How to Jumpstart Book Sales in 5 Steps—a Makeover Challenge

You launched your book and sold some, but sales have plateaued. All the likely buyers have been contacted. What do you do?

Some authors feel the problem is distribution. Should you try to get the book into brick-and-mortar bookstores?

We believe that pursuing sales to brick and mortar bookstores and/or maximizing print margins is a waste of time and money. Instead, why not improve the book’s metadata and use online marketing to introduce the book to new readers?

This advice can be applied to many books, so what follows is a checklist of sorts about what many people can do when faced with this situation.

Before starting, taking stock of what you have

First off, your book should have two things going for it:

1. A great cover: Is it competitive with similar titles?
2. Commercial appeal: Is it easily classifiable, and is it a category that sells lots of books?

This isn’t to say that every book needs to meet these criteria. But your results will vary depending on your answers to those questions, the number of customer reviews your book has, and obviously, your budget.

The following is most applicable (and effective) for eBooks.

Step 1: Review and update your description

In the countdown to book launch, it’s expedient to use the book description from the back cover.

Take an hour to explore the descriptions for bestsellers in your category. Here’s a style guide to follow:

• Quote by someone your audience would recognize. Keep it short.
• Bold the headline.
• Two to four short paragraphs. These should be one to three sentences each.
• For non-fiction: Add some bulleted information between the paragraphs.
• For fiction: Set up tension; use a cliff-hanger.
• One to two short paragraph close.
• Bonus: Use phrases and terms your reader might use to search for your book.

That first bullet, a quote, is sometimes hard to come by for new books. That’s all the more reason why it makes sense to revise your description within 60 days of the book’s release. By this point, you should have at least one positive testimonial.

Step 2: Review and update your categories, perhaps keywords too

Now that the book is live, check out the categories where comparable books show up. (Remember that Amazon can add the book to any category it wants.)

You choose two categories in KDP and use the KDP contact form to ask for up to eight more.

Keywords: Honestly, we feel keywords are overrated in terms of driving sales, certainly for most new authors. For now, brainstorm terms and type those into the Amazon search box for books. The auto-suggest feature will provide more ideas.

We recommend updating keywords a few days before you begin advertising a book.

Step 3: Note your pricing

There’s a direct correlation between high prices and sales stagnation, certainly in the early stages of your release. We go into pricing strategy in detail in our guide on this topic.

Also see this case study on the book Virtual Selling.

If you plan to change your regular price, change it after you put the book on sale, not before. For example, if your book’s standard retail price is $9.99, and you put it on sale for 99-cents, the new standard retail price would be $4.99 (or whatever price you decide).

Step 4: Schedule a promotion

The number-one proven tactic for jumpstarting your book’s Amazon ranking is sales.

We usually spend about $150 across several services to promote a price drop.

Optional: Create BookBub ads for added promotion

What we love about this tactic is that you can quickly test and discover keywords and themes in near-real time. Using Amazon Ads, this can take weeks.

We spent $107 on BookBub ads for a client’s book. They performed poorly for the first two days, but we kept experimenting. Finally, we got traction. And based on the proven success of those keywords, we confidently moved to step five!

Note 1: Anyone can use this BookBub service. It’s different from their highly-selective featured deal service. Visit their Partner overview page.

Note 2: For help learning how to write advertising copy that sells, we highly recommend Ca$hvertising. Learn more in our recommended reading library.

Step 5: Implement Amazon Advertising (AMS)

Amazon keeps making it easier to use their ad service by adding automatic targeting and letting you choose categories instead of making you guess at keywords.

It takes some time to get the hang of it, but it’s time well spent. Showing your book to likely shoppers can result in more sales and better reviews.

Two bonus tips:

• Revise and update your Author Central profile (Read our guide here).
• Make sure that every service you use to list your book for sale has the same information used in KDP. Examples of those services include IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Smashwords, or any of the eBook stores you might have used.

Online price reductions work, and here’s why

The June 2021 issue of our AuthorPro newsletter had a graph that illustrated the effects of promoting a temporarily reduced price on Amazon’s sales rank. Think of these price-drop promotions as mini-Black Friday sales.

For online book selling—certainly on Amazon— temporarily reduced pricing has the added benefit of creating sustained interest. That’s because the Amazon algorithm rewards buyer interest in the book with improved promotion of the book.

Amazon added this “Best Price in 30 Days” badge to support a recent price-drop sale we ran for My Publishing Imprint.