Marketing on Amazon

This past week, I let my novels sit and stew while I concentrated on setting up the Catholic Writers Conference Online and put some effort into my author pages on Amazon.

This is something I've been meaning to do for a long time. Amazon is right now the big bear of online selling, so it should not be ignored. I've read many success stories of authors who say their sales increases are due to working Amazon. So this week, I made a list of things to do and got on them.

First, I had to log into amazon's author central. If you do not have an author's central account, get one.https://authorcentral.amazon.com This lets you do a lot of things including adding information about you and your books.

Next, I updated my bio, added some pictures. Simple stuff, though I don't think I'll really have a lot of sales success from them.

Then I opened up each book's page and got to work on the info. This is the stuff like reviews, summaries, etc. Your publisher should fill in some of it, but a lot gets left blank. I put in reviews, the back-cover information and revised the product descriptions where they were the same as the back-cover blurb. I also added my genre-specific bio.

There's an interesting section called "From the Author." You're supposed to add something about why you wrote the book, etc. I put in some snippets from interviews, a guest post I wrote on building the world for Neeta Lyffe, etc. (Time-saving key: re-use what you already have if you can.) It made for an interesting mix, I think.

I read an interesting blog about the importance of tagging books on Amazon, so once or twice a week, I ask folks to tag my books. I post the request on Twitter and Facebook, then to whatever genre-specific group I belong to. I don't know the results yet, but I'll let you know. I've got a record of my amazon ratings.

Also on my list are some sillies like listmania, joining a group or two, etc. I'm aiming for a small task a day.

What are your ideas for Amazon?