Using Amazon to Optimize Book Sales: Guest Post with Michelle Fayard

Hello, writer friends! As promised, Michelle Fayard and I have collaborated on something fun for you! It stemmed from week one of Deana Barnhart's blogfest, the subject of which was to ask your burning questions about writing. For my blogfest post, I asked readers to share the most successful marketing tips they'd implemented or seen other writers implement. Michelle's comment was so detailed and mentioned several things I'd never even heard of! I asked her for more details, and after a string of discussions, we decided to share with all of our writer friends!

I strongly encourage you to check out and follow Michelle's blog. She is a wonderfully supportive blog friend full of great insights (as you'll see below)! Michelle and I have recreated the course of our conversation in a question and answer format. Enjoy!

Alexia: What is “tagging” on Amazon, and what should authors try to get their readers to do to increase the success of this tool?

Michelle: Tags are keywords readers are likely to use when searching for a book, similar to the label feature of Blogger. Once you set up tags for your book, ask others to tag it with that same keywords, because the more people that do so, the higher up your book will show in a search.

Alexia: How many reviews should an author attempt to get on Amazon as soon as their book is available? What is the benefit of this? What other popular sites allow readers to post book reviews?

Michelle: I recommend authors get at least 10 reviews, each about 75 to 300 words long. According to Berrett-Koehler Publishers, customer reviews are the single most effective tool for selling books on Amazon, as they help potential customers decide if the title is a fit for them. If you ask your contacts to post a review on Amazon, ask if they’d mind posting the same review on Barnes and Noble and Goodreads as well, for example.

Alexia: What is Author Central? What about an Amazon Connect blog?

Michelle: Author Central is a place where you can upload your photo, bio—even videos. Another great thing about Author Central is you can start posting content to your author page as soon as your book is listed on Amazon, which usually is several months before it ships.

Amazon Connect is the former name of a feature that allows authors to tie in a blog to their book listings, either writing them directly from Amazon Connect, the recommended way, or using an RSS feed to pull content in from an existing blog. The great thing is you don’t need to post as often on your Amazon blog as you would a “regular” one; about once a quarter, let your readers know about your book’s highlights and milestones. Some things to get out there include press mentions, reviews and any book appearances you’ll be making. You also can direct readers to your Web site. Some other cool things you can do include enrolling your title in Search Inside the Book and linking to Amazon’s Author Pages from your own Web site. As of May 26, Amazon Connect became part of Author Central.

Having an Amazon blog has another advantage for when your subsequent books come, as you can use it to announce your next novel to your current readers and increase pre-orders, since the blog shows up on all your books’ pages.

Alexia: How does an author coordinate a “bestseller campaign?”

Michelle: What’s great about a pre-order campaign—which is where you do advance promotion to build up customer orders for your book before it’s available on Amazon—is the orders will ship at the same time, increasing your sales rank for that day. It also helps get word of mouth and customer reviews happening sooner. Another advantage about driving traffic to Amazon’s site is the more sales Amazon has on a book, the more its search engines will recommend that title to others and the more it will pop up as a book bought by others.

Similarly, you can do a bestseller campaign, so your Amazon sales rank will be in the top 100 bestselling books for that day. If anything, it inspires you to let a lot of people know about your book in a concentrated time frame. What other authors have done is offer a free gift customers can receive if they buy your book from Amazon on a particular day. The gift can be something readers can download from your Web site or blog. You also can do this as part of your pre-order campaign.

Thank you very much for inviting me to share these tips with your followers, Alexia. Yours is one of the best blogging sites out there, because of features such as your Awesome Books page and your new monthly newsletter.

Michelle, thanks so much for visiting my blog today!! You are a fountain of knowledge!

So, writer friends, do you have any Amazon secrets to share? Or other marketing tips?