Amazon Kindle Guide: Pick the Niche, Publish Books, Post/ Get Reviews, Scale Up
- Thread starter dbk03
- Start date
dbk03
Regular Member
- Feb 21, 2012
- 360
- 361
Here it comes
:How To Publish a Book?
In my opinion, this is the most important chapter of them all. This is because you will not learn just how to publish (upload) the book on Amazon. You will also learn how to optimize your book page in order to rank better in the internal search engine of this website. Furthermore, there are some tricks that could make your title to sell better and increase the customer trust.
How to pick the title of your book?
Most of you know the importance which is hold by the title of an article when you publish it on your website. The same importance should be given to the title of your book. There are two main reasons behind this statement:
1.The title of your book will be part of the link that your book page will get;
2.The title of your book is an important factor that the internal search engine of Amazon will take into consideration when ranking your book.
Therefore, you need to try to put your main keywords in the title of your book.
A couple of tricks which will help you in choosing the right title of your book:
- Check the titles of your competitors? book. Try to combine the keywords which can be found in several titles which are ranked on the first page, in your niche.
- Remember that the main title is not subject of copyright laws. However, the sub-title could be.
- Even if keywords are very important, try not to stuff them in the title of your book. Spamming is undesirable here, as well.
- Try to create a catchy title: highlight the problem that makes your customers search for this kind of book and also advertise the fact that you are offering the (secret/ custom/ unexpected) solution to their problem.
The cover
The cover is the second thing that your customers will see when then are checking your book. Because the first impression lasts, make it look awesome. Don?t go cheap here. If you are not really an experienced Photoshop user, avoid creating your own cover. There are plenty of guys here, on BHW, which will provide you with quality covers for reasonable prices.
However, if you decide to make your own cover, then here it is some little help:
Free and paid stock images sites:
freedigitalphotos.net
sxc.hu
freeimages.com.uk
dreamstime.com
freephotos.com
istockphoto.com
stockphoto.com
shutterstock.com
Most of them are paid, indeed. However, you could easily find the right picture for your cover (niche), thanks to the internal search engines of these websites. The prices are quite decent.
I don?t recommend you using Google Images. Most of the images that you?ll find here are copyrighted. And, I guess you already know what happens if Amazon will notice that you?re using a copyrighted image on the cover of your book.
If you still want to use the big G, just make sure you are filtering the images by using the ?free to use, share or modify, even commercially? feature (Settings>Advanced Search>free to use...).
IMPORTANT TIP: Make sure that your main keywords can be seen on the cover, when it is displayed on the search pages of Amazon. From my own experience, I noticed that customers are more attracted to click on the link of a certain book when the catchy title (as mentioned in the a/m paragraphs) can be easily spotted on the cover.
When logging into your KDP account, and starting to publish your book, there are some important sections which you should give a special attention:
Page description
This is similar to writing an article on a website. You will want this content to rank your book. You will use here all the keywords that your book will need to rank for. LSI is very important here, too. Don?t spam and don?t forget that you could write here nearly 800 words. Use this opportunity!
Just like with the common website SEO, you also have the opportunity to use headers and tags. They are also an important factor for ranking your book. Include keywords in these headers and tags
However, on Amazon, standard HTML will not work. < and > are replaced by < and > . <h1>TEXT</h1> will look like this: <TEXT>
H2 Orange headlines: <h2>TEXT</h2>
Centered text: <center>TEXT</center>
Bold: <b>TEXT</b>
Italics: <i>TEXT</i>
Underlined: <u>TEXT</u>
Insert images: <img src=?http://www.linkofyourpicture.com? align=?left?>
Ideally, you should use 200 pixels pictures. Upload it on your website, facebook, flickr etc. Copy its URL and replace http://www.linkofyourpicture.com with it.
