Q&A: How can I market my book on Amazon.com?

QUESTION: I'm an author with a new book. Which Amazon features work best for promoting books? For instance, is becoming an Associate still worthwhile? What about the feature that lets readers look inside your book? I am curious to see what's worked or not worked for others.

ANSWER: Congratulations on your new book. Several Amazon programs enable you to promote your book effectively and at virtually no cost. I have tested most of the programs myself and consulted with other authors on their effectiveness.

Your top priority: Amazon customer reviews. Find people to read your book and post an honest review of it on Amazon. Customer reviews are the most popular feature on Amazon, and the reason is very simple: Reviews help shoppers decide which books to buy.

Amazon reviews are easier to get and do more for your sales than reviews in major newspapers or magazines. For more details, read this Amazon guide to getting your book reviewed and boosting your sales.

A couple of other Amazon programs you asked about specifically:

Search Inside the Book. This lets Amazon shoppers browse your book’s table of contents, introduction, and a limited number of other pages. It also enables shoppers to find your book on Amazon when they search for keywords contained in your text. According to Amazon, books enrolled in Search Inside sell 13 percent faster than books that aren’t in the program. The program is free, so this is a no-brainer.

Amazon Associates. Again, another free Amazon program that can boost your sales and bring in more revenue. If you have a Web site or blog, you’ll be able to post a "Buy at Amazon" link and earn a commission on each sale. Since many people will probably buy your book on Amazon anyway, why not participate in Associates so you can earn extra money on those sales?

Here are a few more of Amazon’s most effective promotional tools, and all of these are free:

Amazon Connect. This program enables authors to send blog posts directly to readers on Amazon’s site. Amazon Connect blogs provide a way for you to stay in touch with readers who haven’t yet committed to buying your book—or people who might be interested in buying your next book. You can also use your Amazon blog to refer visitors to your own Web site. You can get more information and apply for an Amazon blog here.

Listmania. This allows any Amazon user—readers, authors, music-lovers, movie buffs—to create lists of their favorite items organized by theme. And, of course, you can fashion a Listmania list to spotlight your own book. Listmanias appear in various places on Amazon, like product detail pages and alongside search results. Listmanias that mention your book can expose your title to thousands of potential readers on Amazon, and can even appear in Google search results. See the 100 most popular Listmanias here.

Tell a Friend. On your book’s product page at Amazon is a link labeled "Tell a Friend." Click the link, and a form will appear on your browser with the boilerplate message, "I found this item at Amazon.com and thought you might find it of interest." Type in the e-mail addresses of your friends and colleagues, and they’ll receive an official announcement about your book from Amazon. Ask recipients to forward the message to their friends.

So You’d Like to . . . guides. Have you ever wished you could submit a how-to essay to your local newspaper that demonstrates your expertise and helps publicize your book? You can accomplish much the same feat on Amazon by writing a So You’d Like to … guide, which could be read by more people than a newspaper article. Guides are time-consuming to write and require considerably more original writing than Listmanias, but are consulted often, especially in niche topics. A short excerpt from your book might serve as the basis of a guide.

Amazon recommendations. One of the benefits of having your book sold on Amazon is that buyers who have bought similar books in the past will receive recommendations to buy your book too. This can generate a positive feedback loop, prompting even more sales of your book. Here’s one example of how Amazon’s book recommendations can propel a book onto the bestseller lists.
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User-generated content site links writers, publishers

Helium, a "citizen journalism" site, launched a Marketplace where publishers can list "bounties" for articles. Then authors submit the stories, which are ranked by peer reviews. Payment for the articles range from $20 to more than $100, with Helium pocketing a 20 percent commission.

Helium has been piloting Marketplace for the past few months with 14 publishers offering about 10 bounties each. Next month, more than 1,000 publishers will participate, according to TechCrunch.

