-scenes emails have shifted over the last 2 years to focus more on discounted books. It makes sense, as data from sites like BookBub show that discounted books are one major way that readers discover new authors, and once they do, they go on to purchase books at full price. Make no mistake, also bots are still driving some visibility behind the scenes, but the impact has lessened over the years as new algorithmic features crowd out this mechanism, much like vegetables crowd out junk food on your plate. Takeaway: also bots still matter, but they have been layered over by new algorithmic features. I think they are losing prominence in driving sales, and there is definitely evidence that they are losing space in in personalized recommendations, especially Amazon sales emails. Takeaways. Also Bots are an important visibility mechanism in Amazon's algorithms because they drive a lot of the personalized recommendations in-store, in-app, and in email. There are 3 types of this kind of carousel: Also Bots, Also Views, and Also Reads. Also Bots create clusters of books that move through Amazon's ranking and recommendation systems. You can train Amazon on who to cluster you with through cross-promotion or advertising. Author also bots are more prominent on the site than they ever have been, so you can see some of your author clusters. Keep in mind that just because someone is showing on your page doesn't mean that you are showing on theirs. The good news is that the connection already exists one way, so it's easier to create the connection the other way too. Just get more book sales from that person's audience. Also bots still matter, but they have been layered over by new algorithmic features. I think they are losing prominence in driving sales, and there is definitely evidence that they are losing space in personalized recommendations, especially Amazon sales emails. Task checklist: Find comparable books and authors in your also viewed, and also Reads carousels if you are able to find them. You can often see them on your product page using an incognito window. Find comparable authors in your Authors Also Bought carousel. Targeting these authors and books in advertising can help you cluster near other more successful books and authors. A rising tide lifts all boats. Chapter 13. How Amazon Shares Personalized Recommendations. The last major piece of Amazon's algorithms is one that we can't study nor bend to our will easily, because it's largely a set of algorithms based on other algorithms. We can measurably affect the algorithms that drive personalized recommendations, and we can guess at how personalized recommendations work. Chapters 4 to 8 have largely covered the how of this discussion already.— at least what I personally know of the how, which is all I could give you to begin with. What I wanted to share in this chapter is how prominent personalized recommendations are across Amazon's site, app, and email list, so you can see just how important they are and just how much they can help you find your readers. Amazon is unique in that they are one of the pioneers of recommendation search engines, and have worked extensively on their algorithm algorithms to get it right. There may be no other company in the world that has worked so hard on this, aside from Netflix. So I want to show you that showing up in personalized recommendations is the fruitful result of pulling the right algorithm levers on Tier 1. It's the honey ready for harvest. Takeaway: Personalized recommendations are based on also bots, popularity lists, and a few other things. Retailer landing and home pages. When you enter Amazon's book site or go to any popularity list category page, Amazon shows you a mix of carousels that can tell you a lot about what they've tracked for you personally. We've covered a few of these carousels already, but let's get really clear on what they are. Also bots—these as a category are by far the most prominent carousels in the store. And drive a lot of the recommendations in email and in-app too. What's New in the Store: These are driven by both the bestseller lists and popularity lists. For example, if the carousel is labeled "Hot New Releases," it's the bestseller lists, because that is the fastest-moving list in the store, but you'll also see "Featured New Releases," which is a steadier list based on popularity rank. I almost never see the bestseller lists carousels on the site or in email. But I see the popularity lists carousels frequently. Clickable book tags. These carousels are made of popular tags created from a variety of sources, some of which are customer-generated. My guess is that the book tags are intended to someday be entirely based on how customers tag a book, and I would guess it's largely around customer reviews. There's usually a word cloud above reviews. Right now it looks like they are mostly using categories as book tags, which is common for Amazon while they are testing something. A random metric on their site—most wished for, most gifted, or top-rated—may come up, and they are fairly self-explanatory. While these are interesting carousels, they garner so little visibility on the store that there's not much point to putting effort into getting on them. Deals. Deals. We talked about how to apply for deals in Chapter 3. Amazon gives those deals a lot of visibility throughout the store using carousels and near-daily emails that send readers to their deals page. Merchandised. You'll sometimes see Editor's Pick attached to a book, and there are carousels for that. It is basically a book chosen by Amazon's editor team and has some weighting toward customer favorites. There are very few merchandised areas on the storefront so I wouldn't worry about these carousels either. The best way to get in them is likely to be a best-selling book on Amazon anyway. There are probably many others, and in truth, carousels is one way that Amazon tests new algorithms. The bestseller lists, popularity lists, search, and also bots are very set and have been for years. When Amazon wants to test things, they build new carousels to collect data on how readers react. One area where I think they are testing is rebalancing how free books appear in the store. Ideally, they'd like them to appear on product pages without those recommendations overtaking email and app pushes. Instead of tweaking them in the Tier 1 algorithms, they test them on the retailer site only. Personalized recommendation carousels. There are two larger flavors of personalized recommendation carousels that you will see more often on product pages. These have on-site potential, but their greater potential is how they drive recommendations in the backend. Books You May Like. This carousel includes books from all your favorite categories and is sorted based on the category you are looking at. It remains roughly the same for you as you browse across the category, aside from the special case of taking a book out of rotation if you are on the product page for that book. When you change major categories, this carousel changes with you. If you are browsing a category for which Amazon doesn't have much personalized data on you, the carousel will also not have great recommendations for you. If you are browsing a category that you frequent and buy a lot of books from, the recommendations will be very strong. This carousel is likely based primarily off of also bots, Also Reads and Also Viewed from the website. There are no repeated authors, likely because the goal of this carousel is to help readers discover new authors. For wide authors, it is far easier to get your free book into this carousel. I believe the addition of Also Reads and Also Viewed to the mix has made this easier, as free books also get into these two carousels easier too. Recommended for you in category. This carousel is not based on sales rank or popularity rank, despite how it looks. It's instead based on books with also bought connections that you have purchased. If you have purchased a lot of books that have this book in their also boughts, the book will rank high in this carousel. In a category that I frequent and have many books from, my first recommendation is the book for which I had already purchased the most books in the also bought carousel. The next books went down from there. There could be other factors around this, but this was the strongest link I found. Like books you may like, your history within the category matters. If you look at a page in a category where you buy a lot of books, this carousel often replaces the also bought carousel. Whereas if you look at a category where you don't, it may not be on the page. Takeaway: There are many carousels on the stores, and personalized recommendations are part of that. It's easier to get your freebie into these carousels and notifications than it has been in the past. Author Follows. Good news! You can now see how many Amazon follows you have right in your Author Central dashboard. Go to https://author.amazon.com/marketing-reports. You must be logged in. Here, you will be able to see how many followers you have. How Amazon follows help you gain more traction on Amazon. Because I follow very few authors on Amazon, it's easy to see how the retailer handle shows me books based on it. There are 3 main ways which Amazon uses follows: Carousels: There are a handful of carousels that use your follows, though they are minimal on Amazon's website. Personalized emails: They send out marketing emails based on who you follow. Push notifications: They send out push notifications in the Kindle app based on who you follow. Let's look at each one in more detail. Number 1: Carousels. Carousels are modular lists that get inserted all over a retailer. Amazon may have been among the first to popularize this style of building websites, but every retailer uses them, and they are the same in concept as what Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress might use to build a page. I follow Cassandra Clare and Michelle Maddow on Amazon, and they have heavily influenced my carousel for "Authors You Follow." This carousel, in particular, puts authors you follow directly into the reader's personalized view of their homepage. But there are other carousels that will bring similar authors to authors you follow into its own carousel. Other authors I follow include a handful of friends, along with spiritual witchy authors and artists. Because I'm judicial about following, the recommendations in the "Inspired by Authors You Follow" carousel are fairly spot on for me, aside from some of the fiction books which are in genres that my friends Write In. These carousels pop up all over Amazon's site, including on the reader's homepage. While they don't often show up on individual product pages, Amazon could shift that in the future, and Amazon is always testing various carousels to see how they convert in different spaces. Number 2: Email Notifications. Amazon sends out email notifications about preorders by authors you follow., similar to BookBub. This is incredibly important to bringing visibility to your new release over the first several months. While you can't really time these promotions, Amazon sends them automatically, they are essentially free email newsletter pushes to your followers when you have a 3-4 week preorder or longer. I've noticed an increase in frequency of these emails over the past year. Replacing other formatted emails from Amazon that used other aspects of algorithm functionality for sorting and visibility. Amazon also has a mini carousel section in its daily newsletter that is sometimes included, sometimes not. This can pull most popular books by that author or most recent books. Because these are going out daily and in the background, these notifications can keep your book top of mind in front of the people who follow you on Amazon. Amazon. Additionally, in pre-order or new release emails, you'll often see a "More from this author" carousel below it, indicating that these are dedicated emails. It's unlikely that everyone who follows you gets these emails, because a person could be following hundreds of authors, and that gets unruly. Amazon likely has to dole these out sparingly, and at times, make choices when the reader is following too many people. You'll notice that similar authors, not similar books, are a focus underneath this carousel with the Customers Also Bought items by list. I believe that Amazon is moving away from relationships at this book level. There are multiple indications of this move, including their evolving personalized emailing system and their prominent placement of series over the last several years. I received a personalized email from Amazon about another author I follow on December 3rd, about a month after the book's release on November 10th. Again, you don't control when these get sent out, but it usually happens within the first 30 days of your new release. Number 3: Push notifications in the Kindle app. Push notifications are very similar to personalized emails from Amazon, and reinforce many of the same types of carousels that one might see in email. In marketing, you need multiple touchpoints before someone takes action. For readers who have push notifications turned on for their Kindle app, they will also start to see pushes from authors you follow and more. Here are some that a reader might see: Authors you may be interested in. A book by an author you follow. A book by an author you've bought from before. A Kindle Vella story you follow. Still thinking about this book, based on website activity. Next in series, based on series metadata. Various deals and promotions from Amazon, editor's picks, sales, etc. Reading goals. Among those, the ones based on Amazon follows are prominent. Permanent. And it doesn't matter whether someone reads on their phone, iPad, or a dedicated device, because the notifications are attached to the account, not the method of reading. There are also 3 periods of time that you'll see Amazon follows. Pre-orders: Leading up to your launch date, Amazon might push your pre-order to followers. I've seen that the longer the pre-order, the better chance of this. Because they can space out the emails among other competing priorities. Launches: When your book launches, you are highly likely to see personalized marketing emails and push notifications driving your book sales. These usually go out within a few weeks of launch, and you cannot control them. Other: There are a few other times that you get publicity for your books or author profile based on follows,, but there aren't as many clear and discernible patterns around how those work. They are most likely based on user activity and/or Amazon's "visibility inventory," so we won't go