They Can’t Buy Your Book If They Can’t FIND Your Book….

Setting up your book’s listing on Amazon and your Author Central page is kind of like getting your house ready for a Christmas party.  First, you have to make sure that your house is in good shape.  You have to make sure that everything is clean, and put away, and everything is set up.  Now, once your page is set up perfectly, the way you want it to be, then it’s time to start reaching out and driving more people to that page.  That happens by making your book easier to find.

The fact of the matter is that Amazon.com is the second largest, and second most-powerful, search engine in the world, after Google.  So, Google.com is the largest and most powerful search engine in the world.  Most of us already know that, but many people don’t realize Amazon.com’s search engine takes second place.  If you treat Amazon the same way that you treat Google when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), and ranking, and searchability, you will not be sorry.  There are a lot of benefits to that.

So, how does ranking work?  Ranking works in a number of ways.  It starts by being a reflection of how your book is doing.  A number of my clients and students have come to me, and they’ve asked for tips and tricks on how to improve their ranking.  I say to them, “Who cares?”  Your ranking isn’t something that affects sales.  Your book’s ranking is simply a reflection of how the tools you are using to increase your sales are doing.  However, your ranking will improve when more people are looking at your book, more people are clicking on your book, and more people are putting it in their shopping cart.

Your ranking will also go up as more people purchase your book, and even if more people just mention your book, either in the reviews or on Amazon’s discussion forums.  There are a lot of different ways that your book’s ranking could be affected.  Let’s say that your mother, your sister, and your best friend all buy your book.  Of course, they would all need to have different last names than your own.  If your reviews come from people with the same last name as you, Amazon isn’t going to pay much attention. 

Alternatively, if I get people with three different last names, who aren’t so obviously connected to me, and they all three write a review for me on the same day, my book’s ranking is going to go through the roof.  Don’t get too tied into the rankings.  They don’t always mean that your sales are increasing.  What a good ranking will do is help you to gauge how your marketing efforts on Amazon are going.  That’s why a book’s ranking, in my opinion, is so important.  It’s nothing that you want to lean your shoulder against, though.

The secret to better ranking and showing up at the top of the search results used to be getting preorders.  Let’s say that you have a new book coming out in March, and by mid-January, you have your book up on Amazon, and you even have your eBook up as well as your print version.  You are going through your preorders, and you’ve got hundreds of people to preorder the book.  That way, on March 3^rd, when your book goes live, your book shoots to the top of the search engine results, and it becomes #1 in its category.  That’s how it worked for quite a while.

Amazon doesn’t play into that so much anymore.  There are new algorithms and rules in place.  Nowadays, if you want to be #1 in your category, and you want to show up at the top of the search engine rankings for your category, you need to be a little subtler.  What you need to have, now, is constant and consistent sales over a 30-day period.

So, let’s say your book is coming out on March 3^rd, like in the previous example.  What I’d recommend is that from March 3^rd to April 5^th, you begin promoting your book and getting organic sales.  You can get people, such as clients, friends, and family members to buy your book and leave you an honest review during this period of time, which will help drive your rankings and your sales further, but you can also promote through your blog, or website, or through other strategies.  The point is to have consistent and constant sales over a 30-day period of time, and then this must be followed by a strong surge of sales.

If you really want to drive your rankings, the easiest and best ways to do it in the past was through preorders.  Those days are over.  Now the best thing to do is to hold off and ask people to order your book on a particular day or within a 48-hour period a month or two after your book is launched.  The reason is that now Amazon.com factors rankings by taking all of the sales made over the last 30 days, spread them out, and divide by 30.  So, if you had no sales for 29 days, and then you sold 200 copies on the 30^th day, you will only get the same ranking as someone who sold about 7 books a day over the last 30 days.  That’s how it works now.

Now, if you are looking to get preorders just to get people excited about your book, that’s great.  But, if you are using this as a strategy to grow your ranking or become a bestseller on Amazon, I want you to be aware that the new algorithms that are in place will thwart you, unless you understand how to play.  Another aspect of this that I want to mention is that the growing number of reviews you get from month to month will do more to increase and hold your ranking than anything else.

Amazon cares about organic, honest reviews, and if you have a bestseller ranking (BSR) of 16,000 for your category, and you don’t get any new reviews for two months, your ranking will sink.  It doesn’t matter how many tricks you pulled.  If you can get a constant flow of reviews, even just one or two a week, or at least, you don’t let too much time pass between reviews being posted, your book’s ranking will improve week by week.

Keywords!

One of the places you might use keywords is within your author biography.  There are other places you’ll want to use them, which I will touch upon in a moment.  For now, I’m going to tell you about my three favorite websites that I use to find keywords.  You see, I might think that “book expert” is the best keyword out there, but the truth is that I found out differently when I went to Kendlepreneur.com, Yasiv.com, and used the Google AdWords tool.

All three of these tools are very powerful.  They all gave me keywords that I thought would be crazy to use.  Guess what the #1 and #2 most purchased keyword that worked for me were.  They were “books on books” and “bird on bird”.  I never would have chosen those.  I advise that you use all three of these sites.  They are each going to give you a very long list of authors, titles, and phrases that you can use in your keyword work. 

Once you’ve found your best keywords, get them into your bio and your book description.  My book description contains the questions, “Have you written a book,” “Are you thinking about writing a book,” and, “Have you heard that it’s easy to self-publish?”  Do you think that these questions just came out of thin air?  No, those were generated from the keywords that I found using the keyword tools that I’m recommending to you today.

There are other places that you can use keywords, other than just your book description and your bio.  You can also seed them in your Author Central page and in your blog names.  Let’s say that one of the suggested keywords that I have found is “book sales funnel” or “book expert”.  Can you guess what my next blog is going to be called?  It’s going to be called “Book Sales Funnel” because that blog name is going to show up on my Author Central page.

If I use these keyword generators, and I find out that my biggest competitors and comp-title authors are Joel Friedlander, Jane Friedman, and Frances Caballo.  You can bet that I’m going to put those books and those authors in a Wishlist so that my book and their books are intimately linked in Amazon’s algorithm.  There’s one last thing that I advise you do, concerning keywords.  If you have friends, loved one, and cohorts that are going to write a book for you anyway, you can actually seed reviewers and reviews with certain keywords.

Let’s say that a student of yours has decided to write a review for your book. You can ask them to mention somewhere in your review that you are a book expert.  Ask them to use the specific phrase “book expert,” if they feel comfortable doing so and if they feel that the term really does fit you.  Of course, “book expert” is just an example.  You’d want to ask them to include a keyword that you feel fit you, and be sure that they know to use it only if they feel it fits you too, but if they could do this for you, then that’s yet another place that you can add a keyword that would help your listing thrive.