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Plug your book by offering readers a vacation

It didn't have my name on it, and it sounded too good to be true, so I was just about to flag this MySpace message as "spam." But just in the nick of time, I noticed it was sent by one of my friends, Avon Romance Books:

Are you destined for white beaches and tranquil turquoise waters?

You and a guest can win a fabulous vacation package cruising the beautiful British Virgin Islands with Horizon Yacht Charters. Airfare, seven nights aboard chartered yacht, meals, and activities included—some restrictions apply. Enter this amazing sweepstakes today!

Cosponsored by Avon Books an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers and The British Virgin Islands

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100,000 novels bloom in China

Guess what the most popular Web search is in China? Novel.

That's because in China, writing and reading novels online has become the hobby of 10 million people, according to Wired Magazine. Not everyone is getting rich, but tons of books are selling.

Unlike the music world, where MP3s are threatening to kill off CDs, online novels in China are helping physical books fly off the shelves. Print versions of popular online works sell by the millions and publishers, as well as authors, are cashing in.

I wonder if something like that could happen here someday.

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Would you join a book club that has no members?

Viking and Penguin launched a Web site to promote new releases, and while it's beautifully designed, is a complete failure according to the LibraryThing blog.

What's wrong with using brochureware to plug books? Well, to start with:

1. The site has lots of great content, but you can't link to any of it.

2. The site will never appear on Google.

3. The site has completely unnecessary "features."

4. External links go to PDFs.

To top it all off, the site is billed as a "book club" but has no social features. Get all the ugly details from Tim Spalding's post.
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Amazon adds features to aStores

Amazon sent this message to members of its Associates program:

The Amazon Associates team is excited to announce a great new set of aStore features! Since the launch of aStore last summer we have been overwhelmed by the enthusiasm you all have for the tool. Thanks for your feedback and suggestions so far, and please keep it coming since we are basing our new releases on your feedback!

New aStore Features

With the release of our latest features we have increased your ability to customize your aStore while keeping it easy to use. Some of our newer features include:

• Access to every Amazon.com category and subcategory for automatically populating your product categories – If Amazon.com has created a group for it, such as Biographies of Frank Sinatra, you can create a category page to automatically pull in those products and organize these categories however you like.
• Unlimited category/subcategory nesting – Create as many levels of product categories and subcategories as you like, and populate the products in each category by Amazon best-sellers, hand-picking them, or importing a Listmania list.
• Build your own category navigation – Advanced users can take integration with their existing websites a step farther by hiding the aStore category navigation and building their own directly within the core site navigation.
• CSS control – Advanced users can also now directly edit the stylesheets for their stores, and share those with others.
• aStore Widgets – Advertise your store to your site visitors using these new banner links, and increase your aStore traffic.

aStore Examples

Since you are either a current user of aStore or our records show you have created one in the past, we also wanted to provide two examples of successful aStores. Both of them have done an excellent job of integrating the aStore with their primary website by selecting and categorizing products related to its content and using the Color and Design tools to match the look and feel. As you build new and modify existing aStores, these examples may be useful to reference.

The Typepad Bookstore: http://books.typepad.com/store/
HDTV and Home Theater Guys: http://htguys.com/shop.php

Log in to Associates Central today to take advantage of these and other new features! We would love your feedback on your experience with them and other things you would like to see added to aStore in the future. Keep in mind that you can build up to 100 aStores with the same Associates account!

Thanks for participating in the Amazon Associates program,
The Amazon Associates Team
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Using MySpace as an Author Promotional Tool

By Rick Reed

Authors are getting on the bandwagon musicians and filmmakers have already discovered to promote their work: the phenomenon that is MySpace. MySpace is rapidly becoming one of the most popular sites on the web (with a reported billion page views per day) and authors have unlimited potential for connecting with readers on a very interactive level. Personally, since starting my MySpace page, I have found many new readers for my work, which have translated into sales I wouldn’t otherwise have. I’ve also found MySpace to be a great tool for networking with magazine and book publishers, film production companies, and editors. As a result of MySpace, I have been interviewed and asked to write for other writers’ websites.

