Conversion Factors to Sell More Books | Try These Methods Now
(Plus Your Launch Schedule for Amazon’s Latest Algorithm Change)
To increase conversions of your book on Amazon, pay attention to these 6 items:
1: Your Book Cover – Don’t skimp here. Make it professional looking, eye-catching and readable in thumbnail size.
2: Your Book Title – Everything else being the same, a change of book title has been known to move a loser into the best-selling category.
3: Book Description – Think of your book description as a mini-sales letter. Every word should work to turn the prospect into a customer.
4: The Look Inside Sample (This is the table of contents and the first 5 to 10 pages) Make your table of contents compelling, with plenty of benefits and curiosity. Your first pages should highlight what the reader will get from reading your book – the benefits and changes they can expect, or the entertainment value. If it’s a work of fiction, your first pages and lead character need to capture the reader’s interest to the point where they care about the hero and MUST find out what happens next.
5: Price Point – This will depend on your genre. In some niches, 99 cents and even $2.99 books sell well. In other niches, that low price point implies the book isn’t worth the customer’s time.
5.5: Reviews – Quantity of reviews can be almost as important as how many stars you average. Don’t panic when you get the occasional negative review – it makes your positive reviews that much more believable, and some negative reviews can actually increase sales. For example, a book on herbal remedies with a negative review from someone who only believes in pharma drugs is a positive to that book’s target market.
The higher your conversions – in other words, the more traffic you can convert into a sale – the more traffic Amazon will continue to send to your book page.
Focus on higher traffic, lower competition keywords. Choose categories with plenty of visibility that you can rank for (not so popular that you can’t compete and not so obscure that no one cares).
If possible, get pre-orders to help you reach the hot new releases list when your book launches. Plan to send an initial boost of traffic to your Amazon book page the day you launch as well as the next two days after that (72 hours total). This primes the Amazon traffic pump. When Amazon’s algorithm sees that traffic is purchasing your book, it will begin to send its own traffic.
To please Amazon’s latest algorithm change, your launch schedule might look like this:
Pre-launch – discount your book price and get pre-orders*, the more the merrier.
Day 1 of Launch – email your list and use social media. Today you’re sending all of your warm traffic to get your conversions high.
Day 2 and 3 – do everything you can to get more traffic, such as promotions, guesting on blogs and podcasts, getting your book featured on book blogs and so forth.
Days 4 – 7 – if you can continue the hard push, do so.
Day 8 – move your book to full price.
And as long as your book continues to convert well, Amazon will continue to send traffic your way.
*Let’s talk a little bit about Pre-orders
Pre-orders are obviously a great way to guarantee you’ll have sales on launch day, and you can start getting pre-orders before your book is even written, much less published.
(HINT: If you have a book idea, put it on Amazon for pre-orders. Then push traffic to it to see if it converts. If it doesn’t convert, tweak the 5.5 conversion factors listed above. If it still doesn’t convert, you might want to consider writing something else instead.)
Amazon has changed the preorder period from 90 days to a full 12 months.
And you can put your entire series of books up for sale before they are written – up to 10 books in a series. The power of writing a series – fiction or non-fiction – is that when a person buys one book and likes it, they are much more likely to buy more books in the same series.
Plus, you can promote all the other series’ books in each of the individual volumes.
Just make sure you can write and publish your entire series within 12 months.
Irving
