Name: Make a Killing on Kindle
Rating: 4.4 (19 reviews)
Author: Michael Alvear

What’s in it for me? Learn how to market your e-book successfully in just 18 hours.

For the longest time, getting a book you’d written into print meant putting yourself at the mercy of the gatekeepers: the publishing houses and critics.

But then came the digital revolution and the internet, giving aspiring authors direct access to the marketplace for the first time ever.

E-publishing certainly has made it easier than ever to become an author – but not necessarily a successful one. In addition to being a good writer, you also need to know how to market your work effectively, and how to exploit providers like Amazon.

Enter Michael Alvear’s Make a Killing on Kindle. As these blinks show, Alvear’s book is a great help to authors who are struggling to make a good profit from their books, or to those who are just starting out. In fact, the author claims that in just 18 hours you can implement a marketing strategy that will get your book into the top 20 in your category in a matter of weeks.

In these blinks, you’ll also find out:

why the most important reviewers of your book are people you know,
why Twitter is useless for new authors and
why it’s a good idea to place your introduction before your table of contents.

Two myths you should ignore when self-publishing: that you must build an author platform and a social media campaign.

You've finally finished writing your book and you're planning to self-publish – congratulations! Since you'll probably want to publish it as a Kindle e-book, it's now time to attract potential readers.

But how are you going to do that?

Many books and articles about self-publishing recommend that you follow the example of popular authors: in other words, spend months constructing a platform by getting people to subscribe to your blog and building a massive email list and Twitter following.

But this is a myth: unless you're already a famous author with a loyal fanbase, this is not the best strategy for you.

An author platform is the number of people following you – via social media, articles, email lists, and so on. However, in order to sell a lot of books using this platform, you need to have hundreds of thousands of followers.

Why?

If you have a blog that contains an ad banner, the average clickthrough rate is three-tenths of one percent. Of these three-tenths, around four percent will buy your book.

So, if your blog has 10,000 subscribers, only 30 of them will click on an ad for your book, and approximately 1.2 of them will actually purchase the book.

Therefore, if you're a new author, with just a hundred or so fans, the author-platform approach simply won't work.

The second myth is that you need a social media campaign to sell your Kindle book. In fact, using social media for this purpose is a waste of your time.

While using social media is a good way attract followers, 90 percent of them don't own a Kindle device – in fact, just eight to ten percent of the United States' population own a Kindle e-reader.

Therefore, spending a lot of time and effort attracting followers on social media won't lead you to your potential customers.

So what can you do to attract readers to your book? As you'll see in the following blinks, there are several other tools you can use.

Choosing the right keywords and categories will guarantee that you attract the right customers.

When trying to attract readers, there is one fundamental principle to remember: If a reader cannot find your book, they cannot buy it!

Readers search for books by entering keywords into online bookstores, or by browsing categories where they've previously found an interesting book, so you have to ensure that your book is visible in these areas.

Your book's title and cover design are major attraction factors.

The cover of your book is the first thing that readers see. So if the title is not clear and the design is ineffective, the battle to sell your book is lost before it's truly begun.

What can you do to ensure that both the title and design are effective?

Your book description should be a tool for the customer to get more engaged with your book.

After you've attracted prospective customers with effective keywords and a well-designed cover, you then need to get them engaged with the book itself.

How?

There are several price strategies; use the right one to get customers to click the “Buy” button.

There is no single, correct way to price your book. Rather, there are several strategies that you can try until you get the maximum revenue possible.

The first strategy is “Rock Bottom Pricing,” in which you price your book at the lowest price possible: 99 cents.

You need reviews that encourage people to buy your book.

Because they are a kind of “social proof” that your book is good, reviews are essential. When your potential customers see that other readers were happy with their purchase, their confidence in your book’s quality is boosted dramatically. Moreover, if your competitor’s book has good reviews and yours doesn’t have any, you’ll probably not sell many copies.

But how many reviews do you need? In fact, you need just three good reviews to drastically improve your sales ranking.

Your book should be a tool to sell more copies.

If your book is good and readers like it, you can get free publicity via social media with the rating feature that Amazon provides on the last page of Kindle e-books. This feature is called “Before You Go,” and – if you use it wisely – it can help to increase your sales.

If all goes as planned, readers will be invited and encouraged to rate your book as soon as they’ve finished reading it. Then their feedback will be published using their Facebook and Twitter accounts, helping to spread the word about your book.

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

Unknown authors publishing their first e-book shouldn’t waste their time building an author platform or social media campaign. Instead, they should do the following: Choose suitable keywords and subject categories; use a short, catchy title and professionally designed cover; describe the book in an enticing way; price their book effectively; encourage good customer reviews by getting acquaintances to post reviews first; and, finally, ensure that readers reach the “Before You Go” page at the end of your book, as this is a way for authors to sell even more copies.