Amazon Bookstore: How to Promote Your Books and get the First Earnings?

In the last tutorial we learned how to publish our book on the Amazon. Now, it’s time to talk about useful tips to help you find your readers and bring you desired income. Briefly, this text should help you avoid the most common mistakes most writers make, and which can be described in a single sentence:

I will publish a book, and someone will see it and buy it.

It is surprising how many times I heard this view. Most writers often have a clear picture of success in front of them, but do not take into account all of the necessary steps that will lead them to that goal. To understand why the quality of the reception is the primary task of a writer rather than a publisher, we need to understand how things work.

A. Self-publishing gave everyone the opportunity to try to become a writer.

B. This leads to overflow in all genres, but does not bother Amazon - users will sooner or later find something that interests them. If they do not know that you write a great horror, be sure they know that Stephen King is doing it.

C. Writers must fight for their visibility or sales will not occur.

A number of theories have been written about this. There are different opinions and I would like you to form your own. That's why I will describe some of the basic concepts that can help you get to your readers in the first days after publishing a book.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

I deliberately put this to the start. Twitter is ok, goodreads also, but Facebook can be your winning combination. Use the power of its precise targeting to spread the message and the news about your book, generate the first sales and build community around your own fan page. Since this type of advertising is a topic that deserves a separate article, I will stop here and stick to the point.

KDP SELECT

Amazon says that with KDP Select you can reach more readers, earn more money, and maximize your sales potential by making your book exclusive to kindle. This means that you will have the chance to organize and launch interesting promotional activities once in every three months, which can help you reach the goal that we stated earlier.

Let's see how it works.

Do you remember my short story from the last post? It agreed to be a guinea pig for the purposes of this tutorial, so we'll use it again as an example :-) Go to your "Bookshelf" section, select Promote and advertise.

Two options are waiting for you. We start from the “run a price promotion section”. As you can see in the picture, you will have the option of choosing between a Kindle countdown deal - a discount on your book for a limited time and a Free Book promotion - determining the period during which your book will be free. You can take these actions for a total of 5 days every three months, so carefully select dates and plan your campaigns.

WHAT DO I SUGGEST TO YOU?

Be objective. If no one has heard of you or your book, the discount will not bring you much good. On the other hand, the promo period during which the book will be free can be valuable. This should be your goal at the very beginning.

FREE BOOK - FIRST READERS - FIRST COMMENTS

WHY IS THAT SO?

Most customers will want to see ratings and comments before they decide to buy your book. The first comments and positive reviews come very hard (if you work honestly). A free book will allow people to read your work and some of them will certainly want to thank you and leave their comment. So, your goal during the initial promotion is to get as many free readers as you can, and hope that they will leave a rating and comment on the page with your book. However, in order for this to happen, you must make sure to expand the news about promotion itself.

AMAZON MARKETING SERVICES

Amazon has its own advertising platform, like all major networks today. This is not surprising, because it would be too naive to not capitalize on all the potential of the online store and the fact that people sell their things through it. So in theory it sounds like this - invest in a campaign so that people can hear about your book. In practice, I'm not sure it really does all the business.

DISCLAIMER: When I posted my first book in an online bookstore, I got free $ 100 credits to spend for advertising. Since I wanted only to try the platform and concept, I did not devote myself to the campaign in detail, so I got results that can hardly be regarded as good (practically it turns out that $ 20 was invested in a single free book download). If you get a free credit, you should not go my example, but take time and plan tactics well. I suggest that you run the campaign during those days when your book will be free to download.

On the other hand, the spent credit and the short ad hoc campaign brought me the first comments and reviews of the readers who continued to work for me long after the promotional period was over.

There is one more important thing. Above we talked about comments and ratings that will help us sell our book. No matter how tempting it seems - do not violate the rules of commenting. When I say that, I mean primarily about fake comments and reviews. Amazon has drastically tightened the policy about this question, and there was a serious scandal in which some really big names were involved. Don’t do this!

FREE KINDLE BOOKS LISTS

Ok, so far you have scheduled an appointment for your free kindle e-book promotion. If you're lucky, you also get a free credit for the Amazon marketing platform campaign. What else can we do?

There are also specialized sites that publish free-of-charge books on a daily basis. Some of these sites have large communities gathered around them. You need to get as much of them as possible for your promotion.

So plan this carefully. Some of these sites will try to sell you special positions, but you do not have to do it. Most of them are free and you will be offered to indicate the dates during which the promotion will be made when submitting a book. This means you can prepare everything in advance for the battle that is ahead of you ;-)

The following link contains a list of some of the well-known sites of this type. I believe it can be useful to you :-)

https://www.tckpublishing.com/list-of-sites-to-promote-your-free-amazon-kindle-books/

MY LAST WORDS

Ok, I hope they are not the last literally :-) Do not give up. It will be difficult, but if you believe in what you are writing, the readers will surely come. This sounds like a horrible cliché, but unfortunately, sometimes clichés are nothing but simple life truths.

The steps described above represent several tools on which you can base your tactics. Do not forget about goodreads or Facebook groups. Relax and try to make the best of everything you do. It will start to pay off.

Off course, if you want to support this article you can upvote or resteem it. I am here for all your questions, so please feel free to contact me. Thank You and good luck!!