Amazon is the biggest online book retailer out there by a long shot. Most sales estimates show Amazon to be making more sales than the rest of the online retailers combined, logging somewhere around 60% of the total online sales. In a landscape like that, it can be tough for a new author with a new book to make her/his book visible. But there are strategies to use when listing your book on Amazon that can help.
Overall Strategy:
Amazon divides up books by categories, and those categories follow specific "browse paths." The secret is to choose the right browse paths to give your book a better chance for the right readers to find it when they are browsing.
Strategy In Action:
1. When you go to the "Books" section of Amazon, you find the browse categories in the left column.
Here are the first few:
Department
- Books
- Arts & Photography (702,247)
- Biographies & Memoirs (565,943)
- Business & Investing (1,615,219)
- Calendars (89,335)
- Children's Books (1,057,291)
- Etc. (maybe 50 more categories)
Let's say I had a book called How to Succeed as a Photographer in the Digital Age.
I would want to list it in the "Arts & Photography" category. But if I just list in in the Books > Arts & Photography category, it will get lost in the sea of 702,247 options.
2. Click on "Arts & Photography" and you get about 20 more sub-categories.
Here are the first 3:
Department
- ‹
- Arts & Photography
- Architectural Art & Design (42,115)
- Business of Art (898)
- Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions (21,642)
3. For How to Succeed as a Photographer in the Digital Age, I would click on "Business of Art" and get:
Department
4. The "Business of Art" category has 953 books in it. That's still a lot, but it's far less than the 702,000+ in "Arts & Photography." That means you're competing against 953 other books in your targeted sub-genre. Chances are that a few hundred of those are old and no one is actively marketing them, so the real number is actually lower.
What Next?
5. Wash, Rinse, Repeat: You'll want to spend an hour or more digging into various browse paths to see what kinds of books are listed there, how many books are in that sub-category, and understand your copetition.
6. Choose 2: Amazon lets you choose 2 specific browse categories for your book. If you haven't listed your book with Amazon yet, you can choose them when you do.
7. Adjusting: If you're already on Amazon and want to change your browse categories, go to your Amazon Central author account and send an email to them including the title of your book, your ISBN and/or your ASIN number, and the browse paths you want to change to.
Write them out like this: Books > Arts & Photography > Business of Art
8. Turnaround: The Amazon team will manually update your browse categories, usually within 24-48 hours. There is no way right now to update them yourself. I have found the staff to be super helpful, though. If you have questions, call them and talk. They are pretty knowledgeable and always find the answer I'm calling about.
Bonus:
9. Description: What else can you do? You can use keywords and directly compete with similar books. Read the descriptions of the books that you think of as your competition. How do they sound? Is there anything that's great that you want to imitate (in your own words, of course)? Are there holes in the descriptions where you think you can show your book to be a better alternative? Read a few dozen and use them as the starting point for revising your own book description. Consider a short description with bullet points as the Amazon page is busy and people tend to skim web pages rather than read blocks of text anyway.
10. Keyword tags: Amazon allows you to select 7 keywords to tag your book. These don't affect your browse categories, but they do affect results when shoppers type things into the search box up top. When you are selecting tags for your book, I recommend doing a little research first. For me that research means typing a few dozen search terms into the search field and seeing 1) what Amazon auto-fills, and 2) what books come up when I click Search. Auto-fill long-tail terms are popular on Amazon. If you select a few of those for your keywords, you are setting yourself up to get found. If you select the popular tags that bring up books very similar to yours, you are positioning your book next to the right books for maximum visibility.
Do you have any other recommendations for Amazon strategies for maximum visibility?
Image source: suvodeb via flickr and photo of a Jasper Johns classic by cliff1066 via flickr
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