Unless you’re Stephen King, Oprah Winfrey, J.K Rowling or Chimamanda Adichie, you must find a way to promote your book on Amazon and thoroughly push out sales otherwise it will literally get dusty on the shelves, while you wait for royalties.
No, I’m not kidding you! Even these popular authors I mentioned are not leaving no stone unturned, when it comes to promoting their books.
From granting interviews, getting on podcasts and personal storytelling, these authors do not leave no stone unturned when it comes to getting the words out for their books, despite their popularity because thousands of other books out there are also struggling to get visibility.
To be specific, one of the best kept secrets of best selling authors is marketing, marketing and more marketing. With roughly 7500 kindle books published daily on Amazon, you have to come up with a superior strategy if you plan to get your books on the Amazon’s top best selling list.
Again, I’m not kidding!
If you really want to get your book to stand out from the crowd and command the attention it deserves you need to understudy the following book marketing strategies.
Enroll in KDP Select
Table of Contents
This is by far one of the biggest and most popular ways to promote your book on Amazon without lifting a finger.
Not only is it very straight forward, usually, the fact you’re a published author with an ebook, on Amazon KDP makes you automatically eligible to enroll your kindle book in the KDP Select program.
The KDP Select in turn allows Amazon to promote your book across it’s platform especially to it’s subscribers.
Below are some of the benefits you stand to gain when you enroll your book in Amazon KDP Select…
Kindle Unlimited
With Kindle Unlimited, your book gets promoted to KU subscribers and you’re paid based on the number of pages or times your book is read. (Read more about KU here).
Kindle Countdown Deals
For one week (5 days) in each 90 day period, you can discount your book by putting it in a count down deal. With this you still earn up to 70% royalty even if your book is priced below 2.99 USD, during the countdown period.
Kindle Free Promotions
As part of the benefits of enrolling in KDP Select, you have 5 days free book promotion within every 90 days. During this promotion, your book will appear on Amazon Deals Page, giving you some more publicity in the process.
Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL)
Just like Kindle Unlimited, Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allow authors to earn a fee whenever their book is read via the KOLL program.
Like I mentioned earlier, as a rule; in return for this FREE promotion, you give Amazon the exclusive right to manage and sell your book for 90 days.
This means that as soon as you enroll on the KDP Select program, you literally lose the right to sell your book on other platforms (not even your website) within 90 days, or as long as your book is enrolled in the program. (Of course you can still sell your hard copies offline if you have them).
While this might sound a bit off and not-so-enticing for some aspiring authors, a lot of authors have benefitted from the KDP Select program. At the same time, so many have counted their loss.
In a nutshell, the KDP Select program has a handful of benefit for your book. For instance, it allows you to key into the Amazon discount programs and Free book promotion among other benefits.
But at the same time, you want to have a critical look at the options available before you, the gains you stand to make and the cons before enrolling your book on KDP Select.
You also have to note that as soon as you’re enrolled on KDP Select, your book cannot be removed from the program until after 90 days.
Set your eBook for Pre-Order
Another popular step to promote your book on Amazon is to get your book set up for pre-order and then go all out to get the buzz on for the book before you hit publish.
Amazon pre-order, allows you to update your book’s content details and make the book available for customers to pre-order even before it gets released.
Although this is currently unavailable for paperbacks, you can make your new ebook available for up to a year or some days before the final release of the book.
During this period, your ebook will be available for pre-orders before the set publish date. And you can always make changes to your book’s content until when its close to the dateline.
Within this period also, you can work on promoting and getting people to pre-order the book, visit its page or just get to search up the book on Amazon.
Doing this can contribute to a better search rank and prepare the book for a decent visibility, before it goes on live as people continue to search for it.
Personally, I believe this is a good strategy you can use to get the noise out for your book while putting the book together.
It is also one of the strategies you can use to work your way to the Amazon best sellers’ lists in a matter of days or weeks, after the book finally gets published.
PS: Do not enroll on pre-publishing unless you’re sure that your book will be ready on the target date. Or, work on using only a pre-set date that’s realistic. And if you must use pre-ordering be sure you’ll get a decent visibility and possibly, actual pre-orders before the book goes live otherwise it might be a waste of time.
Sell at Limited Discount
If you’re already enrolled in the KDP Select program, you can use the Kindle Countdown deals as one of the major ways to promote your book on Amazon.
With the count down deals, Amazon offers you about 7 days to sell your book at a discounted price to your audience.
Unlike the basic KDP where you’d earn 35% royalty for books sold below 2.99 Dollars, the KDP Select allows you to still earn up to 70% royalty for all sales made within this period.
Such promotions like this can help you slice down the selling price of your book in order to attract more customers thus boosting your sales, visibility and the ranking of your book on Amazon’s sales list.
It can also give you access to generate the data that can help you predict the accurate price your book is sold for, based on the amount the majority of people are buying it.
Opt in for Free Book Promotion
All books enrolled in the KDP Select program are eligible for the Amazon free book promotion.
Yes! I know you’re wondering about why you should give out your book for free to readers after you’ve put in so much effort to get the book together.
But here’s it… The free book promotion is a very good strategy to promote your book on Amazon and get some free publicity in return.
What it does for you is that it allows you to set your books to be read and downloaded for free, for 5 days, within every 90 days period of your enrollment in KDP Select.
During this period, a lot of people might get to download the book, visit your page or get the noise out about your book. And in turn, this has a way of boosting your book’s visibility and overall ranking.
