How to Optimize Your Amazon Page
Far too often, authors neglect one of the essential elements of book marketing – Amazon book page optimization. Since most book sales occur online, authors must spend time making their book promotion content as robust, strategic, and impactful as possible. Digital booksellers provide a range of useful promotional tools, many at no cost to you, and you need to take advantage of them.
Making sure to optimize the Amazon page about your book is crucial because successful selling online is fundamentally about user experience. Therefore, you need to carefully complete it with thoughtful and helpful information to reach your target readers. Book publicists remind authors that marketing success is often incremental, which means small things like online book information web pages work together to spark sales.
Here are three quick tips:
1. Author Bios Need to be Thorough
When it comes to how to optimize your Amazon page, a well-written bio is vital. An author’s biography should be written in the third person and not too long or short. It is your chance to show your personality and qualifications to help people value what you’ve written. Be creative and be honest—it helps people connect with you. If education or work credentials are essential to your target audience, list them. Your bio also should provide insights into your personality and writing style.
Feel free to include awards, travel (if relevant to your book), and humor that suits your book and personality. Adding writing-related awards also adds credibility. For guidance, check the bios of your favorite authors of all genres. If you are stuck, perhaps have an author friend write one for you (and you for them). If you’re working with one early on, an author publicist also can help craft a solid bio.
2. Your Author Central Page Should be Complete
The Author Page on Amazon gives readers an easy place to learn about you in one place. In a book promotion campaign or ebook marketing push, media often review your Author Central Page, and of course, savvy book buyers will too. You are in control of what you want people to know about you, your background, other books, events, as well as links to your website, social media channels, blogs, photos, videos (especially if you are a speaker!), etc.
Tips on where and how to start: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help
Here are examples of authors with robust Author Central pages.
Health author Robb Wolf:
https://www.amazon.com/Robb-Wolf/e/B003Z4MQVY/
Literary author Neil Gaiman:
https://www.amazon.com/Neil-Gaiman/e/B000AQ01G2/
Women’s Fiction author Christina Baker Kline:
https://www.amazon.com/Christina-Baker-Kline/e/B001I9VW40/
Romance author Colleen Hoover:
https://www.amazon.com/Colleen-Hoover/e/B006SKAK42/
Middle-Grade author Dav Pikley:
https://www.amazon.com/Dav-Pilkey/e/B000APCYV8/
Business Book author Simon Sinek:
https://www.amazon.com/Simon-Sinek/e/B002CB2SDC/
3. Book Descriptions Must Draw Attention and Have Keywords
Writing for the internet, and Amazon specifically, includes using well-placed keywords to help people find you in searches. You need to write compellingly and authentically and include the keyword phrases people will search. For example, if you’ve written a novel that’s a thriller that took place in the past, your text needs to say “historical thriller” precisely at one point. Search engines understand what your book is about, but confirming it once in the text helps them be more confident in recommending you to their searchers.
- Start with one or two sentences in bold to quickly summarize your book, followed by a paragraph break (a line of white space) and additional text not in bold. Example: here is the beginning of the description for The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown:
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of storytelling phenomenon The Moth, 45 unforgettable true stories about risk, courage, and facing the unknown, drawn from the best ever told on their stages …
- Treat the first sentences as if they are the only description readers will see. After a short amount of space, Amazon uses a “Read More” link to show the rest of the text, so use the space wisely.
- Use spaces between paragraphs, rather than indentations, as it makes them easier to read.
- Incorporate bolded words or phrases to call out valuable ideas. But don’t overuse bolding.
- You have 4,000 characters, so use as many words as you can fit in — and add keywords.
- Differentiate your book —yet use wording similar or familiar to what your target audience is expecting. Search and read how books popular in your genre or the books you’d expect to be next to yours on a bookstore or library self are presented to readers.
Amazon Page Optimizing Best Practices Bring Results
Given the enormous share of book sales that occur online, you want to follow best practices for optimizing your Amazon product page and the same for your Author Central Page. It’s a question of being thorough and unique in your content and making sure what you post is helpful and motivating to book buyers. Benchmarking against other authors and their pages is an excellent idea because you can see successful ones. You don’t want to duplicate their content because yours must be original. But you can be inspired by them to write something one-of-a-kind about you and your book(s).
In every forum where you promote your book, always avoid the hard sell or anything that appears overly self-serving or promotional. People appreciate authenticity, and genuinely engaging with them draws favorable attention and builds rapport. If you’ve written a book, you’re well informed about your topic or story and have polished skills to communicate with others in writing. It’s a lucky coincidence for authors compared to people selling other products. If you put your natural talents to work in the best way, you’ll connect with readers and sell more books online.
When you’re marketing your book with an author promotion plan or strategic advertising, optimizing your Amazon book and author pages is vital to support your ultimate goal of sparking sales.