Follow these steps in the correct order and your process will be okay.
Before you format your book for paperback, log into the CreateSpace website and start your project. Submit the title and author information. During this process, it will ask you if you have your own ISBN number, want to buy one, or would like a free one. Take the free one.
Then you save and stop this process. Go back to your book and format everything. The book itself needs to contain that ISBN on the copyright page. This is one of the reasons I hate hiring someone else to format my book. If I want to add the ISBN, I have to pay him again.
You can format your book using any method that works for you. You can simply download the template from CreateSpace that matches your book dimensions and copy each chapter into it. That is how the majority of my books were formatted.
Once you have your final interior book content formatted, go back to CreateSpace and upload your interior file. You may have to go back and forth making a few final edits before your interior is ready for primetime. I always catch little mistakes when checking my work in the CreateSpace previewer.
Once your interior is perfect, CreateSpace will give you a final page count. You can download a template with the correct spine size and cover dimensions. Create your paperback cover yourself or get your designer to create the final paperback cover for you.
Upload your final cover design and submit to the manual review process. A real person will look at your formatting before they approve your book to go live.
This process can seem complicated because you go back and forth a few times, but if you follow these simple steps, it is very achievable. As always if you get stuck, check my blog for detailed walkthroughs, or just reply to one of my emails and I’ll get you unstuck.
20
Turn Your Listing into a Sales Machine
The description section is not where you tell people what your book is all about. It’s not where you introduce yourself or explain the outline of your story.
Each component of your book can only serve a single purpose. The cover gets people to visit your listing page. We must remain laser-focused.
The description is to convince people to buy and read your book. Any other goal will lower your sales numbers and limit your potential for success.
Most authors write their descriptions as a summary of the book: a bird’s eye view of the story or topic that the book will discuss. But this does not increase their sales numbers.
There is a big difference between content writing and copywriting. Copywriting is an entirely different art form; that’s why it will be covered in a separate book.
Don’t fall into the common trap of writing a dull or descriptive summary of your book. Don’t list the topics the book covers to help readers make “informed” buying decisions. There are other ways to ensure that your reader knows what they are buying. This section is there to get them excited about your book and bring them across the finish line.
Sell Your Book
Your book page on Amazon is a sales page. It is the infomercial for your book. Do not think of Amazon as a big book catalog that lists titles in alphabetical order. It’s a dynamic system that rewards the strong and punishes the weak.
With a novel, get your reader excited about where the story is going. Don’t waste time explaining the backstory or the world the characters inhabit. Do not tell me what happens, show me.
With a non-fiction book, you want to follow the traditional copywriting process. Point out the problem, explain how your book solves the problem, and show them what life will be like after they read your book.
Take a look at the books in your category that are selling and those that are failing. You will find that the better books also have better descriptions. You want to intrigue and entice your visitors. Make them yearn to read your book to find out what happens next or to solve their problem.
Weave a story that your reader will want to be a part of. Engage their imagination and guide them to clicking that “add to cart” button.
I have several extensive blog posts on my site that detail the copywriting process if you want to continue to grow and master this craft. For now, start by modeling the structure of the books in your space that are doing well.
Formatting
Amazon allows you to use HTML in your descriptions. You can make sentences big or small. You can create bullet points and break lines. You can create words that are bold, underlined or in italics.
Your book description is a canvas, and these advanced constructions are the paint. Take the time to create a beautiful description and you will move a lot more books.
Your first description will have mistakes in it. Learning HTML is hard and even when it looks perfect on your computer, you will find some mistakes when you publish the description on Amazon. Many authors ignore their actual listing and never notice that there are big spaces between some paragraphs and tiny ones between others.
You don’t have to learn HTML or go to computer school to master this process. You should have already set up your author blog and installed WordPress by now. WordPress is my preferred blogging platform, and I have loads of tutorials on my site if you need them.
Open up a new blog post and write your description there. You can save the post as a draft while you work on it. Using the list of allowed HTML tags from Amazon’s website, create a listing that looks perfect. Once you are satisfied with the artistry of your listing, click on the little button that says “source.” This will show you the HTML version of your blog post.
Simply copy and paste that into the Kindle publishing platform. Depending on how fast Amazon moves, your description will appear in six to forty-eight hours. Once that new description is up, take a look and adjust anything that looks weird.
Amazon formats HTML in its own way, so it will look different from any tool you test with. That’s fine. The beauty of the system is how quickly you can make changes to get everything perfect.