into detail about them. Are Amazon Follows Vanity Metrics? What gets measured gets managed. Peter Drucker. If you give someone a metric, they'll try to improve it. Monica Leonelle. Amazon's recent move to show Amazon Follows counts is in line with their recent push of refreshed author pages, which place the follow button prominently at the top and includes a row of author "also boughts" at the bottom of each author page. Amazon might be giving authors their follow count for the first time largely because they want people to start building their followings. If you give someone a metric, they'll try to improve it, but be cautious of how you improve this new-to-us metric. While Amazon doesn't disclose how they distribute visibility, there are a few things that are likely to matter as to whether your follower actually receives notifications of your book. Number 1: Notification Settings. A follower has to be opted in to receive marketing emails from Amazon and has to be opted in to receive push notifications from the Kindle app. There is currently no data on how many Amazon users opt into, to push notifications, but general benchmarks across all apps are 50-95% on Android and 30-75% of iOS. This makes push notifications a really good way to reach readers. Number 2: Relevance. Relevance is important on any platform that is showing your product to its customers. When these notifications go out, do your followers actually click on and buy your book? While this may vary some from user to user, in general Amazon sends about 1 marketing email per day, and the Kindle app sends about 1 push notification per day. Not all of these communications are dedicated to who and what you follow though, so there is even less space available. Furthermore, when it comes to carousels on the website, there is significantly limited space, especially in the first row, which would get the best conversion. Amazon has a limited inventory of visibility per person, if you will, and is going to give that inventory to the books that are converting to clicks and then sales, as it always has. The downside for follows is that you can't see who is following you, nor can you sort through your following so that you can increase your relevancy like you might be able to do with an email list through pruning. This is not as much of a problem if you write in a popular genre like contemporary romance or thriller, but could be a problem if you have a more niche audience. Number 3: Personalization. Much of the visibility Amazon gives books is done through personalization, which makes it much harder to track. In other words, Amazon shows personalized marketing for books that it thinks each individual user will click on and buy. If a follower is following one author, they are likely to see all of that author's release emails and push notifications. Whereas if they are following 500 authors, they are likely to see any given author based more on timing, e.g., low-volume launch periods plus their other actions, e.g., clicking on their books or buying their books. As you build your following, keep in mind that quality over quantity may be more useful to you from an algorithmic perspective. I don't think followings are vanity metrics only, but if you build it one way, you won't be able to go back and fix it later, similarly to your BookBub following. Getting more Amazon follows. There are no secrets to getting more Amazon followers. Some ideas that are worth trying include: Simply asking people. You can make your ask as part of your autoresponder and add it to your email template your back matter, and more. Treating it like another social follow: You can add an Amazon follow request to anywhere that you add social follow buttons like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and more. Unfortunately, Amazon does not offer buttons like BookBub or another social platform might, but you could make your own! Adding it to a targeted viral giveaway: Targeted viral giveaways through KingSumo or UpViral are great ways to get followers on Amazon Amazon, BookBub, Goodreads, and even Kickstarter—both a main account and individual projects. One thing to keep in mind as you build a following is that, as always on Amazon, conversion matters. If you have a huge following that doesn't convert to book sales, Amazon is likely to stop pushing your books in emails and notifications. So build mindfully as opposed to a scattershot approach. The larger moves Amazon is making. On the one hand, Amazon could be sharing the follower count simply because they are redoing many elements of Author Central right now. I also have noticed, however, that the personalized marketing emails Amazon sends out have drifted more and more toward daily deals, similar to BookBub, and books from authors you follow, similar to BookBub. Of course, the only data I see is my own personalized email, and other users may be experiencing Amazon's marketing differently. Previously, my personalized emails were still driven largely by Also Bots, despite its carousel removal from most product pages. I would guess that for many readers, this is still the case, and Also Bots are driving some of the visibility on Amazon still. With algorithms, it's less likely that things change or are taken away and more likely that things are crowded out. Much like the advice to crowd out bad foods from your diet by increasing your vegetable intake. I believe, however, that Amazon Follows, and Author Also Bots, are crowding out the Book Also Bots that have been driving Amazon's algorithms for a decade or more. It makes sense: Also Bots were built in a world where every book was a miniature brand in traditional publishing, with its own separate launch and marketing push. Indie have changed the landscape, however, placing a greater emphasis on series brands and even author brands. There are too many individual books to treat every book as a single unit when it comes to marketing. Amazon's algorithms are adapting to that. What fascinates me is that it is largely a response to the independent side of the publishing industry—we are more influential than what we think. Which begs the question: how will we influence retailer behavior next? Takeaway: There's a lot to watch around Amazon follows, and I'm not convinced they are a vanity metric. I believe it's worth building your Amazon following with relevant readers who are actually going to read your books. Author Recommendations. Amazon has recently done away with blog posts, photos, and videos in author profiles, Reviews, and added in its place author recommendations. You can find this feature in Amazon Author Central. It's similar to BookBub's current feature, though at the current time, authors cannot write reviews, but rather just highlight books from their own catalog and from other authors' catalogs. When paired with the company's recent movement toward more visibility, and notifications for Amazon Follows, I believe Amazon is trying to incentivize two things: authors driving their readers to their profile page for a follow, readers looking for more recommendations directly on Amazon. Personalized emails. Amazon sends out a few basic flavors of email. Category books. If you've been browsing new categories or looking for something, you may notice new emails about that category pop up all of a sudden. Button. These are sorted by popularity rank, I believe. Deals: Amazon sends frequent emails around daily deals, monthly deals, and a few other promotional deals they have. These are mostly based on your also boughts, also reads, and also viewed, while also being sorted by popularity lists after that. Carousel summaries: Amazon sends summaries of your carousels, including also boughts, also reads "books you might like for you in category," etc. It's usually called "book recommendations for name." Follows: Amazon sends individual notifications for authors you follow and labels it such. Takeaway: Personalized emails go out with the focus of getting readers to buy more things that they'll read eventually. Personalized push notifications (in-app): Push notifications work roughly the same as what is sent out in email, aside from one exception. In the app, author connection and series connection matters a lot for the end-of-book experience, which I believe Apple Books pioneered. When you have gotten to the end of a book, Amazon now wants you to read the next book in the series or another book by the author. Pretty straightforward. Sometimes simple is better, it turns out. Otherwise, push notifications mostly go out for a new release when you are following the author or have purchased several books from them, or given other indicators like browsing the category or buying several other books in the category that you would be interested in the book. Takeaway: push notifications go out with the focus to get readers to buy more things based on what they have been reading. How to get more visibility in personalized recommendations. We can't really study personalized recommendations easily, but we know that these 3 things will increase your visibility in emails to the right people. Getting higher in popularity rank search, because when the category emails go out, you'll be higher or visible. Only the top people get shown. Being in an awesome also bought cluster for your category. Amazon sends out 2 to 3 books from each carousel, so you need to be toward the center of the cluster consistently over time. Getting more author follows from people who have few authors they follow or buy a ton of books in your category. Remember, Amazon is constantly testing things in this particular part of the algorithms, and it definitely seems like this is the place to watch watch, to better understand where the recommendation engines are going. For now, focus on the Tier 1 algorithms: bestseller lists, popularity lists, search, and also bots, but verify that it's working with personalized recommendations. Lastly, you need to be selling to get recommended. Hopefully, after 5 chapters, this is pretty clear. I thought I would drop it here again just to make sure. Amazon recommends things that will make them money. Pretty straightforward. Takeaway: You need to be selling to get into personalized recommendations. Takeaways: Personalized recommendations are based on also bots, popularity lists, and a few other things. There are many carousels on the stores, and personalized recommendations are part of that. It's easier to get your freebie into these carousels and notifications than it has been in the past. There's a lot to watch around Amazon follows, and I'm not convinced they are a vanity metric. I believe it's worth building your Amazon following with relevant readers who are actually going to read your books. Personalized emails go out with the focus of getting readers to buy more things that they'll read eventually. Push notifications go out with the focus to get readers to buy more things based on what they have been reading. You need to be selling to get into personalized recommendations. Task Checklist: Look at organic ways you can build your Amazon follows, as I think they can help you improve your personalized recommendations behind the scenes. Keep your sales up. Initial sales drive personalized recommendations, which account for a larger portion of visibility on the platform than people think. Remember, nearly all of Amazon's email sales are personalized. That is a lot, and with high conversion. Chapter 14: KDP Select. This book is mostly focused on getting book sales at Amazon. That makes it incredibly rare,— as the majority of content teaching people how to market books on Amazon focuses on the KDP Select program and getting more page reads. About 90% of independent authors have all their books in KDP Select. So many authors from beginner to advanced don't even realize or acknowledge that most of the teachings are focused on how to please a shared subscription service reader base versus how to sell books. However, these are two completely different business models, and your marketing on Amazon's storefront changes drastically based on which model you choose. Some may wonder why I've included this chapter at all in a book that focuses so much on book sales and wide strategies. Even if you are a wide author, you may have series in KDP Select. Many wide authors also put their translations in the KDP Select program., as it's less daunting to learn and promote one platform in a new language. Ironically, most of what I've shared in this book can be used for books that are in KDP Select to get sales. The reverse would not be true though—most of what you learn about marketing KDP Select books doesn't apply to marketing books that are not exclusive. If you have a book in KDP Select, you've already gotten a ton of tips on how to make more book sales. Sales. This chapter will give you additional methods to make that book successful. How KDP Select Works. KDP Select is by far the biggest publishing industry program using exclusivity to gain leverage in specific markets, but it's far from the only one. Amazon has several other large programs, including ACX for audiobooks and Kindle Vella for serials. Both of which try to use significant exclusivity to gain market share. Additionally, there are other exclusivity writer programs that attract independent authors, many of which we will dive into in this book. KDP Select is a per-book basis program that has many aspects, with the most prominent being inclusion in the Kindle Unlimited program, where readers who are subscribed to the service can borrow ebooks at no additional cost. There are and have been other elements to the program over the years, but this chapter will focus primarily on what it means for a book to be part of the Kindle Unlimited program from a marketing standpoint. Books in this program can be sold two different ways. Readers can purchase the books at price, or they can borrow a book. When the book is borrowed, the sales rank mechanism on Amazon treats a borrow as equivalent to a sale, From a payments perspective, though, authors only get paid when a reader actually reads a book. There have been ways to game this system in the past, but many of those security holes are plugged now. Authors get paid based on monthly KENP rates, which are released around the 15th of every month, and varying bonuses. Kindle Page Rates. KENP rates range from about about 0.0035 to 0.0055 over the years, with the 2023 monthly rate hovering around 0.00425. In general, the monthly rate has gone down over the years, as advertising costs on the platform have gone up significantly. This rate means that a book of about 350 KENP pages will make about $1.50 USD per read, if the reader reads to the end. Unfortunately, KENP page