Once you have your book listed on your KDP dashboard and it’s live on Amazon, you can carry out some basic maintenance tasks on a regular basis to give your book a chance to shoot up the rankings.
Format
KDP offer Kindle, paperback and hardback options, and you can create an audiobook via Amazon’s ACX platform. Ideally, your book should be available in all formats.
Subtitle and Description
Give your book a subtitle and description containing the keywords that you’re targetting. One way to look into this more is to investigate similar books on Amazon and how they’re listed via an Incognito Window on Chrome so the algorithm doesn’t know your browsing history.
7 x Keywords
Play with the seven keywords you can list on the KDP dashboard. Again, use an Incognito browsing window and start typing into the Amazon Kindle search bar to see what phrases and words people commonly search for. Your seven keywords can be individual words or phrases combining a few. Experiment, dabble and check your rankings and where you appear on the search pages in a few days to see what’s working.
Categories and Rank
Select your favourite two categories in the KDP dashboard and make sure to contact KDP to request that your book is also listed in up to eight other relevant categories. This tends to happen organically anyway but you can make a specific request. Keep an eye on where your book is appearing and where it’s doing best, and go back and tweak your subtitle, description and keywords as necessary.
Price
Experiment with price and consider running a Kindle Select promotion and possibly some low cost paid for promotions with sites such as https://bookrebel.com/ and https://www.freebooksy.com/.
General Housekeeping
Once you have more than one book, make sure you claim all your titles on your Amazon Author profile and other profiles such as Goodreads and Bookbub. You also need to make sure the Also By pages in your books are up to date and have a link to the next book at the end of each of your Kindle books to make it easy for your readers to find them.
Further reading
If you’d like to learn more about all this, check out https://kindlepreneur.com/
If we list your books on your behalf and you’d like us to do some dabbling with your Amazon listing, give Gillie a call on 07970 065628 or email us to arrange a catch up.
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