Getting started on MySpace is easy…and free. All you need to do to begin is set up a page for yourself. MySpace provides forms for you to fill out which allow you to describe yourself and your work, who you’re looking to meet, and to catalog favorite books, movies, and music (a great way to find connections with other like-minded individuals). The MySpace page that results is less than glamorous but there are free sites galore in cyberspace that will allow you to change the entire look of your page with the simple copying and pasting of some HTML code.

And that’s another great thing about MySpace. All of the subject areas accept HTML code, so you can customize not only your page with book covers and links for where to purchase (for example, I have the covers for all my current books in print on my page; clicking on each one takes you to their Amazon page), you can also use HTML code to create comments that you can leave on other’s pages. These comments can also include books covers and links to sites like Amazon or your own website. Plus, leaving comments is a great way to lead others to your space.

Once you have your page set up, it’s time to begin finding an audience. Establishing a MySpace page is kind of like creating a website, you need to promote it to get noticed. MySpace makes that easy through “add a friend.” But how do you start adding friends and building a targeted audience for your work? The first thing you need to ask yourself is: who is the audience for my work? For me, the answer was people who enjoy reading horror (so I always check on a potential friend’s page the section on books…if they list Stephen King or some other horror writer, I send a friend request; if they ask what books are, I move on). But going through individual profiles takes a lot of time. To speed up the process, access the groups feature of MySpace. I found many groups for fans of horror (both movies and books). I can go through their membership, click on members, and send friend requests, thus building up an audience of targeted readers. I’ve also found the browse feature useful for targeting people in specific geographical regions, such as my current home town and other places I’ve lived. You can do searches on your high school or college to yield friends who you attended school with…these people may very well have an interest in your writing. Once you begin adding friends who have an interest in your genre or books, your profile and comments may appear on their MySpace pages, allowing others to see you and what you’re about. Once you begin adding friends to your base, you will begin getting requests yourself. It’s kind of like a viral thing: once you have made many friends, it’s easy to get more…they start coming to you.

But once you build an audience, you have to keep them coming back to your page, so you can clue them on new releases and the like. You do this through blogs and bulletins. Bulletins (which also allow HTML and flash codes) appear on each and every one of your friend’s pages. Lots of people use this feature, so your bulletin will be buried relatively quickly. I’ve found blogs to be a very effective way to keep people coming back to my MySpace page. In my blogs, I can do things like show a new cover design for an upcoming book, announce when I have a free story up on my website, or release of anthology that features my work. One very effective thing I’ve found with blogs is the quick and easy ability to invite subscribers (once someone subscribes to your blog, MySpace will send them a notification e-mail when you post new content). To invite someone, just click on the link on their blog page that says, “Invite to my blog.” MySpace does the rest. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can build up a subscriber base.

One word of caution, though: the tag line for MySpace is “a place for friends.” Keep that in mind as you write messages, leave comments and bulletins, and post blogs. If all you do is talk about yourself and give people a hard sell for your work, you’re going to turn them off.

Which leads me to my final, and most important, point about promoting your writing on MySpace: don’t promote too hard. Be a friend. Answer messages quickly and as a friend. Take an interest in other people’s lives, even beyond their reading taste or interest in you as an author. When you post a blog, make sure it’s not always about your work…use the time in the spotlight to show how well you can write and talk about a topic people can relate to. By showing that you’re there for more than beating the promotional drum, you’ll actually have more people take an interest in your work.

