Lindsay - September 23, 2021For this week’s show, Dave Chesson from Kindlepreneur joined us to discuss the new A-plus Amazon content now available to authors publishing through the KDP dashboard, as well as keywords and categories and how they can affect organic book discovery. We also talked about Amazon search, how best to market a book around the launch, and whether or not there’s a “honeymoon” period during which Amazon is more likely to suggest your book to readers.
Yes, this is a very Amazon-centric episode, but hopefully you’ll find it useful, whether you’re wide or exclusive. As the creator of the popular Publisher Rocket (software for finding keywords on Amazon for search and advertising), Dave spends a lot of time analyzing this stuff, so he was a great and informative guest.
Here are the questions we asked him:
- What’s your background, and how did you get into helping authors figure out the inner workings of Amazon?
- You recently posted an article on A-Plus Content on your site that explains what it is and how to do use it. Could you give our listeners the gist?
- What are the common bits of information that readers might be looking for that we should be addressing in A+ content?
- Since the time this was released, have you heard any reports of whether or not it’s helping? Have you noticed a lot of authors taking advantage of it? And what sort of a priority would you give it for our busier listeners?
- Is there anything authors shouldn’t put in their A+ content section?
- You’ve got another article that we quoted and talked about on an earlier show (The HoneyMoon Effect: Does Amazon Give Preferential Treatment to New Books?) Could you talk about your experiment, findings, and what it means for authors planning book launches?
- Did you get any indication of the length of the honeymoon period? We reference things like the 30-day cliff. Does the actual period vary?
- How much do also-boughts and other algorithm-type things currently affect book launches? What do you recommend authors do to boost the algorithms?
- What can authors do with their book launch to give their books the best possible shot to get organic sales, not only in those first few weeks but as time passes as well?
- Writing in series is very common and highly recommended, but promoting mid or late series books is kind of a tricky thing, since you typically want to funnel new customers to the beginning of the series. But that means you’re promoting something instead of the book that Amazon might be giving a free boost to. How does one best take advantage of the honeymoon period when we’re talking about book 4 or 5 in a series?
- How do you recommend authors who aren’t obsessed with data (or who are even intimidated by it) smartly approach their book launches?
- Just to get basic, what are keywords on Amazon, and how can they affect how your book ranks (or doesn’t) in search results? How important are search results when it comes to fiction?
- Amazon adds categories (both explicit ones and categories that seem to be derived from your keywords) periodically. If one comes along that’s more specific to your book, should you change your category?
- In what ways has Amazon’s approach toward categories and keywords changed over the years, how has that affected you (and Publisher Rocket), and how has it affected authors? What should authors keep a lookout for in the future?
- I know in my case, frequently filling in the keywords section is a challenge because it isn’t always clear what aspects of your book are worth calling out in keywords. How does one find a likely set of keywords for a given genre?
You can find more articles on book marketing, choosing the correct keywords, and more on Kindlepreneur. You can also visit Atticus to learn more about the new writing and formatting tool Dave mentioned in the show.
