How do you market your Kindle ebooks?

I just published a Kindle book and one thing I did was get a domain around the main keyword. I'll write some articles and maybe make videos that point to this domain. I'm also going to look into press releases.

What about using PPC? Can you direct link to your own Amazon Kindle ebook?

If so, it might be good as a "loss leader" to increase the initial sales/reviews?

I must admit that I do pretty much nothing to promote mine.

One of them I do have on the sidebar of my website (dog niche) and it makes about 10 - 20 sales a month but NONE of them come from the website. The website itself gets a fair bit of traffic (about 100 people a day) but they don't seem to click the link to buy the book. I also promote it in my email series but no sales seem to come from that. I am using Amazon tracking id's to determine this so unless they strip out the tracking id because they know I am also the author it appears my marketing does not increase sales.

Lee

Lee, how long does it take once you submit a new Kindle ebook for it to get indexed by Google and show some ranking?

I would think reviews would be crucial as well and how people "tag" the subjects.

For Kindle books, there are some things that help it to get higher exposure within Amazon itself. One of the more prominent ways is to get you book listed in what is called the "also boughts" of other books.

The only way to get these is to actually sell copies of you book though. The most popular way to get your book to "sell" copies in order to gain "also boughts" as well as higher rankings on the besellers lists is to offer your book for free for a limited amount of time.

Often, a book that is offered for free will have a huge spike in downloads. As a result, it will start to get a bunch of also boughts (often for other free books) and because it's being downloaded a bunch of times it will rise on the free books bestsellers list.

When your book stops being free, it will still have the also boughts and for some reason will also appear higher on the paid books bestellers list. Both of these together give the book a little more visibility and usually result in more sales than it had before it was free.

As of right now, there are only two ways to offer your self published book for free. One is a brand new program that was just launched this week called "KDP Select". This is basically an agreement between you and Amazon that you will not offer your book in digital format anywhere else, such as the Nook, Ipad, or your own website as a PDF for 90 days. If you enroll in that program, you can list your book as free for up to 5 days of the 90 day period.

Before this program was launched, the only way to get a book listed as free on Amazon was to offer it free elsewhere (your website, Nook, etc.) and ask people to report the lower price to Amazon, which they will (eventually) price match.

Of course, if you do this, then when you want it to be paid again you have to change it to paid on all of the outlets that you sell it on and wait for Amazon to change it back to the list price.

Of course, you could also use all of the other internet marketing methods to promote your book as well. PPC is said to convert poorly, if at all, unless you have name recognition already.

Getting someone to write you a review can help. You can 'buy' these on micro job sites. I saw an increase in my sales (slightly) after doing this.

Ed, the free feature was launched at the same time as select. It could be mistaken as part of select but it's actually not. It's a way for indie publishers to offer all Amazon customers free downloads for a limited time, just like the big publishers do for promos.

There are so many ways to promote but I find that Facebook is effective.

Amazon is also doing a great job with their "also bought" recommendation.

I have found that sales come primarily through Amazon's own marketing.....and they are far better at it than me!

Hi guys,

I read this thread after listing my first book in the Kindle store (non-fiction parenting) this last week. Then the Select email went around the very next day. Hence I found this thread.

I followed Dan's advice. I made my book free for 5 days and WOW, the book went way up on the search rankings on Amazon. Main keyword had me on page 3 or 4 initially (120 books in the category). Now after 5 days of "free", and over 7000 downloads, I'm ranked #3 when you search on my main keyword.

The book isn't free anymore, so I'm curious how many sales I'll see just from the ranking boost. Nobody would have found me earlier. Now they all see me when they search.

Kindle Select is worth trying.

Do a joint venture with a credible expert in whatever niche your book is about.

we have only 3 kindle books, but it seems to convert well via email marketing, as soon as we added this onto the end of our autoresponder sales have tripled. Ok, the books is only 9 bucks, but we all know how well email works....so I would tell you to try this method its working great for us. All of our books are non IM niche, stay away from IM niche in kindle...they do not do well at all from what I hear.

I am planning to build Squidoo lenses on each book and the author when I publish some of my husband's fiction.

