So, you’re ready to put your book on Amazon! Before hitting that “publish” button, it’s important to think about marketing strategy so that you stand out among the thousands of books out there.
How Do I Market My Book on Amazon?
Amazon provides helpful tools for authors interested in using the Amazon platform to get their book the attention and recognition it deserves. Other articles such as SelfPublishing.com provide useful advice for self-published authors who might not have the same resources that traditional publishers provide.
But what tips and tricks are important to implement in the Amazon book world?
Research
To find the answer to that question, I decided to look at the top 30 books on the Amazon Best Sellers of 2022 list. Several books on the bestseller list with the same author are not taken into consideration so as to not skew the data.
Before coding the data, I came up with 10 marketing elements each Amazon book page could have:
- The book has customer reviews
- The book has editorial reviews
- The book has video reviews
- The author has an Amazon author page
- There is a book description provided on the book page
- A Kindle or ebook version of the book is available
- An audiobook version of the book is available
- A "Look Inside" option for the book is available
- The book is on sale or discounted from the original price
- The book publisher has added pictures of the book or review snippets on the page
I enlisted an independent coder to code the data to account for reliability, and out of the 30 books selected, we fully agreed in our coding of the presence or absence of the marketing elements. Here is what we found:
- 100% of the books have written customer reviews
- 100% of the books have an Amazon author page
- 83% of the books have editorial reviews
- 96% of the books have video reviews
- 86% of the books have a book description
- 86% of the books have a Kindle or ebook version available
- 90% of the books have an audiobook version available
- 76% of the books have a “Look Inside” option
- 93% of the books are on sale or discounted
- 93% of the books have pictures or review snippets provided by the publisher
Results
While not all the book pages contain all 10 book marketing elements, it is important to note that the books that ranked higher on the bestseller list had more of the marketing elements: #1, #2, and #3 on the bestseller list have all 10 elements, and so on.
Including written customer reviews and an Amazon author page are clearly important to market your book on Amazon, but that may not be enough. With this information we can infer that including more of these marketing elements ensures more visibility and a higher ranking overall on Amazon.
With all 10 of these elements in place, you’ll be ready to hit “publish”!
Read more on Bookmark to market your business!