Today I’m excited to share a guest post written by the fabulous Christine Dore! Christine is an editor at a Boston-based publishing house, and she focuses her list on creative nonfiction. We’re lucky to have her on the blog today, sharing some insider tricks that can help your book shoot up the Amazon rankings.
Amazon Tips for Authors – Or: How to Tame the Amazon Beast
In the timeline that is book publishing—and book selling—the ecommerce beast known as Amazon (some view this creature as fuzzy and loveable, others not so much) is a completely new phenomenon. Both Amazon itself and book providers are constantly learning and adjusting how we use this new retail giant to it’s fullest potential. Here are a few tips and tricks to help your title make its way up the Amazon algorithm and into your readers’ e-carts:
1. Preorders. Preorders. Preorders. If you haven’t heard this word yet from your editor, you will. Use any and all means of mass communication—social media, your blog or website, any regular writing gigs you may have—to push preorders of your book. The more people that preorder your book on Amazon, the higher the initial order Amazon will place for your book. This trend trickles down to other outlets as well, as they tend to follow suit to what Amazon is putting their money behind.
2. Encourage pageviews. The more people that look at your listing page, the higher it pops up on searches for your topic or genre. Even asking your family or blog readers to look up your book on Amazon every day for a week will affect its ranking. The Amazon system is run by a computer; it doesn’t know or care who’s looking at it–it just notices that people are and reacts accordingly.