counts are not necessarily based on the actual book's page count, so it can be difficult to predict how many KENP pages your book actually is until you upload it and Amazon tells you. In general, and for fiction specifically, 350 KENP pages is about 50,000 words. Author and Title Bonuses. KDP Select books may also qualify an author for a bonus, though this requires top performance. The structure for bonuses has changed over the years. Amazon used to have both author bonuses and title bonuses, the former of which rewarded the most popular authors with an extra $25,000+ per month. This structure favored authors with a ton of books, who could rack up millions and millions of page reads under a single pen name. In 2022, Amazon expanded the bonus structure to new countries, significantly lowered the payouts, and took away author bonuses. This structure favors popular books, regardless of how many books are in the author's catalog, and also favors international authors as there are fewer of them. The changes to the bonus structure are the most obvious sign that Amazon is focused on growing internationally. Internationally, and in other languages, where self-publishing is still fairly new and successful authors are likely to have smaller catalogs than their English-language counterparts living primarily in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The new structure rewards breakout books and spreads the large bonuses that used to be primarily for English-language books to other countries that Amazon has storefronts in. It makes sense. Amazon has grown as much as it can in the English-language markets and is the dominate e-commerce retailer in the United States and United Kingdom. The only place to grow is internationally, where it only holds 1/3 of the book market share. Takeaway: KDP Select is well known to make authors money because most books are earning both sales and page reads. The program continues to get weaker and weaker,, with payouts getting much smaller, yet many authors stay because it is still the best place for their books to make money. Major Differences in Marketing a KDP Select Book. We briefly talked about two major marketing tools that authors have for their KDP Select books: Kindle Countdown Deals and Kindle Free Days. Every book can create one of these promotions per book, for every 90-day cycle that it is enrolled in KDP Select. Head back to the chapter on Merchandising and Marketing to read more about how those promotions work, or head to the Marketing tab in your Kindle Direct Publishing account to see these promotions in action. I wanted to list out the major differences in marketing that come with having a KDP Select book. No permafree strategies: Not only does your book have to be exclusive to the KDP Select program, You also can't have much of the book available for free online. Sometimes authors will make the first book in their series permafree on all retailers, then have book number 2 and beyond only accessible through Amazon sales or Kindle Unlimited borrows. 5 free days: KDP Select books are given the option to use 5 free days to promote their books. Few end up taking them. It makes very little sense to do so algorithmically. Because as you are building your sales rank on the free lists, you are losing your sales rank on the paid lists. When you switch back after 5 days or fewer, as you do not have to use all of them, it doesn't matter how well the book has done in downloads, you have lost a lot of momentum for your sales rank and have to build it back up again. Now, those free books may have other purposes. Not everything is algorithmic. An author may use their free days to attract more sales through a first in series, the same way a wide author might. Countdown Deals: If a KDP Select book doesn't use its free days, it can instead use a countdown deal. These can be set in specific countries, including the US and UK, and can have multiple price points throughout the 7 days. You could schedule the first few days at $0.99, the next 2 days at $1.99, and the last few days at $2.99, for example. There is also a prominent carousel of current Kindle Countdown deals, and people definitely browse it to find titles that might be using this feature. This tool makes much more sense for KDP Select books because you are improving your book's paid sales rank and can get more visibility in the store. Then you can increase your book's visibility in the store, which gets you more borrows and hopefully page reads. Bestseller list strategies. KDP Select books are particularly primed for most of the bestseller list strategies in this book. In contrast, most of what wide authors do is going to move away from these strategies, aside from wide authors who are playing in a nascent category where hitting a bestseller list is still possible, even without the boost in sales rank that comes from borrows through the program. BookBub Featured Deals. A BookBub Featured Deal is a difficult-to-get advertisement from the largest ebook and audiobook discount Discount Newsletter. BookBub significantly favors books that are wide and available at all the major retailers over books that are in KDP Select. Some books in KDP Select may get international BookBub deals or may be chosen still, but it's less common and usually not a major part of a marketing strategy for a KDP Select book. BookBub Display Ads. BookBub display ads are available to any regardless of whether they are in KDP Select or not. This is a great way to find readers, as many of them are what the industry calls "whale readers," or readers who read 50+ books a year. Whale readers are often looking for a deal, ranging from free to $2.99 books usually, and many of them are also Kindle Unlimited subscribers, as it's a great deal for whale readers as well. One important thing to remember while doing these ads is that you can target readers by storefront and specifically Amazon, and you can add a graphic to your graphic to let readers know that they can read in Kindle Unlimited. One of the best promotions on this platform is a $0.99 ebook omnibus or boxed set that is also in Kindle Unlimited. This serves both types of readers on the platform, and both the borrows and sales will shoot the box set into visibility on Amazon's platform. It works because BookBub readers are often whale readers too, Amazon Ads: KDP Select books can use Amazon Ads to target other KDP Select books. There are a few strategies that work really well, including blanketing the category, which takes a lot of ad spend, in order to get whale readers to notice your series and read it. Wide authors would use a different strategy to advertise a perma-free, or perhaps 3 books from the series with a sponsored brand ad, and rely on sell-through of the rest of the series to make up the money. Alternatively, wide authors can price their books higher to account for a higher advertising spend, as it's likely to cost them a little more to get readers into a full-priced book than one that they can read in Kindle Unlimited. Facebook traffic ads: You can only send Facebook traffic ads to retailers because you cannot use a Facebook pixel on retailers, only your own website or a platform that allows it. Many of the readers on Facebook are trained to want books in the Kindle Unlimited program, as around 90% of independent authors have all or most of their books in Kindle Unlimited. Authors benefit simply by sending traffic to their product page, even if the reader doesn't buy or borrow. This is because Amazon rewards traffic as buyer intent, There are specific carousels and personalized recommendations that are focused solely on a reader who is browsing but hasn't bought yet. Sending Facebook traffic ads will get you into the personalized recommendations of browsers, and they will often receive follow-up emails and push notifications regarding that book. You can see these for yourself in your own account. The message often starts, are you still interested in As I've noted before, most of what is taught in the author industry about how to market books is slanted toward books that are in KDP Select. This is especially true with cost-per-click advertising; the same tactics will work better with KDP Select books. It's not a problem, as long as you know that you are selling two very different offers depending on where your books live and how they are distributed. Takeaway: There are lots of differences between marketing a KDP Select book and marketing a non-exclusive book, yet the author industry rarely makes the distinction. This can make it challenging to know what marketing and sales strategies might work for your book, series, and catalog. Why does any retailer want exclusivity? While Amazon is currently the book retailer holding exclusive agreements on digital intellectual property at the moment. I continue to remind myself of one thing: the issue isn't Amazon, it's exclusivity. Let's face it, if Google or Apple or even Facebook were able to use exclusivity to conquer the ebook market or any other area of publishing, as Amazon did, they would do it in a heartbeat. There's no question that big tech companies can use exclusivity to sell an all-you-can-eat buffet subscription to their users.— even if it means that creators will get paid less per borrow or per stream. And this shift in how creators get paid is not specific to publishing; it has touched every area of content creation. It's a business model that is ideal for both companies and consumers, and that works to help consolidate industries and build a loyal user base. It's not going to go away. I want to be clear. I don't say any of this with resentment. Instead, I want to point out that business models are business models. The reason exclusivity is extremely valuable to every big tech and media company is because it gets them users. Big numbers matter in big tech. That's how stock share increases and valuations and acquisitions happen. Exclusivity drives subscription numbers,, and subscription numbers and market share drive business as a whole. Likewise, the reason why subscriptions are extremely valuable to consumers is because they are able to save the consumer a lot of money. In publishing, readers who have high consumption or who develop high consumption need an affordable way to consume. Those who read a lot of books, or listen to a ton of audiobooks, prefer a subscription to buying audiobooks individually. The business model is a win for platforms and consumers, but is it a win for creators? Why do authors dislike exclusivity? Exclusivity keeps authors and other types of creators from exploiting their intellectual property to the fullest extent. For authors, intellectual property is extremely valuable, and thus exclusivity in any one format, —to any one company, is also extremely valuable and should be treated as such. Every author, regardless of how popular they are or how quality their work is, is sitting on a gold mine of intellectual property. This gold mine expands as you magnetize readers and increase your catalog. But exclusivity is getting more complicated for independent authors. Exclusivity to platforms has been a prominent force in the publishing industry over the last decade But independent authors are now starting to see exclusivity in format and language as well. This is a response to trends in digital and global reading habits. Amazon may have won the ebook market in most of the major English-language markets like the US, the UK, and Australia, but what happens when readers shift away from ebook to audiobooks and fiction apps? What happens when the growth in publishing shifts away from English-language markets and to other languages in other territories. Well, when this happens, the big tech game of trying to dominate the market space and kill all competitor versions begins anew, hence why new ways to be exclusive are cropping up for independent authors. As of 2023, digital reading is shifting to other formats and languages, spurring new writer programs for authors that come with both opportunities and opportunity costs. Costs to consider carefully. The biggest issue with exclusivity is that so much of your power as an independent author and content creator in general is tied up in your intellectual property, your copyright, your rights. The way so many midlist authors are able to make a living at writing their stories is by exploiting their rights and spreading out their income across many small revenue streams. If you tie up your rights through exclusivity, you cut off many small income streams that could have added up to something big if you had nurtured them instead. Why Authors Choose Exclusivity with KDP Select. As stated before, Amazon is the biggest retailer in many major English-language markets, holding 80% or more of the market share in ebooks in the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Kobo Books, for example, is a major competitor in Canada. Additionally, Apple Books and Google Play Books are available in South Africa and growing a readership through their storefronts, while at the time of this writing, Amazon is not aside from its sales through Amazon.com. Amazon's KDP Select program offers many promotional tools for authors to get discovered by Amazon readers in the markets, including free days, Kindle Countdown deals, and a sales rank boost from borrows. Sales rank determines a significant portion of the on-site visibility at Amazon, which feeds Also Bots, a set of algorithms that determines what customers have also bought if they've purchased a specific book. And Also Bots determine a portion of visibility in personalized notifications over email and push notifications within the Kindle app. KDP Select authors are highly incentivized with much better visibility across Amazon's storefront than their than their wide author counterparts. They also get additional income through page reads, and it is easier to gain traction in small niche categories like Paranormal Reverse Harem Prison Academy, which simply wouldn't do as well or find as hungry of readers on wider platforms, at least not yet. Why Authors Choose to Go Wide. Authors who go wide appear on all retailers including Amazon, but are not allowed to participate in Amazon's KDP Select promotional nor given a borrower boost in sales rank. While authors lose visibility at Amazon, they gain visibility on other retailers where there is far less competition and much more long-tail consistency in marketing. Wide authors enjoy: more room between releases without seeing massive drops in their sales, less time sensitivity around promotion outside of launches, multiple streams of income that grow organically and consistently over time. It's also important to be wide if you intend to create