Rick R. Reed is the author of the horror novels Obsessed, Penance, A Face Without a Heart and the short story collection, Twisted: Tales of Obsession and Terror. In 2007, IM, In the Blood, and Deadly Vision: Book One of the Cassandra Chronicles will be published. Read sample chapters and find out more about Rick at http://www.rickrreed.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rick_Reed
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More tidbits on Amazon Vine and prepublication reviews

Have you gotten your invitation to Amazon Vine yet? Many of Amazon's Top Reviewers have volunteered to review advance copies of books after receiving this e-mail:

Dear XXXXX:

As one of our most valued customer reviewers, we would like to offer you a special invitation to join an exciting new Amazon.com program called Amazon Vine. As a member of this exclusive community, you will have free access to pre-release and new products, as well as the opportunity to be among the very first to review them.

We know how hard you work to ensure that your reviews are accurate and detailed, and our customers love you for it. Your candid and unbiased critiques are essential to making Amazon.com a great place to shop, and have a major impact on whether a customer purchases a so-so product, or a whiz-bang one that they will rave about for years. We understand that there is nothing like the adrenaline rush of knowing that your glowing review contributed to the success of a product you discovered on Amazon.com. Heck, we get that warm fuzzy feeling ourselves.

Amazon Vine is our way of showing you how much we appreciate your efforts. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to review products for Amazon.com. As part of this community of influential voices, you will have access to products before the rest of the market, so the reviews you write will be among the first that our customers read. Critical or glowing, it's your opinion that matters.

Here's how it works--simply opt into the program, and each month we'll email you a newsletter of new products that our vendors have submitted for Amazon Vine reviews. Browse through the newsletter and visit the Amazon Vine website to order items that appeal to you.

We'll ship those items directly to your doorstep free of charge, and they're yours to keep. Once you write your review, we'll post it on the product's page on Amazon.com. Not only will Amazon Vine member reviews be noted as such so they stand out (you'll turn your friends green with envy), but they will be the only reviews displayed on book and music pages before release date. As always, Amazon will not edit or modify your opinions, nor share your personal contact information with vendors.

Amazon Vine is an invitation-only program for our most valued customers.
Thank you again for providing Amazon.com with excellent customer reviews. We hope you will join Amazon Vine, and enjoy all the benefits that this program can offer.

Sincerely,
The Amazon.com Vine Team

I asked one of Amazon's Top Reviewers who has already joined Vine for her opinions on how this will affect competition among reviewers on Amazon. Her reply:

The program gives me an edge on new reviewers. The reviewing system at Amazon may no longer be so equal, unless longtime reviewers don't join [Vine]. I have a feeling most will join, but time will tell.

And what about the ethical issues, with publishers paying fees to participate? Will this taint the review system, and put small publishers at a disadvantage?

My opinion won't be swayed by free books, but will that be the case with others? Amazon says it is OK to have critical reviews but HERE'S THE KEY POINT: Amazon Vine reviews will be the first ones printed in most cases, before other reviewers. How many of those reviewers will continue to get books if they write bad reviews? I can't see how bad reviews would be good for Amazon's bottom line but maybe I'm missing something.

Maybe this is one advantage that Amazon feels is duly earned by people who've written reviews, UNPAID, for years. Our only pay has been the free review copies from enterprising authors and the comments and appreciative emails we get from readers and authors.

I can see both sides of this. Amazon wants to encourage their strongest reviewers to keep it up and is "paying" them with free material to review. Makes sense from that perspective.

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Q&A: How can I sell my self-published book to a traditional publisher?

QUESTION: I self-published my novel with Xlibris last year, and it won awards at two book festivals. I was able to sell many books directly to readers during public appearances. Now I'd like to get picked up by a traditional publisher, but my previous sales aren't ranked by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. How can I get noticed by a publisher?

ANSWER: I consulted Morris Rosenthal, publisher of Foner Books, who has had success as a trade-published author and in self publishing. I asked him whether you're at a disadvantage because you self published, and he said:

The fact that the book was self published is no impediment. Any trade publisher who says it's a problem is just making an easy excuses. Trade publishers love books with proven records, that's why they buy smaller publishers. I've had offers on all of my books. It does happen with fiction, but not every week because not that many self-published novels succeed.