Linda

I really didn't think KDP Select was a great idea after some research for non-fiction publishers like myself. However, I might give it a try with my next title and try to leverage the power of the free giveaway.

Just curious, how many pages must an ebook be to be sold on Amazon Kindle?

I have 12 Kindle ebooks up now, and the best-selling one of the lot (The Sound Bite Workbook) got a huge boost when I wrote a guest blog post for a PR blog that then got syndicated or reprinted at three other web sites.

The others are seemingly being discovered by keywords alone, by people searching on my name or by people who have found one of my Kindle ebooks looking to see what else I have.

I was surprised to see I've also made a few sales on Amazon.de, their German web site, which is running neck and neck with sales on Amazon.co.uk.

Marcia Yudkin

Dean, you can make it free as soon as its enrolled. The earliest it can start is a day later.

My best seller had averaged about 200 US sales a month for about a year now. It's mediocre by my standards so I updated it into a second edition earlier this month. Raised the price and made it free for christmas eve and day.

It got over 600 downloads and shot to the top 5 in all lists.

I now have 7 more titles scheduled for promotion over new years weekend

I've also finally decided to create an author blog to take better advantage of the author pages on amazon and start new avenues of promotion. Kindle had been such a nice hands free income for me since 2008 that I've decided 2012 is my year for ramping it up

200 sales for the one book. I have about a dozen that sell at least a few each month.

You can find many gigs on fiverr to help you promote your Kindle books. Things that work are reviews for example. Make sure that you insist that the person actually reads your book before writing a review and send it to you first. If it is OK you tell them to publish it.

The reviews should be honest (the reader can tell what is honest and what is just brown nosing) but you obviously would not want to publish a review that completely trashes your book.

I still would like to know how many pages most of you have in your kindle ebooks. I've only got a few right now, and they are around 20-30 pages. One is over 50 pages.

My best selling one is 180 pages and most of my others are around 20 - 50 pages. My second best selling one though is only 15 pages.

Lee

There's some good content and tips here. I have just started kindle publishing my self. I am starting it as a full blown business. Have got 3 ebooks live. Having a bit of trouble getting the "Also brought" function happening. Would love some tips?

I ran a free promotion on 1 of my books but there is still no "Also brought" Items on the amazon page for that ebook. Wondering if i missed something. Or the 300 downloads i got from that ebook - No one got anything else after getting mine. haha

Thanks for the tips they are all fantastic.

This works best when you're marketing a Kindle ebook that has a solution to a readers problem. In other words, non-fiction. When you submit your article to places like EzineArticles.com, your article resource box should always point back to your page where you show the cover of your book with a description of why the reader would find it useful. Then if you don't sell from your own site (you should), the cover and a text link (when clicked) will take them to your book on Amazon.

Hi Dayne,

What I would do is to use one of your free promotional days (24 hrs) and offer it free. This will increase your ranking with Amazon. Then, in order to make sure that people find you, add as many relevant 'tags' as you can. You get to these tags by pressing on your book title and then scrolling down to 'Tags Customers Associate with this Product'. You can have up to 15 tags I believe.

Get as many good reviews from family and friends as you can. They can get the book free during your 'promo' period. Amazon will pick up on this and push you further up the ranking.

When you review other people's books, you get a choice to advertise one product. press the relevant tab for this and, in order for the link to go to your new book, put in the ASIN number of your book and press OK. A link will appear where you want it at the bottom of your review, so that people, when they read your review, have the opportunity to go to your book.

You can also market your book on twitter & facebook, however; be careful not to be accused of spamming.

Hope this helps.

Keith Williams (tcrown)

If you have $2.99 to spare (it was £1.88, for me), I think you'll look long and hard for a better and more comprehensive answer to your questions than this one .

I just read it yesterday, and recommend it strongly.

I would love to see what people's expereince of price points. What pricerange sells best, for books under 80 or so pages, in the 80-150 pages range, and over 150 pages? I am interested in both fiction and non fiction as I am about to promote at least one of each.

your article resource box should always point back to your page where you show the cover of your book with a description of why the reader would find it useful.