After your set period of free promotion is over, your books will be sold at the original list price.
PS: While this can generate a lot of buzz for your book, it may also have it’s own disadvantages which you have to watch out for, before settling for it.
Get Book Reviews
Don’t just sell, get reviews and feedback from your readers.
Getting reviews and honest opinion from buyers of your book is one of the best ways to promote your book on Amazon. In fact, it is one of the top tier visibility strategies you can use as an author.
This is because a good volume of honest reviews can improve your credibility before potential buyers. It can also improve your visibility before your target audience.
In most cases if you’re a new author without a huger brand PR, here are the steps you can take to get reviews:
- Request for direct reviews. Ask your buyers to give honest reviews for your book after buying it.
- Incentivize reviews. Offer incentives like a discount in return for reviews from customers. While Amazon will always frown at paid reviews on its platform, genuine reviews from real buyers either on or off amazon platforms are very practical in book promotion.
- Contact Reviewers: There are book hobbyist and reviewers on platforms including websites, social media platforms etc. where you can reach out to get them to review your book or include it in their genre lists. This strategy can create digital imprints for your book across different platforms.
Generally, reviews gives people ideas about your book. Since it comes as an opinion from a reader’s perspective, oftentimes it gives potential readers ideas about what to expect from a book. And readers sometimes get to trust these reviews better than direct marketing stunts.
Enroll In Extended Distribution
Extended distribution is a strategy used by Amazon to distribute Paperback versions published on Amazon.com, across other publishing stores.
It is a great strategy to promote your book on Amazon however you must keep in mind that books are not automatically eligible for extended distribution.
Your book has to meet certain requirements to be eligible for extended distribution on Amazon. This includes things like your trim size, content quality, book’s language, etc. see a list of the requirements here.
One good thing about expanded distribution is that it is free and it also creates a digital imprint for your book across different platforms, if the book gets accepted on the other book stores.
However, it is important to keep in mind that royalties from expanded distribution are always less than the royalties you get from sales made directly on Amazon.
Use Social Media Marketing
Social media Marketing is one of the go to strategies you can use to promote your book on Amazon, as an author.
Done well, it can work for both newbies and established authors, regardless of whether you have a large audience on social media or not. Although naturally, you’ll get more out of this strategy if you have a very engaged audience.
You can key into this, to market your book on Amazon either through the use of your own content or with the help of social media influencers.
Note that if you’re enrolled on the KDP Select program, the KDP policy bars you from selling your books directly via your social media handles instead you’re encouraged to promote the links to your books on Amazon, via the social media.
And you can do this organically through the use of content marketing or you can also use paid advertising to promote the links and get the traffic over to your Amazon page.
Try Paid Ads
Paid advertising is another strategy you can use drive sales for your Amazon published books.
There are a lot of advertising options you can choose if you want to engage in paid advertising. For example, you can use Amazon Ads, Social Media Ads, Google Ads and Ads on third party publishing websites or other platforms around your subject matter area.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that a lot of new authors prefer using the social media advertising over the other options mostly because its cheaper for some genres.
Before deciding to use any advertising option for your book, you should consider the cost, the reach and the overall returns on investment for you.
Do not choose to engage in paid ads promotion or use a particular kind of promotion services just because other authors are doing it. Do your research and make some findings before embarking on this kind of promotions.
Besides the other strategy listed above, guest blogging is another essential strategy to promote your book, sell your brand and expand your audience as an author.
Engage in Content Marketing & Storytelling
Compared to the others, engaging in content marketing especially the use of storytelling is practically, one of the most rewarding promotional strategies you can use to promote your book on Amazon.
And comparatively, it can also be one of the hardest strategies you can use to promote your book if you don’t have a good grasp of it but since you’re already a writer, you should be able to knock this out if you can learn a thing or two about copywriting, storytelling and social media marketing. Yes!
So with this strategy, all you need do is to start creating content about your book even as you’re writing it. Don’t start too early or create too early or too much content. Get a balance. Create content that is engaging to your audience.
As your book gets close to getting published, create more content and finally, even more content after it gets published. A lot of your top writers are already using this strategy.
Recently, leading writers like Chimamanda Adichie start promoting their books, months before it goes live in specific regions. You can adopt this strategy and use it as part of your book marketing strategies.
From your blog to social media platforms and third party websites, get the words out about your book. Create powerfully engaging content, using captivating storytelling strategies that will get your readers scurrying over to your Amazon page to place orders.
Final Words
In conclusions, there are many other ways to market a book on Amazon including getting an author website, using the right categories and keywords, going on book tours virtually or physically, partnering with platforms etc. but; I want you to realize that it is very important to generate a decent number of sales and reviews for your book, during the first few weeks of publishing on Amazon.
It helps a lot in your book’s rating and Amazon SEO. The more people buy and review your book, the better your chances of getting the book seen by even more people.
This is part of the reasons you need to pay attention to promoting your book as soon as it is published.
Of course, these book promotion strategies are not exhaustive but they will go a long way in getting the word out for your book, if you get to use them.
Need further help? Work with our team to publish or promote your book. Reach out to us here let’s get you started.
Meanwhile, to get optimum results from these strategies, it is very important you bring into perspective, the cost implications, your target audience and the overall benefit of a particular promotion strategy before getting to use it.
Now, it’s over to you! Which of these strategies are you going to implement to promote your book? Drop your comments below.
No responses yet