If the book sold modestly, say a few hundred copies, and if there's anything niche about it, a trade publisher will often say "You've already accessed the natural market, there won't be any more sales." But I think they are less likely to take that stand with fiction because publishers believe that they do fiction marketing better than any self publisher.

Rosenthal suggests you begin writing query letters to publishers, but not before studying up on the market. Don't just send an e-mail to everyone listed in Writers Market. Search on Google, use Amazon, and look up the names of the acquisitions editors of similar books (the acquisition editor is usually listed in the front material or on the publisher Web site). Study up on the market, competing books, and their Amazon sales ranks.

When you write your query letter, get to the point immediately. Mention your awards and your initial sales into the first two sentences. If the editor or publisher has submission guidelines, follow them to the letter. They aren't impressed by unsolicited manuscripts. They want a compelling query letter or proposal.

Rosenthal's Web site has tutorials for writing a query letter and selling out to a big publisher.

I also asked Rosenthal whether it might help to hire someone who knows how to pitch books, and he said:

I wouldn't. I think it's money thrown away. With fiction, the big houses don't even take submissions, you have to go through agents, but the same thing applies to the query letters. Authors are sometimes better off trying mid-size and small presses, especially if they had modest sales.

Also, being a fiction author isn't about writing one book, it's about writing many books. Some of the worst fiction I've read is by great authors whose publisher (after the author achieves icon status) goes back, buys, and republishes anything they can find with the author's name on it. Also, unlike nonfiction authors who can sell a dozen titles despite never selling out an advance, fiction authors supposedly only get two or three shots, after which nobody will touch them.

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Amazon adds category bestseller rankings to book detail pages

Amazon has begun displaying the category bestseller rankings on book detail pages, at the bottom of the Product Details section. Here's how it looks for Freakonomics:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #49 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories:

#1 in	Books > Business & Investing > Economics > Econometrics
#1 in	Books > Entertainment > Pop Culture > Popular Culture
#2 in	Books > Business & Investing > Popular Economics

Apparently there's a maximum of three categories Amazon will show here, and if a book doesn't rank in the top 100 in any category, this feature isn't displayed.

Amazon has been streamlining book detail pages recently, so it's odd that a marginally useful feature like this would become a priority. It would be more useful if Amazon took more care in classifying books. Some books aren't assigned to all their relevant categories and subcategories, and some appear in inappropriate categories. In my recent experience, Amazon ignores suggestions from publishers on this issue.

Another problem: The rankings are sometimes for many books in the category lists are incorrect. For example, it's not unusual for a book with an Amazon Sales Rank worse than 100,000 to become "stuck" near the top of some categories, while the surrounding books have far superior sales rankings.
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Amazon book reviews can be tough love

Asking a lot of people to review your book on Amazon is a double-edged sword. Don't even try it unless you've got a darned good book, or you'll get slammed.

But having a crummy book isn't the only reason you might get nasty reviews. People might just hate your guts.

I've studied many thousands of books on Amazon, but I've never seen one with a larger proportion of negative reviews than this one.

Twenty-four of out 52 reviews are just one star. The lead review, voted "most helpful" by other shoppers, puts it succinctly:

Boring.

I'm not sure why Mr. Shaughnessy thought people would be interested in this story. It is quite simply the most boring book I've read in the last five years. Pure and total garbage.

But the story doesn't end there. Irked by the negative reviews, the author's daughter launched an e-mail campaign to recruit positive reviews on Amazon. The text of the e-mail was reprinted on this sports blog.

... As pathetic as it is, these people actually take the time out of their day to go to Amazon.com and write a negative customer review for a book they have not even read, just to spite Dan Shaughnessy. So, I am writing to ask a small favor. If you can, please take the time to go to Amazon.com and write a customer review of your own, letting people know what you --someone who actually read it-- thought of the book...

It was a well-written e-mail, and it resulted in lots more reviews. Mostly bad.

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The 4-hour book tour (are bookstore signings for chumps?)