There are a lot of tools out there that promise to help you write great descriptions and format them to perfection, but none of them have ever impressed me. Doing it for free using Wordpress is the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to create a perfectly formatted description.
Author Central
Once your book is live, you can create an Author Central account, where you can upload your author photo, create a biography and link to some of your social media. Amazon is always changing the integrations. For a while, you could connect to Twitter and YouTube accounts, but then you couldn’t.
Right now you can link to your blog posts, and you have to upload any videos directly to Amazon. In your author biography, you can encourage people to follow you on Amazon, read your blog or visit you on social media. We will go deeper into perfecting your Author Central profile shortly.
One thing that many authors miss is the advanced listing editing tools inside Author Central. When you log in for the first time, you will need to claim your book and confirm that you are the author. Once you have connected the book to your author profile, you can add some advanced sales content to your listing.
You can add a few special sections:
• Editorial Reviews
• From the Author
• From the Inside Flap
• From the Back Cover
• About the Author
As you get great reviews, you can add the best ones to your editorial reviews section. When you add solid content to each of these sections, your book stops looking like a self-published book and starts to look very professional.
You should continue to tweak and improve your listing for the months and years after you initially release it. I rewrite all my book descriptions at least once a year and add additional content far more often.
Using these additional sections will help your book to slide to the top of the rankings and push down the competitors that leave these sections blank.
21
The Secret to Golden Categories
Put
ting your book in the wrong category can end the game before it even gets started.
Some people slip books into the wrong categories for strategic reasons. Every time I look for science-fiction novels, there are loads of inappropriate erotica books shoved into the listings. Amazon will eventually course-correct and shut down all the books playing that game.
Your book answers a specific question. It is designed and written for a very specific reader. Understanding how that reader peruses Amazon and makes buying decisions is the first step on the path to making that sale. For non-fiction books, many people type in the name of their problem and use the search results. This is how people shop for books about writing fast, quitting their job or learning how to cut their hair.
You will make a lot of sales from category listings, but your keywords will often generate the majority of your sales.
With fiction books, nearly all of your sales will come from being in the correct categories. When was the last time you typed “dragon book” into Amazon? That’s not how we approach fiction. When searching for a fiction book at the bookstore we go to the section we like. I walk to the science fiction section and then start looking around.
I shop on Amazon the same way. When I am looking for a new book to read, I go to the science fiction section, limit to books released in the past thirty days and then sort by popularity. This is how I find new books that are also readable. Your average Amazon reader is sophisticated and searches in a similar way.
If you put your hard-boiled detective novel in the police procedural category, your audience won’t find you. If you put your book on curing tinnitus in the social sciences section, your book will die a lonely death.
Researching and analyzing categories is just as important as researching keywords. For some books, eighty percent or more of your sales will come from your category. This is imperative.
Amazon is a living beast and cannot be treated like the Dewey Decimal System. This is not a card catalog, but a dynamic shopping system. The purpose of Amazon is to sell product. That is the single goal of Amazon. Amazon wants to help your reader find the best book for them. When Amazon brings a reader to the right book, that person buys the book, and Amazon makes money.
The categories in Amazon are updated all the time. If I included a comprehensive listing of every category on Amazon right now, by the time this book is published that list will be incorrect. You should check and update your categories at least every three months to stay on top of Amazon.
Taking action to improve your listing and adapt to Amazon’s changing platform is how you can maintain sales for years after you publish a book.
Easy Category
Amazon allows you to place your book in two categories for Kindle, two categories for paperback and then at least one more for your audiobook version. Let’s start with choosing two Kindle categories.
You want to use your categories as a one-two punch to drive sales.
The first category should be easier to rank for. I love finding a category where the top book is ranked around #15,000 in the overall Amazon rankings. I know that my book can beat that. When my book becomes number one in this category, Amazon will add “Bestseller” to my book when it appears in search results.
This bestseller status will increase sales and help to drive me up to the top of my harder category.
Some people like to use inappropriate categories to “game the system.” That’s stupid and has no longevity. Would you be impressed if this book was #1 in the microscopes category? Your easier category still has to be relevant and valuable.
If you choose a category that your book doesn’t fit in, you might get a bestseller star, but your sales won’t increase. I want to get a sale from everyone visiting the easier category. I want every single person who visits that category to buy my book and boost my rankings.