translations of your work or post your work to various fiction apps. Much of the growth in publishing is currently happening in subsidiary rights like audiobooks, serials, and translations. Finally, there are some not-so-niche opportunities that come along once in a while, like retailer Kobo's partnership with Walmart, which brought Kobo reading devices into Walmart stores and extended ebooks to a new and major market in the US in both English and Spanish. Walmart accounts for about 1% of global ecommerce, compared to Amazon's 13%, which makes it a major player. It also owns nearly the entire ecommerce market in India, thanks to a majority shareholder ownership of India Internet conglomerate Flipkart. It can pay to be wide when these deals happen, as Kobo factored in loyalty to their platform when deciding which ebooks and authors they were going to push through Walmart's extended reach into these countries. Why I'm Personally Aggressively Wide. Outside of some old contracts and a few experimental projects, I have zero intention of ever going back to my old ways of thinking. My old ways included: focusing mostly on ebook sales, jumping in and out of KDP Select based on the whims of the marketplace, signing away my rights in less popular formats for long periods of time because I wasn't going to exploit them anyway—every single time those rights have become way more valuable over time, this industry changes quickly—seeing exploiting subsidiary rights as a nice-to-have or bonus money, rather than as a high-priority project. Looking at my short-term income over the longevity of my career. Throwing things together but not nurturing them. The 2 years where I took off from publishing was a little unexpected, and boy do I wish I had my catalog in order through those years. There are so many reasons I love my new choice to be aggressively wide, in as many formats and languages as possible. Number 1: Experimentation. It's always good to do things that work, especially when it comes to reliably paying your bills. I also enjoy the experiments though, using technology to try something a little different and seeing how readers respond. I want to try everything and have so much passion around finding and interacting with readers in new and different ways. Number 2: Security. Security means different things to different people, and some people likely view exclusivity as secure. There's no right answer. You can also make a bunch of money through exclusive programs and invest it wisely, the ultimate choice if your main priority is financial security. Personally, I want to be secure in my writing career. Money is important, but it's not truly what drives me. I ultimately want to be in as many places as an author and have the greatest chance of breaking out. In truth, I would love to write television someday, so I want to be discoverable everywhere. Number 3: Direct sales. One of the most basic questions of business is, how can we bypass the middleman and go direct? Authors have spent the last decade not asking this question. But they are starting to. This is an area that most successful authors are considering and trying to build. You would rarely be able to go completely direct, and distribution and retail partners add a ton of value to your business. But you should have an understanding of how to sell directly to your readers, as it provides you stronger cash flow, better data, and a deeper sense of security. Authors have been avoiding this, but that can't last. Keep reading I share why in subsequent chapters. #4 Longevity. I believe that the secret to a long author career is to be everywhere and find readers on every retailer and in every format. The more spread out your portfolio is, the better. I've seen my work take off over and over again in surprising places and ways, usually when I least expected. #5 Money. I truthfully believe that there is more money to be made in being wide than there is in being exclusive. There are a few examples of people who are doing it in the independent fiction author space. There are also thousands of examples in the independent nonfiction space. Most of the people who are doing this have an aggressively wide mindset, even when a portion of their catalog is in KDP Select. Transitioning from KDP Select to Wide. If you are an established author, you may be nodding your head at much of this, but still wondering, "How can I consider going wide when I make so much or all of my money in the KDP Select program?" When you've established yourself and have something that works, there's a great risk to switching things up. If KDP Select is not working that well for you, it's easy to make the jump to wide, but if KDP Select is working out, why mess with a good thing? Here are some of the ways that independent authors go wide. Number 1: Starting wide. Some authors start wide right out of the gate. In fact, some authors that have been around for a while have simply stayed wide and never enrolled in KDP Select to begin with. You can also start wide with a new pen name game or a new series. There will be a learning curve, but at the same time, you'll be set up for the long term of your career right from the beginning, which is nice. Number 2: Moving wide cold turkey. Some people do what I did, and move wide cold turkey just by letting their KDP Select contracts expire on all their books. Personally, I went into my dashboard and unenrolled every book. Within a few months, months, I was free to go wide with my content. If you don't want to wait, you can also email Amazon, as they will usually let you out of your contracts early. Even though I personally did this, I can't recommend it for anyone with a solid presence on Amazon. Wide sales take a longer time to get started, and if you are new to the wide retailers, there's a fairly steep learning curve at each one. Who has a good chance of succeeding at going wide? There are a few indicators that your content might do well. Regular BookBub International Featured Deals (International BBFDs). If you can get BBFDs on a book with consistency, then that will likely continue if you take that same book or series wide. Only when you're wide, you'll get the US included because you've left the KDP Select program. Since BBFDs are a great way to get sales going wide, This is a good indicator you'll make solid sales wide. Strong audiobook sales: Many of the wide retailers push audiobooks, and if you are in KDP Select, then your presence at these retailers is likely through your audiobook catalog. This indicates that you already have a readership that you can start to convert to ebook sales as well. Relatively low page reads and payouts compared to sales: If you are not making much in page reads, you're likely not going to miss much income as you transition out of KDP Select. Strong ability to rack up preorders. KU readers don't preorder, so if you have thousands of preorders, you are probably safe to try going wide. Number 3: Partial Catalog Wide. If you've already established yourself as an author on Amazon, you may be interested in only taking a portion of your catalog wide to help you learn each platform. Typically, authors choose lower-performing series, especially if they are performing poorly in page reads, translations, a smaller pen name if they have several, or books from their catalog that are in a popular wide genre, which has usually cooled down with Kindle Unlimited readers. #4: Exclusive Then Wide. Several popular authors who have made the move to wide put their new releases in KDP select for a term or two before releasing them on wide retailers and staying wide. I believe this is one of the best ways to do it if you have a readership in Kindle Unlimited and want to satisfy them even after you move most of your catalog to wide retailers. The downside to this method is that to take advantage of preorder visibility at wide retailers, you'll have to wait until your Kindle Unlimited limited run is over. Between the exclusivity time period and the preorder period, your wide readers may be waiting a long time to receive your books. Something you can do to tamper this is to offer your book to your email list ahead of publication, put the book in Kindle Unlimited for one term, and then place the book wide for anyone who didn't buy it the first time. This could be a way to get direct sales from wide readers as well. 5. Wide, then exclusive. A few authors use the strategy of posting their book wide for a month or so, in order to take advantage of long preorders at all the retailers. This is a smart strategy, when so many of the wide retailers focus heavily on pushing your book during launch week, and the few subsequent weeks. It's also ideal for you if you tend to rack up many preorders and either want the sales over borrows, and page reads for those, or know you can hit the USA Today bestseller list by starting wide for the launch week. The downside to this method is that delisting your books on wide platforms means that you have to start from scratch if you ever go back. It's also hard to maintain your readership at wide retailers when you only have a single book up in your catalog. Even if you receive promotions and visibility, readers don't have anywhere to go besides the single book. New readers can't buy your other books, so you don't get a cumulative effect around marketing that comes with having a large catalog. Authors sometimes sell their book directly through their website or through Patreon before they release the book into KDP Select. This can be a way for diehard fans on other platforms to keep reading your books right when they come out. #6 First in Series Wide. With this option, authors put their first book permanently free on all retailers, while putting the rest of the books in the series in KU. This straddling of the line is largely considered "shenanigans" in the independent author world, but some authors still do it, which implies there are benefits. First, you can use that content everywhere, including your website and email list, to draw readers in, then direct them to purchase the rest on Amazon. You can maintain an author presence at wide retailers with these ebooks, and that effort can be bolstered by audiobook sales. You can also still apply for US BookBub and use that system to advertise heavily and get more sales on Amazon. The downsides are that it annoys Kindle Unlimited readers who expect to find the first book in the series in coup, and it also annoys the wide readers who download the book in your series, then can't find the rest at their preferred retailer. Furthermore, Amazon's algorithms work heavily against permafree books, so you may see better results with a 99-cent series starter in Kindle Unlimited. I rarely think that first in series wide, with the rest of the series in KDP Select is a good idea. For each series, be in or be out. The half and half is a compromise with no solid winners, and it creates a lot of ill will among multiple reader groups. It's a personal choice, and your choice matters. One of the biggest messages I want to stress is that authors have choices these days. You can decide to stay in KDP Select with most or all of your books, but still take an aggressively wide mindset in other formats. You can decide to stay out of KDP Select and work to break out on other retailers and fiction apps. You can do translations of your KDP Select books and build your author name outside of Amazon through promoting those versions of your book. Here's the important piece of this: your choice matters. When you decide to work on your print sales and get your books selling at as many retailers as possible, that matters. When you invest in translations so you can reach language markets that are served by Apple Books, Google Play Books, and Kobo, that matters. When you take one low-performing series out of KDP Select and onto wide retailers, that matters. Every small step you take to be aggressively wide is a new potential stream of income that expands your readership and diversifies your revenue sources. It all adds up and puts you in a better position to remain a career author for the rest of your life. Takeaway: I'm all in on wide, but that doesn't mean you have to be. Wide can mean a lot of things, and you can dip your toe into wide in many formats and languages. The most important thing to remember is that exclusivity can be limiting, and there is plenty of money to be made wide, too, despite what so much of the industry thinks about it. KDP Select vs. Kobo Plus. In early April 2023, Kobo finally opened the doors on its Kobo Plus program. A Kindle Unlimited competitor, to other English-language territories beyond Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This expansion included the US and UK, two of the largest English-language territories in the world. Kobo offers ebooks and audiobooks in one subscription membership at a price of $7.99 USD for ebooks or audiobooks, and $9.99 if you want eBooks and audiobooks. This pricing is comparable across all countries, it's available and listed in that country's native currency. You can also get a Kobo Plus subscription through several of Kobo's partner retailers, including Bol (Netherlands/Belgium) and Fnac (France/Italy/Portugal). These retailers have varying terms of service for readers that differ slightly from what Kobo offers directly. Of note is the price tag: Kobo Plus is cheaper for readers than Kindle Unlimited, which recently raised prices from $9.99 USD to $11.99 USD. If you consider the price of both Kindle Unlimited and Audible memberships, this membership is a fantastic deal with significant savings. Further, Kobo Plus already has 1.6 million titles, which is half of Kindle Unlimited's 3 million titles. Over time, I think the program will be highly attractive to readers, and expect it to pull some readers from Kindle Unlimited, especially if those readers can bounce between subscriptions and get access to a new set of books. Kobo also accepts AI-read audiobooks, which means those can be included in the subscription model. Kobo has quietly positioned itself to take on Amazon Amazon, Apple, and Google, and I think the company has a strong shot to make a dent in Amazon's stronghold over the industry. Takeaway: Kobo Plus is new to the US and UK markets as of 2023, so it will be interesting to see if they can capture some of the Kindle Unlimited readership. It's possible that whale readers will want two sources for binging, especially when the two catalogs are nearly mutually exclusive. And it's also possible that Kindle Unlimited readers will switch because of the price differences. We will see how this plays out in the next year or two, especially as more US and UK readers learn what Kobo Plus is. As