What's the burning ambition of every wannabe author? Touring the country, signing books for legions of fans at every Barnes & Noble, Borders, and independent bookstore from coast to coast.

It's a rabidly popular marketing discussion at Lulu.com, the self-publishing service company: How one self-published author defied the odds and got a signing at her local Barnes & Noble.

It's just common sense, right? You've got to get out there and pound the pavement to sell your book, right?

Wrong. Bookstore signings are for chumps, according to Tim Ferriss. And he knows something, having written a #1 bestseller. With his first book. Without traditional advertising or PR.

Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, and, naturally, didn't want to waste time marketing it. So he surveyed several bestselling authors, asking them to name the biggest wastes of time and money in book marketing. With this advice, Ferriss compiled a not-to-do list for his book marketing campaign:

Number one was no book touring or bookstore signings whatsoever. Not a one. All of the best-selling authors warned against this author rite of passage.

Bookstore signings require tons of time and money. Getting on plane after plane, staying in hotel after hotel. And for what? To sell 15 books per stop if you're wildly successful at it? No thanks.

Instead of bookstore signings, the experts told Ferriss to focus on Internet marketing:

* Go where bloggers go
* Be there with a message and a story that will appeal to their interests, not yours
* Build and maintain those relationships through your own blog too

Ironically, one of the most talked-about author marketing Web sites I've heard about lately is BookTour.com, which is all about traditional book tours. Maybe they should add blog tours to the menu!
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Q&A: I've written a short story. Now what?

QUESTION: I wrote a short story of about 30 pages. Now, I have no idea what to do with it.

ANSWER: It all depends on your ambitions. I will assume you're not trying to make a ton of money with this story, but you'd like as many people to read it as possible.

So get your story out there. Get an account on MySpace and post it on your blog.

You could also try for publication in a magazine. Your local library probably has a copy of Novel & Short Story Writers Market by Writers Digest Books. It lists most of the places you can submit your story -- more than 1,000 book publishers, magazines, literary agents and writing contests.

Another option is to join a network where you could upload your story and ask for comments and criticism -- if you want to try to revise or strengthen the story. One I can recommend is EditRed, where basic memberships are free.

Another network you may want to take a look at is Gather.com, which sponsors many writing groups and contests.

If you want to sell your story as an e-book, an easy place to get started is Lulu. You'll simply upload your word processing file and set a price for your story.
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Amazon will supply free advance copies of books, movies to customer reviewers

Amazon.com will provide free advance copies of books, movies and music to customers who agree to post reviews of the new releases on the company's Web site.

The program, Amazon Vine, will permit negative reviews as long as they meet Amazon's regular review guidelines, said manager Russell Dicker.

"As with all Amazon reviews, we want your honest opinion of the product," Dicker said. "Amazon will not edit or modify any reviews beyond small tweaks to fit within existing guidelines -- this is exactly how it works today."

Starting August 15, Amazon will ask customers to join the program in invitations e-mailed over the next few months. To be eligible, customers must allow receipt of commercial e-mail from Amazon. Customers can check and change their settings here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/gss/ccp/

Asked if publishers would pay Vine placement fees, Dicker didn't elaborate. Many professionals in the book trade believe it's unethical to pay for reviews, although in this case Amazon would receive the payment, not the reviewer. It's also unclear whether small publishers or self-publishers will be allowed to participate.

In 2006 Amazon experimented with recruiting its Top Reviewers to critique advance copies of the fantasy novel The Stolen Child, and Amazon bought the book's film rights. The publisher, Doubleday, acknowledged the overwhelmingly positive online reviews propelled the book onto bestseller lists. However, some readers argued Amazon should have disclosed it was a paid placement by Doubleday.

Dicker emphasized publishers won't expect good reviews. "We have given the vendors absolutely no assurances about good publicity," he said. "They understand that the nature of their reviews will depend on the quality of their product."

Click here to see reader comments about this article.
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