How to format your book
At some point, this could be a quite complex process. I recommend you downloading this book because it gives quite pertinent guidance: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007URVZJ6/ . Obviously, it is not one of my books J
Things to remember:
- Always include a ToC in your book. In order for this to be an easy process, when writing/ editing your book, make sure that the titles of your chapters/ sub-chapters have been put in headers. That?s because, when pressing the ToC button in MS Word, the software will automatically create a perfect Table of Contents, based on your chapters (page numbers included)
- The ideal number of words which should be included in a kindle non-fiction book is (in my opinion) between 15 and 25k words. Of course these numbers are variable and they depend a lot on your niche. Check your competition and make a ratio between the number of kindle pages/ words that each of the top ten books has.
Save your book in HTML format. Upload it in KDP interface. Check how it looks in the Kindle previewer software (you will need to download it on your PC: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765261). Make the necessary adjustments, if needed.
No need to mention that you should insert your keywords, when requested in the KDP interface. Also, try to pick the closest category(ies) to your niche.
I recommend you to use just one pen name for publishing your books in a specific niche. That?s because you will want to create some reputation for this name. Customers will also check what others books a certain author has published. So, the more books you publish under a certain pen name, the more chances of increasing your sales will appear.
Don?t forget to insert links of your competitors? books at the end of your own. You need to do that because customers will not limit to buying just one book in a specific niche. If they click the links towards your competition, that you have inserted in your book, and, also, if they will buy one of these books, too, your title will appear in the recommended items section, on your competitors? pages
.IMPORTANT: Before running the first free promotion:
- From your Amazon author account, head to CreateSpace and setup a profile of your book. It?s about the same process that you have to do in KDP, so don?t be scared by the look of its interface. Price your book much higher than you did on Kindle. Make sure your CreateSpace account is linked to the Amazon author one. In this way, your Kindle book page will also display the option to buy the paperback. You will not receive too many sales from the paperback version but it provides two main advantages: your book looks very professional and, also, the higher price will make the Amazon page to display a huge discount next to the Kindle price. And, your customers love discounts.
- Before running a free promo, get at least 5 reviews. A free book with some good reviews already posted on it, looks more tempting.
- Also, before running a free promo, make sure you increase quite a lot the price of your book. When it will be free, your customers will see the ?You save $XX?. Again, they love to see that they are saving money
- Don?t let your book free for 5 days in a row. Make it free for 1 day. You should let some time to pass in order for the people that downloaded your book to start reviewing it. Repeat this process in 5 different days.
- I found that the best day for running free promotions is Saturday. Also, the sales are increasing on Saturday. Make it free on Saturday.
C C Z
Registered Member
- Dec 18, 2013
- 58
- 7
Hey man, I appreciate this guide. I am a 21 year old college student.
I have a few questions before I jump into this thing.
I am a very creative person and can come up with good plots and stories, and so right now I am playing with the idea of making a 100 or 200 page high quality FICTION book. I will make this book the best I possibly can, and if I start a project like that I will pursue it relentlessly.
1. Do you think I should get on with this plan or am I better off outsourcing a bunch of lower quality shorter books?
2. What is the best route for saving time and making money with this thing?
3. Can I expect 20 or 30 sales per day with one very high quality book?
I have around $5000.00 saved up from all types of sources, and I am willing to put 300-400 dollars from that into outsourcing for this project. So that's my budget.
Thank you for answering in advance. Hope everything gets even better for you.
I have a few questions before I jump into this thing.
I am a very creative person and can come up with good plots and stories, and so right now I am playing with the idea of making a 100 or 200 page high quality FICTION book. I will make this book the best I possibly can, and if I start a project like that I will pursue it relentlessly.
1. Do you think I should get on with this plan or am I better off outsourcing a bunch of lower quality shorter books?
2. What is the best route for saving time and making money with this thing?
3. Can I expect 20 or 30 sales per day with one very high quality book?
I have around $5000.00 saved up from all types of sources, and I am willing to put 300-400 dollars from that into outsourcing for this project. So that's my budget.
Thank you for answering in advance. Hope everything gets even better for you.