authors, we can help to educate them too. Additional Resources. Join the Wide for the Win group. This is by far the best place to get advice on how to move your books wide. You can learn all about the different retailers and distributors that help you go wide, as well as how people are making the transition. There's also the Tree of Knowledge, which has pinned posts that answer tons of questions about going wide. If you have a specific question after searching the group, I encourage you to post it and get answers for your specific situation. https://learn.wideforthewin.com/home https://www.facebook.com/group/wideforthewin/. Join my Facebook groups on wide and direct sales. Go wide, grow wide. https://www.facebook.com/group/3050254625225459/. Direct sales. Https://www.facebook.com/groups/167869352991047. Check out more books about going wide and direct. I've written several that paint a broader picture of how to make money at wide. My secret is direct sales. Get your book selling wide. Get the basics of publishing in print, ebook, audiobook, translations apps and more. Book Sales Supercharged #1. Get your book selling on your website. Book Sales Supercharged #7. Get your book selling direct to readers. Book Sales Supercharged #20. Takeaways. KDP Select is well known to make authors money because most books are earning both sales and page reads. The program continues to get weaker and weaker, with payouts getting much smaller. Yet many authors stay because it is still the best place for their books to make money. There are lots of differences between marketing a KDP Select book and marketing a non-exclusive book, yet the author industry rarely makes the distinction. This can make it challenging to know what marketing and sales strategies might work for your book, series, and catalog. I'm all in on wide, but that doesn't mean you have to be. Wide can mean a lot of things, and you can dip your toe into wide in many formats and languages. The most important thing to remember is that exclusivity can be limiting, and there is plenty of money to be made wide, too, despite what so much of the industry thinks about it. Kobo Plus is new to the US and UK markets as of 2023, so it will be interesting to see if they can capture some some of the Kindle Unlimited readership. It's possible that whale readers will want two sources for binging, especially when the two catalogs are nearly mutually exclusive, and it's also possible that Kindle Unlimited readers will switch because of the price differences. We will see how this plays out in the next year or two, especially as more US and UK readers learn what Kobo Plus is. As authors, we can help to educate them too, Task Checklist: Become discerning of all marketing advice geared toward succeeding at Amazon. Practice noticing whether a marketing strategy will work better for KDP Select books or wide books, and try to figure out why. Pay particular attention when it comes to advertising. Chapter 15: Print Books. Unlike ebooks, print books are not one format. There are multiple formats of print book, and each one can be a different product in your catalog without you having to write more words. Each print book type serves a different purpose to your readers and hits a different audience as their preferred purchase option. The more formats you can offer, the more readers you can find who only read in their preferred format. Once you start working with print retailers and distributors, you'll notice that they give you a lot of options. There are 3 main types of print books that you can create of your novels on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing Print (KDP Print). Number 1: Trade paperbacks. These are the default books that independent authors will publish, as they sell well online, in independent bookstores, and in the book section at big box retailers in the US. Much of the paperback market in traditional publishing has shifted to trade paperback as well, sell, as mass-market paperback shelf space has shrunk over the last 5 to 10 years. 2. Hardcover Case Laminate. Though this is a fairly unpopular choice in most traditionally published fiction, it is becoming a choice for independently published fiction, thanks to Amazon launching well-done case laminate hardcovers through Kindle Direct Publishing. This program is still in private beta at the time of this writing, writing, but should be available to all authors in the near future. The positives are that you can usually adapt your trade paperback files to this style of hardcover easily, compared to hardcovers with a dust jacket. That said, I think many authors will continue to try to look like traditionally published books. #4 Mass Market Paperbacks. These are smaller books, like the ones you see at grocery stores and big box retailers. They have small trim sizes, cheaper pages and printing, no graphics or images, and are designed to be an impulse buy. In the US, you may still see these books in Sam's Club, Walmart, Costco, Target, but there are fewer shelves of them, as this has largely been replaced by a full section of trade paperback books. There's not a reason to create these as an independently published author, because for the most part, we are niche stories for niche buyers. The only interesting thing about mass market paperbacks is that the bigger traditional publishers are publishing fewer of them, and the distribution happens through a company called ReaderLink. There could be an opportunity to strike a deal for top independently published authors, 10,000+ sold on a new release, but I don't know of anyone currently who is doing something like this. I do know a few authors who publish exclusively in this small format. Possibly because they write pulp y-fiction, or possibly because they want the higher page counts. If you think it makes sense for your stories and readership, give it a shot. It only costs you your time, formatting efforts, and another ISBN to list it everywhere. Starter Print Book Options. Most independent authors start with a trade paperback and then choose one of the hardcover options. Artists, depending on their genre and ability to create or commission new art for the hardcover wrap. I've also seen authors create special edition hardcovers in color, as well as alternative art hardcovers, which usually requires getting a case laminate for the book, and printing a wrap separately, then assembling the books and either selling them directly or shipping them to a warehouse, like Amazon's FBA, for dropshipping. You can also get your books printed outside of print-on-demand through offset printing, where you'll likely have to front the money for at least 750 copies, but where you will have far more options for printing. Unless you have a specific promotion to sell that many books, I recommend going with print-on-demand over an offset print for most titles in your catalog. Takeaway: You can publish a trade paperback at Amazon, with the most popular size being 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches, and you can publish a case laminate hardcover. Those are the primary formats that I would consider publishing at this time. Specialty print books. In addition to your main print book options, there are also other special editions and ancillary products that may be worth considering, depending on your catalog and audience. Large print paperback. These are books that are specially formatted with large font, no hyphenation, no justification, and several other specifications that allow people struggling with their eyesight to easily read your book in print. There's a surprisingly large market for books like these, and Amazon even offers a checkbox to specify large print editions in their KDP dashboard. Hardcover Special Edition: These books are nice hardcovers, often with special content inside, possibly with more elaborate formatting or illustrations, and sometimes even with interior color. You have to have a larger audience to sell these and make a profit, but they could be fun just to make for yourself and your greatest fans. I've seen independent authors who run hardcover special editions through POD at a $50 USD sale price. KDP Print doesn't have enough options to print these on demand through them, but you can create these books and sell them on Amazon—more on that later in the chapter. Workbooks, coloring books, and planners: ancillary products in the consumables space are exciting because you often don't need a ton of additional text content, and you can sell them at a significantly higher price than trade paperbacks. You can also sell the digital version of your consumable in PDF through Etsy, where printables are big business. I currently sell workbooks on Amazon as well, with the digital version being a PDF replica that I created through an obscure program called Kindle Create. Graphic Novels: One of the biggest growth areas in traditional publishing is graphic novels. A younger generation has started to consume these, thanks in part to the growth of webcomics and webtoons that are marketed toward the same demographic. Graphic novels are also considered ideal for reluctant readers. I do not have graphic novels, but my business partner Russell Nohalty, who is also a comics and graphic novels creator and expert, sells his comics and graphic novels through KDP Print. Decks with companion guides, tarot, oracle, and game decks are considered books and can be assigned an ISBN. There aren't a ton of deck print-on-demand companies, but you can order small print runs of 50 decks and package your deck yourself then send it to a distribution warehouse. There are so many types of decks, from fully illustrated ones to simple ones with compelling quotes on them. As a deck collector who has over 100 decks, I understand the passion for decks on a personal level. People love cards that can be part of their daily routine, and are often willing to pay between $45 to $75 for an independently published deck. This cannot be done through KDP Print, but you can create decks or other products like them and sell them on Amazon. More on that later in the chapter. Takeaway: You can print a regular edition, large print edition, workbook, coloring book, planner, or comic graphic novel in perfect bound paperback or a hardcover case laminate. Other offerings cannot be done through KDP Print. All the places you can sell your print book. When it comes to selling your print book, there are 3 paths. Working in print-on-demand with online retailers. This is the easiest way that independent authors can get started with selling print books with no upfront investment and no inventory. Working with a brick-and-mortar retailer, usually through a distributor or several. This requires 2 pieces of marketing. A one-sheet and a marketing sheet. The one-sheet explains who you are and why they should work with you, while the marketing sheet explains your specific title and why they should buy it from you. Selling the books directly to your customers. This is easy if you have a fan base and is usually done through a direct sales website, a table at an event, a speaking opportunity, or a major promotion like a Kickstarter project. When authors consider improving their print book sales, they usually start with the sales avenues that are similar to what they are already comfortable with: ebooks. We sell ebooks by uploading a file to a retailer platform. Most of us start in Kindle Unlimited, while some of us go wide and upload to 5+ retailers at once. This matters very little because the business model is the same. We have no inventory and no storage costs. We need no additional business structures, because we can get started as sole proprietors. It's an easy, simple, and straightforward business model. The same model exists for selling print-on-demand books through online retailers, which is why most of what you will see about selling print books is focused on this area. It's a good thing, as relatively few independent authors care about growing their print sales at all. It's not the whole picture, but it's a great picture to start with and master. And most importantly, some independent authors are adding 6 figures a year to their total revenue just from selling POD books through online retailers. This is not a small business opportunity; it's a large one that is growing more and more every day. POD quality has gotten better over time, and readers have begun to care less about traditional versus independent publishing. As authors, we can create products that rival traditionally published books, and we are. Print on demand is yet another way we can drive sales to our books, and readers are here for it. I highly recommend starting with print on demand, and only entering the other two options when you are confident that your print book sells. I talk a lot about direct sales in other books, because each avenue is so different frunt the others. Selling direct on Kickstarter is very different from selling direct from a website, which is very different from selling direct through in-person events. I've created separate books on each of these, specifically Russell's systems and experiences, so you can dive deep into each topic if direct sales is a big priority for you in your author career. Takeaway: You have a lot of additional options to get your books to Amazon Amazon, and to get your print books to other avenues. Since you are creating them anyway, might as well distribute them widely—there are no exclusivity programs at Amazon for print books. Take advantage! How to Get Your Print Books to Online Retailers. Outside of traditional publishing, there are several ways to get your books printed. Print on demand is an option that lets your printer create one copy of your book quickly, based on demand, someone ordering it. This means you don't have to front any costs and you just collect royalties, similar to your ebooks. Most independent authors start with print-on-demand, at least as they are growing their businesses. The costs are minimal compared to other efforts, and once you've set up print-on-demand at online retailers, it's much easier to sell your books through other means as well Here's where you can get your books printed and distributed. Number 1: Print retailers and distributors. Print on demand. Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP Print). You can access this through the KDP dashboard and set up trade paperbacks and case laminate hardcovers. The latter is still in private beta in the US but will likely roll out to all authors soon. KDP Print uses IngramPod to create its books. Barnes Noble Print: You can access this through your B&N Press account and set up trade paperbacks and hardcovers, both case laminate and with a dust jacket. You can also do pre-orders, which Amazon doesn't currently allow at the time of this writing. Since many independent authors forgo Barnes Noble Print and let IngramSpark distribute to them instead, there's an ISBN issue if you try to publish the same title ISBN into both platforms, you can also just do your preorder through IngramSpark. PNN Press uses IngramPod to create its books. Ingram via IngramSpark: This is the place that most independent authors list their books as they have a self-publishing platform that makes it easy. Most places that you want to be in trade paperback have the ability to order your book through IngramSpark. That said, there are other distributors that major segments of the market prefer. Likewise, different global territories have different distributors due to shipping costs, so if it's important to have a print edition easily available in another country, you may want to explore distributors beyond IngramSpark. Can you get print-on-demand services elsewhere? Absolutely. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of distributors that can get you into various platforms and distribution channels. Channels. I am focused on these 3 channels because of their ease for independent authors and their ability to make a substantial impact on your bottom line in the shorter term. I am all for you exploring other POD services to test them out, but these are the 3 that independent authors use the most. What you need for POD sales. Although POD online sales through a retailer are fairly easy in comparison to other distribution channels, it still requires a little bit more work than publishing an ebook. In addition to all the stuff you need to do for an ebook—covers, editing, formatting, marketing—you also need: your books formatted for print, usually as a PDF file; your covers formatted for print, usually requires a back cover, spine, and possibly a wrap for hardcovers; an International Standard Book Number, ISBN, 1 per print book size format, optional. When you upload a print book, you need 2 files, the COVID file and the interior file. All 3 of these POD printers and distributors offer a free ISBN that you can use only with their site. That's because they have a pool of ISBNs that they are borrowing from. If you use their ISBN, it means that they are the publisher of record, For the most part, this doesn't matter much, but I personally prefer to use ISBNs and buy them in blocks of 100 or 1,000. It's easier to have the same ISBN tracking a book's sales and metadata across many platforms and distributors. And if a bookstore wanted to order your book, they are looking for it by ISBN to avoid confusion. You can get ISBNs for free depending on your country, free, but in several countries, like the United States, you have to buy them. In the next sections, I'll go through each of the POD printers and discuss their unique quirks. Takeaway: Print on demand is the main way that independent authors publish their books. The most popular setup is to use IngramSpark to distribute print everywhere, and to get a print on demand version on Amazon for the specific benefits KDP Print offers. Amazon automatically suppresses the IngramSpark versions in this case. Working with Amazon. There are 4 ways you can get your print books on Amazon. Publish your books directly through your Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing account. Publish your books through IngramSpark, which distributes to Amazon. Do a print run of your books and package and ship them yourself when someone orders them through your Amazon listing. You can set this up through an Amazon Seller Central account. Do a print run of your books and send them to Fulfillment by Amazon, Amazon's warehouse dropshipping service. You can set this up through an Amazon Seller Central account. KDP Print and IngramSpark. The most important way to get your print books published is through KDP Print, which is part of your Kindle Direct Publishing account. When you sell your books through this option, you can link them to the ebook and audiobook. You're also eligible for Amazon's 2-day shipping perk, which means that your readers will receive your book in the same time frame that they would receive a traditionally published book. The second option is to send your books through IngramSpark (Iz), which publishes them to Amazon. Iz and Amazon have an interesting relationship in that if your books are published to both, both, Amazon suppresses the Ingram listing. That means that your book only shows up as one product in Amazon's store, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, Amazon and IS are fraught with conflicts of interest in their relationship with each other. Amazon has two relationships with IngramSpark: one as a retailer to a distributor and one as a pod competitor. This causes all sorts of problems, problems in getting the two companies to play nice with each other, and sometimes independent authors get caught in the crossfire, especially around pre-orders and returns. The challenges largely stem from a few things. Amazon gives preferential treatment to its own KDP print titles, listing them as available to ship within the 2-day shipping guidelines for Prime members. If your book is only on IngramSpark, or only on Amazon in a specific format, Amazon may list it as shipping out in 1 to 3 weeks. At times authors have reported that their book that was supposed to launch that day gets listed as "out of stock." This seems to happen particularly often with hardcovers. So in order to show up as in stock on Amazon, you need your book set up through KDP Print as well as IngramSpark, even though it distributes to Amazon. This is likely due to the POD competitor relationship. IngramSpark sometimes ships Amazon Print preorders early. Yes, your readers could get the book before your official launch date, just like a few lucky souls with the new Harry Potter book way back when. Since you are not J.K. Rowling, this is probably not a huge deal for spoilers, but if you worry that some in your audience might post about the mistake in your Facebook group or other online community and upset the rest of your fanbase, case, you must be aware of this. Amazon orders books through the IngramSpark listing. It's true, even if your book is listed with both KDP Print and IngramSpark, sometimes Amazon will order through IngramSpark anyway as a bookstore retailer. This can happen when you have a preorder available through is and Amazon predicts a certain order size. If it is cheaper for them to order an offset print run of it, they will do so rather than using their own POD arm. This is due to the retailer-distributor relationship. Unfortunately, this means that if you have returns enabled, Amazon can overorder and then return books. You are charged for them when it happens, or rather, the retailer is given a credit for the books, and you are stuck with the printing costs. I discuss returns when I talk specifically about IngramSpark. Work, but know that it's possible to get a large order from Amazon and then get slapped with a return months or even years later. Ingram and Amazon blame each other for availability problems. I've heard of many authors who have serious availability problems when using the two for preorders, who never get a resolution because the two companies will volley the blame back and forth to each other. As an author, you probably care more that your readers actually get the books they pre-ordered, but it's tough to get any solution or resolution on print pre-orders that go wrong. IngramSpark and Amazon break if you choose expanded distribution for Amazon. The recommended setup is KDP Print distributed to Amazon only and IngramSpark distributed to everywhere else. There is some good news in all of this. Which is that unless you are doing a reasonable volume in print, these issues are largely nonexistent. I hear about these problems more for popular authors with large print preorder numbers. If you do experience issues, there are a few ways to get around the availability issues between these two companies, but the clearest way is short print runs that you can then distribute through another company, like Vervante in the US, or Clays in the UK, or can send to Fulfillment by Amazon so that they have the books in stock and will list them as such. At the end of the day, you definitely still want to list your books with both IngramSpark and Amazon through KDP Print. Though you may encounter problems, you need to be with both distributors for different access to different channels that readers buy from. Takeaway: IngramSpark and Amazon don't always play nicely together,, and this can affect you as your retailer print sales grow. Many authors do not use preorders through IngramSpark for this reason. Dropshipping with Amazon. Dropshipping is when a company fulfills an online order for you on your behalf. Typically, you print and package the book, and rent storage space in their facility, and when they receive an order, they will ship the package for you. You can usually take orders from several places that integrate with the dropshipper. There are a few companies that independent authors use. Printful. This company integrates with several popular retailers like Amazon and Etsy, and also integrates with several popular website store platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, and Squarespace. If you have books, bundles of books, or a book box that includes merchandise, you can ship your products to them using their warehousing fulfillment service. Fulfillment. You pay to rent space where they store your products, and they ship when you sell them. https://www.printful.com/warehousing-fulfillment. If you want to add merchandise to your website's store, you can also dropship many different items from Printful. https://www.printful.com/sell-merch-items. Online. Fulfillment by Amazon. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) works similarly to Printful, but there are major benefits when you sell through them. While you can always get your books onto Amazon easily, FBA is ideal for books that can't be easily done through POD, but it can also be useful if you want to offer signed print copies of your books, an actual print box set, or bundles of products of any other You can additionally dropship merchandise printed through Printful through your FBA account at Amazon. Finally, you can access Amazon benefits like eligibility in Prime Shipping, as well as outsource customer service and returns to Amazon's team. You can learn more here: https://www.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-Amazon fulfillment-buy-amazon/b?i=utf-8&node=13245485011. Takeaway: You can dropship special or signed print editions and even merchandise through Fulfillment by Amazon. This is a way to sell ancillary products on Amazon, even if they can't be done through KDP Print. Selling more books at Amazon. Now that you have your books listed with KDP Print, how do you sell more of them in Amazon's ecosystem? Here are a few Amazon-specific tips. Number 1: Cross-promoting with your ebooks and audiobooks listed on Amazon. One of the best ways to sell more print books on Amazon is to run regular ebook and audiobook promotions as well. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, sales of audiobook and ebook can actually help the popularity rank of the print book, not to be confused with the sales rank of the print book, which is listed on the product page. I have experienced that when your book is selling well in one format, it sells a little better in all formats, due to the visibility and the algorithmic juice it gets behind the scenes. Number 2, Amazon Advertising. Amazon lets you create ads for your paperbacks specifically, and also lets you target paperbacks specifically. You can use the popularity rank discussion in earlier chapters to see what books are doing well in your print categories. You can then target them with advertising for your print book. This only works if you have solid profit margins that allow you to run ads, of course, which is why so many authors don't do it. There is a lot less competition for these advertising spots, and they are usually filled with ebooks rather than print books. Pricing your books. Because we are creating several new products for your catalog, I have to discuss pricing, specifically the mistakes I see independent authors make and what I think they should do instead. Mistake number 1: Matching pricing on traditionally published books. Many authors try to keep their print price low, usually trying to match what they see in the traditional publishing space. Price. One price I see frequently is $8.99 on a 300+ page book. Doing the math on printing costs and factoring in that a retailer like Amazon takes 40% of the royalty, then deducts the printing costs from the remainder, this typically leaves less than a dollar profit on a print book sale. I'm not big fans of low margin items, not just because they offer small profits, but because they are impossible to grow. You can't put ads on a print book that only makes you 94 cents. There's just no leeway in that math. That's why I'm of the belief that you cannot price your books like a traditionally published book, which is much cheaper to make because they use offset printing. Just as independent authors have to make pricing decisions on ebooks that are different from traditional publishing, they also have to make pricing decisions on print books, but the difference is that instead of pricing lower, they actually need to price higher. And while some authors do the math to make at least $2 on their print books, I do the math to make closer to $5 to $10 on print books, depending on where I are selling them. Crazy, right? Here's the truth: this is a mindset issue more than it's an issue of people not buying at that price. People love to buy at this price, and would probably be just as happy to buy even higher. Part of being an independent author is being special and different and undiscovered. You'll be surprised at how many people value that. On Russell's Kickstarters, for example, people pay $25 for a single novel, domestic shipping and handling included. They pay $38 for a graphic novel and $100 for 4 novels plus special thanks. Release all your beliefs about how you should be pricing your print books. Because your intuition may guide you to undervaluing what you are offering as an independent author. Mistake #2: Missing the hidden costs of print book sales. I, Monica, used to list my books at $8.99 to $10.99 as well, until my MBA kicked in and reminded me that it made no sense to actively be in a business vertical with zero or negative profit. I now sell my print books at $12.99 for 100+ pages, $14.99 