Best Practices for Selling More Books

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I’ve noticed through the years that some writers get very discouraged when their book doesn’t generate many sales. This discouragement can make them wonder if they should even continue writing. Many times these writers have put everything they have into a single book.

While there’s no magic bullet, there are some things you can do to make it easier for readers to find your books.

Go wide: This means not putting all your eggs in the Amazon basket. It’s the best way to hedge your bets and make sure your income is protected if and when Amazon makes changes to its algorithm or even backs out of selling books altogether. How can you go wide? An easy way is to go through a aggregator like Draft2Digital.  You can find other ideas in this post of mine from 2019.

Write more than one book: There are many reasons why you should do this. One good reason is that it will stop you from being over-sensitive and anxious about book one. Another good reason is that the more books you’ve written, the more real estate you have online, so to speak. That can make readers find you easier. One excellent way to write more books is my next point:

Write in series:  You’ve all heard me talk about this a lot. I have three active series currently, and I love the way series engage readers. It’s also less work. You’ve already created the setting and readers are familiar with it.  You’ve already developed the main characters and the huge amount of work that goes along with that is mainly finished. The groundwork has been laid and you can focus on other aspects of your story. Plus, once you’ve hooked readers on book one, you’ll be able to funnel them into the other stories. After all, readers have also made an investment in your stories, time-wise, and it makes sense for them to continue in the same story world they’ve gotten used to.

Update your Amazon book page and author page:  Although it’s important to go wide, it’s also important to make sure your spot at Amazon is updated. This means both your author page (bio, links, etc.) and your book page (make sure your books are all listed under your name). Find more ideas for taking care of this basic chore on this post I wrote for the IWSG.

Be consistent with your metadata: Is your series name the same across all retail outlets? Is your author name? Although it seems like a small thing, it works much like an old-fashioned card catalog. If something’s different or flat-out wrong, it can hinder discovery. Ingram Spark puts it well: 

One mistake self-publishers make is—believe it or not—their name. If you use your middle initial or a hyphen in your author bio, spell it exactly the same way on your book cover. This creates more links to you and your book, and the more links there are, the more you and your book will appear in searches.o

Categories and keywords matter: Your keywords don’t need to stay static. Reader interest changes and so do the terms they search for. Find out the most popular searches by either manually typing terms into the Amazon search box, or using a tool like KDP Rocket. Dave Chesson explains both methods in his post, here.  Categories are also vital for reader discovery. Are yours as narrowed down as they possibly can be? It would be tough for readers to find me under the huge “mystery” category, but they have a better chance with “cozy mystery-animals.”

Create a newsletter:  This doesn’t need to be a rabbit hole you fall into. Put a sign-up link on your website. When you have a new release, email the folks who sign up. It really can be that simple. See more at this recent post on my blog.

What have I missed?  What other best practices do you follow to help readers find your books?

Image by Charles Thompson from Pixabay