Writing Wednesdays: Advice for Putting Your Book up on Kindle

Thinking of making your book an e-book? Here are some tips I learned about making amazon work for you.

1. For a book online, make the title as long as possible. This sounded very weird to me, but thinking about the internet, it makes sense. The more words you put in your title, the more keywords there are for people to find. So the Kindle version of my book Stolen Woman is titled something like: Stolen Woman, the Amazon Bestselling Christian suspense/romance novel on international human trafficking. So now if someone puts in the keywords "human trafficking" my book will show up because it's in the title, whereas if I'd just put "Stolen Woman" it wouldn't be as high up in the results.

2. If you have a book on amazon, you can create an amazon author page. This will show up when your book is pulled up, and people can hit the link and read your bio, see pictures, etc. Here's the link to mine so you can get an idea.

My Amazon Author Page

3. Get as many people to post reviews as possible. When I'm shopping for books, I personally put a lot more stock in reader reviews than I do in endorsements. I want to know what real, everyday people think of this book. And don't worry if they're not all great. I heard that if all your reviews are 5 stars, people get suspicious that the only ones who reviewed your books were friends and family. I usually go to the lowest review and read that, and if their complaint isn't something that matters to me, then I'm really more sold on the book than before.

 

4. Don't freak out if you get a bad review. If they say something helpful, like your paragraphs are too long or the plot was unclear, learn from it and become a better writer on the next book because of them. Or, if it's just somebody with a loud opinion, let it go. I got a scathing review from one lady that bothered me until I looked up her reader page and found out she liked reading erotica--no wonder she hated my Christian novel!

5. If you have a book on Kindle and it's not going anywhere, consider putting it up for sale for a day or two. When things slowed down with Stolen Woman, I put it up for 99 cents for a couple of days and asked everybody to spread the word. There are a lot of people that only buy books for 99 cents, so doing this gives you a whole new audience. It was not only  a big success as far as getting the ball rolling--and it's kept rolling even since I put it back up at 2.99--but that's how I got on the amazon bestseller list.

More about that next week...