Not the power of love, but the power of reviews

Dear All,

The 5 star amazon review is the holy grail of all independent authors. They are not only great for the ego, but key to your books future success. 

A lot of people may think that having a great book would be enough to guarantee a smash hit, but sadly it isn't. The book market, especially eBooks, is driven by amazon. Of course there are other eBook sellers, but none of them come close to the giant that Amazon is. Thanks to the Kindle it is the destination that most people go to when they are looking to pick up their next read.

Therefore, you need to master amazon to have half a chance of selling any books. In my last blog post '12 tips on how to get an Amazon Best Seller',I mentioned that you needed to choose 7 relevant keyword strings that would enable people to find your book on the site. What I didn't tell you was that, just because you have chosen a key word, doesn't mean that your book will come any where near the top of the search results.

For my best selling post-apocalyptic zombie book, Dead South, one of my key word choices had to be 'zombie'. But with the zombie market being highly competitive and awash with lots of books, I found that Dead South was no where near the top. In fact after listing my book and typing in 'zombie' into the search bar for the first time, it came in on page 7! 

The reality is that not many people are going to look that far down for a book. Most will look at page 1 and a few may look at page 2. This wasn't great, but I wasn't too disheartened, because my other 6 key words, whilst not as relevant as 'zombie' were fairing much better.

But that being said 'zombie' was still the best search and I wanted to be on page 1, so I rolled up my sleeves and did what I had to do to get Dead South up that search.

I needed to do my best to make Amazon notice me and make their success formula kick in. Which is as follows:

sales + reviews = higher up search engine = more sales = more reviews = even higher up search engine = even more sales etc, etc

Your early sales will inevitably come from friends and family. Don't be shy to ask them to buy it, I'm sure you've done lots for them over the years! Also remember, to promote the book on social media and maybe even write a blog of your own. The more that you do this, the more chance you have of selling books early on.

Those early sales and hopefully a few reviews will help you to quickly climb the search engine - within 2 days Dead South had sold around 10 copies and picked up 2 five star reviews and although that may not seem many that had already got it onto page 5 of the 'zombie' search.

The sales kept on coming and after 6 days, Dead South had climbed up to page 2 of the search. It did this with about 40 sales, but the key was that 6 five star reviews had come in.

It took 6 weeks, but Dead South had finally managed to climb on to page 1 of the 'zombie' search. Sales were going well (approx. 600 odd), but it was the reviews that seemed to make the most difference in getting it there, and number 20 was the one that finally did it.

Now that it is there, the sales and reviews seem to be going from strength to strength. But I know that I can't rest on my laurels and that I need to keep on posting, tweeting and blogging to keep it there.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Until next time,

Dave