When you begin your category research, you may find that there are a few categories that would fit the book you are writing. This book could be any of these categories:
• Business writing
• Authorship
• Creativity
• Home-Based Business
• Communications
• Direct Marketing
• Writing Skills
This book would make sense in any of those categories. From them and some deeper research, I will choose the easiest one to rank for as my crutch.
When selecting categories, your easy pick should be one that is relevant.
Tough Category
For your tough category, find one that is a little harder than your first category. I like to use twelve thousand as my baseline. With my system, I know I can get any book to around that ranking pretty easily.
If the bestseller in my easier category is around #15,000, then I know I can get to bestseller status. For the stronger category, I like to ensure that I can rank somewhere in the top twenty. If the twentieth book is ranked around #20,000, I am happy. I want my book to be number one in the easy category and on the first page with my hard category.
The first category is for ranking and to generate some momentum; the harder category will have a lot more traffic and visitors. Placement in this category will generate more revenue for me.
With your category placement, you want to be strategic.
Secret Categories
When you go to upload your book to Kindle, you may find that the category you want isn’t there. Your perfect category is missing from the options!
Amazon updates their public system far more often than their backend. When your preferred category is missing, don’t just select a similar one as this can mess up your progress. Just choose one category and leave the other one blank.
Once your book is live, you can email Kindle Support, and they will manually add you to the better category. This is a serious competitive advantage for you. Many authors limit themselves to the incomplete list, and you can dominate a better category simply because the competition doesn’t know about it.
Amazon is always changing categories around, and you will sometimes find a new category that much better fits the problem you solve. With non-fiction, Amazon will release a new category that perfectly matches your book.
Right now your book is in the auditory problems category, and that’s pretty good. But then Amazon opens up a category called “tinnitus.” Manually moving your tinnitus book into the better category will spike your sales and give you a lot more authority.
Jack Rabbit
Sometimes you will notice your book drifting down the rankings. This drop can happen after an initial barrage of sales if you don’t receive enough reviews. Amazon will start to slide you down.
You might have a book right now ranked in the hundred thousands or millions. That book is not dead. Changing categories can bring you back into the game. Amazon will often give you a second chance when you change categories.
There are always several categories that would be a great fit for your book. Moving your book between categories every few months will keep the book fresh. You will also go in front of a whole new audience. The people who read books on authorship are not the same people who read books on working from home.
Hopping between categories will expand your audience reach.
When you are running a promotion, as we’ll discuss in a moment, you may drive tens of thousands of downloads for your book in a single day. When I launched Serve No Master, I ran a one-day promotion and became the 2nd best free book on all of Amazon. I was #1 in any category where I placed my book.
When you are running a promotion with a lot of external traffic, whether paid or free downloads, changing your categories throughout the day will do something magical. You can switch categories and become number one in four categories instead of just two.
These rankings won’t last forever, but your book will have credibility in more categories. Again, don’t put your book in wrong categories just to mess with rankings, but switching to a relevant category mid-promotion can magnify the
benefits of that promotion.
22
Sell Books or Make Money
It is time to price your book, and this is a daunting decision. The price of your book will dramatically affect how much money you make and how Amazon markets your book.
You can release a book on Kindle to drive people into your more expensive course. If this is your goal, a lower price point makes sense. When you make your money after the initial sale, then you want to move as many books as possible.
At 99 cents you might move twenty books a day, instead of just ten books at $2.99. You don’t care about your Amazon paycheck. You are building a list from your book, and it’s a loss leader. Many businesses operate this way. Most video game consoles are sold at a loss. They lose money on that machine because they know they will make the money back on video game purchases.
If you are just starting out and don’t have a backend in place, a higher price point makes more sense for you. Your primary revenue will come from Amazon directly. Eventually you will build out your business infrastructure, but for now you want to generate maximum revenue.
If your only goal is to get books out there, consider making the book permanently free. It’s much easier to rank a free book and find new readers. If you are a fiction author, having a free book to start your series is an excellent way to capture readers that end up paying for the next twenty books. The free sample is a classic and effective sales technique.
Different Royalties
The pricing of your book will dramatically change your royalties. Amazon pays royalties in two bands: thirty percent and seventy percent. When your book is listed at $2.98 or below, Amazon only pays you 30% of each sale. For a 99-cent book, you will get around thirty cents a sale.
Breaking Orbit: How to Write, Publish and Launch Your First Bestseller on Amazon Without a Mailing List, Blog or Social Media Following (Serve No Master Book 4) Page 9