1. Your cover must be professional. 

2. Your title must be enticing. Readers are more likely to skim long titles, those over 60 characters, so it shouldn’t be too long. The title and subtitle will also influence Amazon search results.  These results are sorted by relevance. Use words related to the theme of the book in your title, if suitable. Test your title on other writers to see what they think.

3. Price. We recommend you set the price of your Amazon Kindle ebook to be between $.99 and $3.99, even if you have to accept a lower percentage on your sales. Lower prices generate a lot more sales. Little known authors need to have their books at a keen price to make their book an easy buy for potential readers. It’s better to receive 35% of $10,000 than 70% of $4,000. Non fiction can be priced higher than fiction. $2.99 is seen by many as the best price point for ebooks, to generate the most income.

First ebooks are often priced lower, to encourage readers to try an author. You can also run 99c sales just for a week occasionally, simply to find more readers. Much of the advice online about pricing is for authors with a series, or a large following. Building a large reader base with low pricing is particularly important if you plan to release more books.

It will also help with your Amazon ranking and getting you into lists, such as Amazon’s Top 100, by genre, or the “Also Bought” section. If you have a series, the first book in your series can be at a very low cost and the others more expensive.

4. Keywords & categories. You should use keywords related to your title and theme when uploading your book into your KDP dashboard. You can also change these later. Categories should be genres with a wide appeal such as Action/Adventure as well as a tighter genre such as Thrillers/Military to have a chance of becoming a best seller in a category, and be found more easily.

We recommend you find keywords which appeal to a narrow audience, so that you will become visible in search results directly related to your book. One of the ways to find relevant keywords is to type one keyword into the search bar on Amazon and see what other suggestions come up from Amazon as you type. Go to the pages for each relevant search, see how many books are listed and if they are similar to yours before choosing that genre. Choose at least one genre with a small number of books in the search result, to increase your chances of being found.

Please also check the categories you choose are visible in the Kindle store, as some are not. Check by searching the categories for the most relevant ones. Changing categories every six months, to a similar one, is also recommended.

You can change to a category with less competition by checking the number of results displayed under each. The key is to focus on subcategories rather than broad genres.

5. Reviews. More is definitely better. Reviews also influence whether Amazon shows your book in “Also Bought” lists on Amazon book pages. Offer free copies of your book to gather reviews. Put in text at the end of your book asking people to review it and provide a link to your book on Amazon. After adding this you can upload the new version to KDP, replacing the current version, and retain your reviews.

You can also offer copies, free, for review purposes, on your day to self promote in our BooksGoSocial Reader group on Facebook. You might also sell the book for 50c for a week in the hope of getting reviews from strangers on Amazon.

Reviews will help your long term goal of building a reader base. In this new age of ebooks it’s not all about early sales. It’s about building an outstanding book page on Amazon so that your sales grow over time.

6. Your Author Central page on the US & UK Amazon sites needs to have a pic, your Twitter name, if you have one, and a trailer, if you have one. We recommend a darker more literary style pic.

We also recommend your author bio, on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk focuses on your writing career, and includes short paragraphs separated by blank lines to make it easy to read.

I know the above is a lot of work, but to sell your book it has to compete with books from major publishing houses, who generally get all this right.

We hope this helps. Thinking long term is what we suggest.

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