for 200+ pages, and $18.99 for 300+ pages. And guess what? I actually sell about the same or more than I did before. The benefit to pricing higher is that you leave room for retailer discounting. Amazon drops prices on your print books, but still pays you royalties based on the full price. I have this happening right now on one of my paperbacks listed at $14.99. My readers are only paying $12.99 right now, but I'm still earning my usual royalty per book of about $4.50. I can also afford all sorts of additional business expenses, like advertising and returns, which is actually helping me invest more in growing my print sales. On my nonfiction pen names, I'm even in the process of putting out ancillary products, like workbooks, planners, proper box sets and decks which have higher margins. I'm also moving into large print and hardcovers, even for my nonfiction work. Mistake #3: Pricing with only retailers in mind. Selling direct to your readers is the definitive form of the phrase "bank not rank." You are selling premium products to a small number of ardent backers. You cannot price your books like most indies do when you sell direct to your readers. If you do, you will get killed. If you are going to price your books at $10 for print, you will lose your shirt. On a direct sales site like Kickstarter, for example, the minimum you should charge for an ebook is $5, for a paperback is $20,, and for a hardcover is $35. I charge $25 for paperback, and $40 for hardcover. Indies have been undervaluing their books forever. You absolutely cannot do that anymore, if you want to grow your print sales profitably. You can't sell a book for $15 with free shipping on Amazon, and sell the same book for $25 with free shipping on another platform. You can't sell a book for $15 with free shipping through direct sales without losing your shirt. The math just doesn't work. You want your books to be a nice-looking deal for your backers in comparison to retailers, which means you may have to bump your price on retailers or offer something exclusive, or both. You ideally want to work these numbers and hitting a balanced sweet spot between the two. Mistake #4: Adjusting your prices in all formats on retailers. You can increase your prices on retailers. Most indies are priced too low on print, for example. Some are priced too low on ebook. The disparity between a low-priced ebook and a high-priced print book can also send red flags to readers, but one possible solution is to raise your ebook prices too. Check in with your prices there and see where you can adjust without affecting your retailer sales. Mistake #5: Ignoring exclusivity on various platforms. You are never going to compete with retailers on being able to print and deliver your books faster or cheaper. Selling your print books direct to your readers is not good for faster and cheaper. If someone can get the thing you're offering faster and cheaper on Amazon, on, they're going to go to Amazon. That's why if you can offer something exclusive through your direct sales—your signature, a bonus sticker, extra content, or even just an early release—it will matter a lot. You can be exclusive through direct sales by offering something that your fans want that is not already on retailers. This can be: your print book before you launch it to retailers, a special or new print format of your book, Your already released book with new content, bonuses, etc. Bundled in physical non-book products that you don't sell on retailers like merchandise, pins, prints, book boxes. Bundled in digital non-book products that you don't sell on retailers like audio commentary, custom art, bonus stories, digital book boxes, and more. The bottom line is you need to pick several of these things. To make your direct sales pricing make sense to readers. The easiest and most obvious thing to do is launch through direct sales a new book or series that isn't on retailers yet. But there are a lot of other things that work. Pick at least 3, but ideally more. You want as many as reasonable for you to do from this list, from the list above, to incorporate into your print book offer that you will sell direct to your readers. Finally, exclusivity has a time limit on it. The longer something is exclusive, the more valuable that exclusivity is. For example, if you launch a book that's exclusive to Kickstarter for several months before it's available at retailers, that's going to convert better than something that's exclusive for a few days. Don't compete with Amazon on the things that you will never win at. Compete on the things that only you can offer as a creator. Amp up the cool factor on your print sales by making your direct sales offer exclusive. Mistake #6: Selling print books direct without adding digital bonuses. You can bolster the value of your print book, and thus, the amount you can charge for it, by including lots of digital content that has value or perceived value. A single 300-page novel with shipping included needs to be at the $25 price point to make the math work out profitably for you. But you can include lots of digital bonuses that cost you nothing extra to produce and ship—they are high margin—to that $25 bundle to increase the perceived value. This isn't just something I made up, it's a larger business concept, which is that you want to bundle things that have clear and measurable costs, physical products, with things that are extremely high margin, digital products. This isn't specific to direct sales either, it's just business. When you do this, people can anchor the price easily. They understand what a book costs. They understand that you have to print it and ship it, and those have real costs to you. And they can also justify the premium to themselves. They get additional digital value on top of it. The strongest online businesses right now use a mixture of both physical and digital products. Which is why there is so much opportunity for indie authors to expand their businesses right now. Mistake #7: Making the logical argument about your pricing to your readers. Yes, you're an indie, and your print books are really special as a result. And in a reader's mind, a hardcover is $20 at Barnes Noble. You have to do the work to change that perception and that pricing anchor, and explain why yours is double, triple, and beyond. In addition to knowing why you need to price higher, you can also make the logical argument as to why your reader wants to buy it at a higher price using the business principles. If you can say that your print book and all the (mostly or completely) digital bonuses are worth at least twice what you're charging, and all of that matches up with what you're charging on retailers, or you're adding bonuses that are special and for super fans anyway, like the audio commentary, you're making a better argument to your readers. Takeaway: Print books from independent authors are special treasures. Readers already know this, and you can make your work even more special for them to own with fan-driven digital extras, like bonus scenes, graphics, additional stories, stories, poster printables, and more. Additional Resources. Grab the book "Get Your Bookselling in Print: Book Sales Supercharged #8" co-written with Russell Nolte, for more information on selling your print books at Amazon and beyond. Grab the book "Get Your Bookselling with Advanced Amazon Ads: Book Sales Supercharged #17" to explore more about Amazon advertising. As a note, There is also a chapter at the end of this book to give you an overview of Amazon Ads. It's really helpful, so definitely use it. Grab the book "Get Your Bookselling on Your Website: Book Sales Supercharged" #7 if you decide to explore other ways to sell your print books. You already created the product, and many of the options can integrate right into your website's storefront. You can even print on demand through Lulu and BookVault. So you do not need to hold inventory of your print books at your home or a warehouse. Takeaways. You can publish a trade paperback at Amazon, with the most popular size being 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches, and you can publish a case laminate hardcover. Those are the primary formats that I would consider publishing at this time. You can print a regular edition, large print edition, workbook, coloring book, planner, or comic graphic novel in perfect bound paperback or a hardcover case laminate. Other offerings cannot be done through KDP Print. You have a lot of additional options to get your books to Amazon and to get your print books to other avenues. Since you are creating them anyway, might as well distribute them widely. There are no exclusivity programs at Amazon for print books. Take advantage. Print on demand is the main way that independent authors publish their books. The most popular setup is to use IngramSpark to distribute print everywhere and to get a print on demand version on Amazon for the specific benefits KDP Print offers. Amazon automatically suppresses the IngramSpark versions in this case. IngramSpark and Amazon don't always play nicely together,, and this can affect you as your retailer print sales grow. Many authors do not use pre-orders through IngramSpark for this reason. You can dropship special or signed print editions, and even merchandise, through Fulfillment by Amazon. This is a way to sell ancillary products on Amazon, even if they can't be done through KDP Print. Print books from independent authors are special treasures. Readers already know this, and you can make your work even more special for them to own with fan-driven digital extras, like bonus scenes, graphics, additional stories, poster printables, and more. Task Checklist. Use the previous chapters to optimize the sales of your print books. Put your books in print. With print-on-demand services, it's become easy to do. If you are able to make formatting tweaks to your books, Don't neglect this opportunity to have your work in a different format. If you have ancillary products, look into other ways to get them into Amazon besides KDP Print. Price your print books like they matter. Don't try to compete with traditional publishers because you can't, any more than they can compete with independent authors on ebook pricing. Chapter 16: Audiobooks. In this chapter, we'll take everything we've learned about Amazon and its algorithms and apply it specifically to audiobooks. How to get audiobooks to Amazon. There are two major places that will distribute your audiobook to Amazon: ACX, also known as Audiobook Creation Exchange, and Audible Amazon Company. If your books are distributed through ACX, they are automatically made available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes, as well as their global partner sites, which for iTunes includes Apple Books. Findaway Voices, a Spotify company. If your books are distributed through Findaway, you simply need to check a box to opt in to have your books distributed to Amazon. As a note, Amazon seems to greatly prefer direct upload to its own platform. And seems to throttle books through distributors for months. Neither of these platforms currently allow any sort of automatically narrated audiobook files unless through their private partners, as is the case for Findaway Voices working with partner Deepzen. Takeaway: Amazon does not have a direct upload for audiobooks. Instead, get your audiobook to Amazon through ACX or Findaway Voices Distributes to Amazon. Please note that neither distributor accepts AI audiobooks at this time. How Amazon audiobooks are sold. Amazon audiobooks are sold through two main ways: their Audible membership program, and their distribution to retailers, which consists of distribution to iTunes Apple Books and their own storefronts. They also have an exclusivity program through their company, ACX. Authors must choose to either go exclusive with Amazon, or to send their ebooks wide through Findaway, with the ability to go direct through ACX still, but for a smaller cut of the royalties. Here's a breakdown of the options for selling your audiobooks. Number 1: Memberships. Two of the Big Five ebook retailers, Amazon and Kobo, offer audiobook memberships. Memberships. They work roughly the same way. For a monthly fee, you get a credit that can be used to purchase any audiobook in the store. There are also usually perks and ways to buy additional credits. The interesting thing about these memberships is that they change the game of how audiobooks are sold through these platforms. This is especially important because Amazon, via its own website and Audible, which it owns, holds a large market share in English market territories. Because of the market dynamics of the membership, a reader has already paid for their books before they browse. They are spending an abstraction of what they paid for, which is a credit. On Audible, the credits also expire, or rather, you can only hold a certain number of credits in your account at any given time. At the time of this writing, a standard account can only hold 6 credits or 6 months without buying a book. This results in some interesting buying patterns. Most readers are looking for an audiobook priced higher, and ideally, much higher, than the money they spent on a credit, somewhere between $9.99 and $14.99. They want to get the most bang for their buck, so bundles of audiobooks that are priced $25 or more tend to do very well with members. Some readers want more than one book per month, or are not going to spend their credits on anything less than $14.99. They are going to buy additional audiobooks à la carte from the store and pay cash, even though they are members. Typically, they are looking for books that are significantly cheaper than the cost of a credit, so books in the $5-$8 range do well with this bracket. Credit. A few readers are trying to spend their credits before they lose them. They will buy books at any price, with a preference toward books closer to $14.99. This is more about not losing something than it is about gaining something, but this is why you'll see people spending their credits on a $12.99 audiobook. How your book is priced matters a lot in these membership sites. Unfortunately, when you go direct to Audible through ACX, you have no control over your pricing, and each retailer—Apple Books, Audible, and Amazon—can price it however they want. While they follow general guidelines—longer books are priced higher—the book's price is likely to go up and down by several dollars month to month, which can make it difficult to predict royalties and even more difficult to justify advertising spending. Spend. Kobo has a similar program to Amazon's Audible, with a monthly membership which gives you 1 credit a month to spend