I have a different kind of guest post for you today. It’s from Dana Lynn Smith, also known as the Savvy Book Marketer. To help launch her new book, How to Sell More Books on Amazon, Dana is “visiting” a dozen blogs in a virtual blog tour and contributing articles that relate to the subject of the book.
Dana is a very experienced online book marketer, and I think she has a lot to offer on a subject that concerns all self-publishers: how to sell more books. Here’s her post.
Let Shoppers Sample Your Book on Amazon by Dana Lynn Smith, the Savvy Book Marketer
In retail bookstores, customers tend to glance at the front cover, read all or part the back cover copy, then flip through the book scanning the contents before making a purchase decision. The best way to replicate that experience online is to provide sample content for potential customers.
On your own website, you can offer sample pages and downloadable excerpts from your book. But it’s also important to let shoppers sample your book on Amazon.com, the most important online bookstore.
Amazon’s Look Inside program (formerly called Search Inside), allows customers to view the table of contents and sample pages, view a random page, or search for a specific keyword reference.
Participating in the Look Inside program can even improve your book’s chance of getting found when customers do keyword searches on Amazon. Keyword search results are based on words and phrases found inside participating books, in addition to book title and customer tags. For keyword matches inside the book, Amazon displays a short excerpt and links to the page where the query matched.
Some nonfiction publishers fear that customers might find the information they need using Look Inside instead of buying the book, but I think that for most books the advantages far outweigh any chance of that happening. The Look Inside program allows customers to view no more than 20% of the content of a book.
Learn more about the Look Inside program here.
For Kindle ebooks, Amazon lets customers view the first few pages of the book through the “send sample now” button on the right side of each page. You don’t have any control over how many pages Amazon includes in this free sample, so it’s a good idea to keep your title page and copyright information short so that the table of contents and first few pages of text will appear in the sample.
Free samples are a powerful book marketing tool and letting your online customers sample your book can boost your book sales.
Learn more about promoting your books on Amazon with How to Sell More Books on Amazon, (affiliate) by book marketing coach Dana Lynn Smith. This new ebook, available in both PDF and Kindle formats, outlines strategies for boosting visibility on Amazon.com, increasing sales, and improving profits. For more book marketing tips, follow @BookMarketer on Twitter and get Dana’s free Top Book Marketing Tips ebook at www.TheSavvyBookMarketer.com