on any audiobook you want. They've undercut Amazon's program by about 33% at the time of this writing in September 2023. The downside to their program, however, is that their selection is significantly diminished due to Amazon's ACX Exclusivity Program, which gives authors double the royalties from Amazon, Audible, and iTunes sales over what they would get if they published everywhere. Audible and Kobo are not the only audiobook memberships or subscriptions; others on the list include Scribd, Audiobooks.com, Downpour, Storytel, International, Blinkist (nonfiction only), and many more. You can reach most of these retailers through Findaway Distribution, Audiobook Subscription. Outside of the US, many markets are embracing audiobook subscription services wholeheartedly. In many European countries, audiobook subscription services make up the bulk of the consumption and growth of audiobook sales. I expect this to continue, and a big puzzle piece of translations is how to create audiobooks in other languages. Number 2: Retailer Purchase Sales. All 5 of the Big 5 ebook retailers—Apple Books, Amazon Audible, Barnes Noble, Kobo, and Google Play Books—also sell audiobooks. While 2 of the Big 5 ebook retailers have audiobook membership programs, those retailers will happily sell books à la carte as well. And all the retailers will link your ebook product page to your audiobook product page for cross-promotion between the 2 formats. Formats. This means that your reader can buy your book outright. If you are going through Findaway, you control the pricing. If you are going through ACX, Audible's backend platform, they control the pricing and distribute only to Apple Books and Amazon. Cross-selling with WhisperSync. Amazon has a program where if you buy the ebook, you can get the audiobook as an add-on. There are requirements on the author's end. The audiobook must be an unabridged version of the ebook, and the content must be near-identical to meet the requirements of WhisperSync, which allows the reader to move between ebook and audiobook without losing their place. Getting WhisperSync on my ebooks and audiobooks has been a big boon to my audiobook sales over the years, and Amazon is so devoted to the concept that they have a special page on their site called Kindle Books with Audible Narration. From the author perspective, your book will get more visibility and sales, but because the reader is paying much less for the audiobook, that'll be reflected in the royalties you receive. Still, it's a good deal, as the reader was likely only going to buy the ebook. Amazon upgraded them, which is the closest thing you'll get to bundling at a retailer at the time of this writing. Free First in Series. If you are going to improve your purchase sales at retailers, you must implement many of the same things that work well for ebooks. Independent authors often have a free first in series in audiobook that leads to the other books as well as a larger bundle of the audiobooks. Keep in mind that many readers who want a huge bundle of audiobooks are going to go to a membership membership or subscription for them, where they can get a far better deal. Solo audiobooks that are priced below the monthly membership fees, which range from $9.99 to $14.99, will have a better chance at being purchased outright. For example, if you had a first free-in series followed by 3 audiobooks at $7.99, that might work better than charging a higher price price, like $12.99 per book. It depends on the store, and what the reader is comparing it to. In general, readers are shopping on either price or convenience, and many are willing to trade off one or the other. Personally, I'm a convenience shopper, so I'll absolutely spend a few extra bucks to not deal with the hassle of creating a new account or downloading a new app, but many audiobook readers are deal shoppers as well. Find ways to serve both types by pricing well for retailers, in addition to making it work for the membership and subscription sites. One easy way to think of this is that individual books are less than $9.99 USD and are ideal for purchase through retailers, while bundles are priced over $20 USD and are ideal for purchase through memberships and subscriptions. If you use this pricing model, For example, you can also do rotating discounts on individual titles in your audiobook catalog, so that you're always promoting something new throughout the year. How to Apply Your Knowledge of Algorithms to Your Audiobooks at Amazon. Now that we've covered all angles of digital narration, let's get back to algorithms at Amazon. Can we apply what we've learned to audiobooks too? Yes, we pretty much can. The chapters on product optimization and search optimization work nearly identically for ebooks and audiobooks. Audiobooks are often directly connected to their ebook counterpart on the product page, especially if they qualify for WhisperSync. Takeaway: Use the chapters on product page optimization and search optimization to help your audiobook get more visibility on the storefront. Audible books can also be listed and show up in many of the same categories as print books on Amazon's storefront. You don't have much control over categories, but recall that categories on Amazon are now heavily determined by other markers like keywords, book descriptions, and more. You do have control over some of these pieces, and it is worth getting familiar with the category structures at Amazon to get more visibility for your audiobooks. That said, a lot of the visibility will come from your best format, usually ebooks, soaring higher in the charts. Most independent authors sell more audiobooks and print books when their ebooks have a promotion, and the reverse will be true as well. Why not then use your audiobooks to get more ebook and print sales too? Takeaway: Use previous chapters about categories to better understand the audiobook audiobook categories available to you. How to Apply Your Knowledge of Algorithms to Your Audiobooks at Apple Books. Now that we've covered all angles of digital narration, let's get back to algorithms at Apple Books. Can we apply what we've learned to audiobooks too? It depends. The chapters on product optimization and search optimization work nearly identically for ebooks and audiobooks. But audiobooks are also in a different section of the storefront and are not directly connected to their ebook counterpart on the product page. Takeaway: Grab the book "Get Your Bookselling on Apple Books: Book Sales Supercharged #2" and use the chapters on product page optimization and search optimization to help your audiobook get more visibility on the storefront. Where audiobooks differ is that they don't have the same categories. There are fewer, so you'll need to check the storefront to reposition your audiobooks well. They are not mixed with ebooks in product carousels, which means they have their own list of unique carousels. Many of those carousels work very similarly to how they work for ebooks, and differences are noted below. New and Trending: This section includes recent bestsellers, read before you watch, and new this week each of which works similarly to its corresponding ebook carousel. Coming Soon: This carousel is where you'll find audiobook preorders. Preorders are available to independent authors through both Findaway Voices and Audible. Top Charts: This section includes the bestsellers in each category. The algorithms for these carousels work similarly to their corresponding ebook carousels. The $9.99 Collection: This carousel is considered to contain affordable audiobooks and may be merchandised by Apple Books. Audiobooks We Love: This section is merchandised, so if you have something relevant for it, send your audiobook information to them, although they do seem to be primarily traditionally published books. Special Offers: This section is where you can find free books, seasonal books, e.g., Oppie month and $6 or less books. It is a merchandised section and the most likely place that Apple Books would place your audiobooks. Takeaway: Grab the book "Get Your Bookselling on Apple Books: Book Sales Supercharged #2" to better understand the audiobook carousels available to you, and use the section on merchandising to attempt to bring more visibility to your books through carousels. The rapid creep of generative AI into publishing. This second major entrant into the auto-narrated audiobook space cements the looming threat to human narration. Both Google and Apple are able to produce high-quality narration that is rapidly improving. Further, the majority of readers are comfortable with the level of quality that this narration can provide. As always, new technology will often start by taking out the low end of a market, meaning that the current software can compete with an audiobook by a narrator at the $100-150 per finished hour level. The technology may creep up into the mid-tier narrator level as it improves, leaving only the higher levels of performance—celebrity narrators, audio dramas, and more—in the industry. Authors may have more options, but there is no question that AI is coming for many creative fields fields besides the audio narration industry, including artists and writers. It's a tricky space to navigate at the moment, as emotions are running high on all sides of the argument. Will you be using these tools to create auto-narrated audiobooks? Takeaway: Generative AI is infiltrating every aspect of publishing. Most of us are blown away by how good AI-generated audiobooks ebook narration has gotten in a short time, but I suspect we will see the same in synthetic art and writing. The best way to keep up with my evolving thoughts on the subject is to follow my Substack, authoranalyst.substack.com. What Auto-Narrated Books Means for Amazon. Amazon has long dominated the ebook industry in English-language markets thanks in large part to its exclusivity program. KDP Select. With its two largest competitors offering free audiobook narration, however, there is no question that some market share will shift to wide platforms as authors see new and better opportunities outside of Amazon. In the larger picture, Google has admitted that it processes all the data it collects through audiobook narration to improve its narrator profiles, which we have been able able to see and hear over the last year. Apple likely has a similar goal, and the endgame for both companies is probably mobile, in-home, and in-car devices. Amazon currently owns the majority of the market share in in-home devices with its Alexa line, but can it keep up? Amazon also has its own auto-narrated software in Amazon Polly, which can already be accessed through and edited with a lexicon of commands. Will it make this program available to authors, perhaps through Audible? And can it offer terms that make it worthwhile for authors to use it? At the time of this writing, Amazon has entered the corporate market with generative AI tools through their Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. These tools are aimed at corporations and software developers. Amazon Polly is not currently available as one of their tools, but someday it could be. Takeaway: Amazon may enter the market with auto-narration, but right now it is focused on enterprise tools for teams of software developers. There are no rumors of this happening on the horizon. Additional Resources. Grab the book "Get Your Bookselling on Apple Books: Book Sales Supercharged #2" to learn how your ACX audiobooks at the Apple Books storefront work. Grab the book "Get Your Bookselling in Audiobook: Book Sales Supercharged #13" to learn how to market your audiobooks on all platforms better. Takeaways. Amazon does not have a direct upload for audiobooks. Instead, get your audiobook to Amazon through ACX or Findaway Voices, which both distribute to Amazon. Please note that neither distributor accepts AI audiobooks at this time. Use the chapters on product page optimization and search optimization to help your audiobook get more visibility on the storefront. Use previous chapters about categories to better understand the audiobook categories available to you. Amazon may enter the market with auto-narration, but right now it is focused on enterprise tools for teams of software developers. Developers. There are no rumors of this happening on the horizon. Generative AI is infiltrating every aspect of publishing. Most of us are blown away by how good AI-generated audiobook narration has gotten in a short time, but I suspect we will see the same in synthetic art and writing. The best way to keep up with my evolving thoughts on the subject is to follow my Substack. Authoranalyst.substack.com. Task Checklist. Use the chapters on product page optimization and search optimization to help your audiobook get more visibility on the storefront. Use previous chapters about categories to better understand the audiobook categories available to you. Don't forget about Apple Books. You can grab the book Get Your Bookselling on Apple Books Book Sales Supercharged #2 to better understand how to optimize your audiobooks for this third platform that Amazon Books Reach. To keep up with how AI is affecting the publishing industry, I have a series on Substack. Follow my Substack, authoranalyst.substack.com. Chapter 17: Translations. One of the most exciting subsidiary rights you can exploit is your translation rights. These rights are valuable and can be extremely lucrative because you can create translations for dozens of languages and countries. You can also take any of your other subsidiary rights, for example, a graphic novel, and translate those into dozens of languages too. Translations are a multiplier on your back catalog, and while several years ago you needed to find a publisher or a company to create a translation for you, we as independent authors can now do this ourselves, and many of us are, and making major bank at it. If you are considering investing in translations, you likely want to explore all the major ebook retailers, because in several countries, Amazon is not the dominant place to buy ebooks. Amazon only holds a third of the international ebook market. The rest is held by: Internet conglomerates from other countries that already have a strong foothold and user base within their countries. Device-optimized fiction apps that are popular reading devices in China, Japan, South Korea, and surrounding countries. Google Play Books and Apple Books, which both have storefronts across 50+ countries. Kobo Books, owned by Japanese internet conglomerate Rakuten. Which has partnered with all the rest of the largest bookstores and e-commerce retailers globally: Waterstones, Fnac, Walmart, Rakuten Ichiba, Bol, and more.