Last edited:
dbk03
Regular Member
- Feb 21, 2012
- 360
- 361
In my last post, I forgot to add these two important ideas:
1. Create an Author Page for each pen name you have. It will increase your professional look in your customers' eyes, which translates into more sales. Also, don't forget to include keywords in this section, too. That's because it will appear on all the pages of your books and, it will increase the chances of ranking here, when your customers are searching after your keywords.
2. Create a website for each of your niches. Link your books to this website, by writing something like: 'If you want to read more useful information on this subject, please visit my website, www.mywebesite.com). You will want to put this particular phrase right on the first page of your book, because it will be seen by customers who use the 'Look Inside' feature, and, in this way, you will get even more traffic...100% targeted and 'in-buying mode' traffic (the wet dream of every IM-er). Again, this strategy will make you look professional in your customers eyes. In the same, time, you will want to sell something related to your niche on this website. This will round up your earnings or, it could overpass them, as well. Use the monetization methods which can be found on this forum (email marketing, CPA, commissions, adsense etc.). Bringing your customers on your own website is, indeed, business-wise: the real money is where you have the highest level of control over your customers.
1. Whatever you do, don't pick the low quality path. You will end-up with a bunch of negative reviews on your book, and your sales will stop. You will loose your money. In this situation, it is better to start by writing your own book (especially if you are good at this).
2. It will sound occurred in the context of the a/m answer...but, the easiest way is to outsource the content writing
3. Yes, you can expect even much more sales from a high quality book. But, this is strictly related to your rank in a specific niche and the number of reviews you have.
$300-400 is a very good budget for this kind of project. It now depends on how you decide to get the content of your book. But, my answer to your first question remains the same. Test this market by writing your book by yourself. USe this budget for your second book. That's my opinion, though.
This week-end I will publish the last chapter of this guide: Getting reviews
From my experience, it's pretty reliable.
1. Create an Author Page for each pen name you have. It will increase your professional look in your customers' eyes, which translates into more sales. Also, don't forget to include keywords in this section, too. That's because it will appear on all the pages of your books and, it will increase the chances of ranking here, when your customers are searching after your keywords.
2. Create a website for each of your niches. Link your books to this website, by writing something like: 'If you want to read more useful information on this subject, please visit my website, www.mywebesite.com). You will want to put this particular phrase right on the first page of your book, because it will be seen by customers who use the 'Look Inside' feature, and, in this way, you will get even more traffic...100% targeted and 'in-buying mode' traffic (the wet dream of every IM-er
). Again, this strategy will make you look professional in your customers eyes. In the same, time, you will want to sell something related to your niche on this website. This will round up your earnings or, it could overpass them, as well. Use the monetization methods which can be found on this forum (email marketing, CPA, commissions, adsense etc.). Bringing your customers on your own website is, indeed, business-wise: the real money is where you have the highest level of control over your customers.1. Whatever you do, don't pick the low quality path. You will end-up with a bunch of negative reviews on your book, and your sales will stop. You will loose your money. In this situation, it is better to start by writing your own book (especially if you are good at this).
2. It will sound occurred in the context of the a/m answer...but, the easiest way is to outsource the content writing
3. Yes, you can expect even much more sales from a high quality book. But, this is strictly related to your rank in a specific niche and the number of reviews you have.
$300-400 is a very good budget for this kind of project. It now depends on how you decide to get the content of your book. But, my answer to your first question remains the same. Test this market by writing your book by yourself. USe this budget for your second book. That's my opinion, though.
This week-end I will publish the last chapter of this guide: Getting reviews
From my experience, it's pretty reliable.
Last edited:
Hello dbk03. I wanted to thank you for your excellent guide. I have a few books on KDP myself, and so far, the results have been rather modest, which made me want to give up on Kindle. Your posts, however, are encouraging me to give it another shot, and to do some things differently. I am eagerly awaiting the next part of your guide, and ever since you mentioned it, I keep on thinking about ways of getting/writing your own reviews without getting negative attention from Amazon. Thanks for letting us in on how you're doing it, this is a great share.
1. Do you have a way one of us could download a basic kdp ready doc file where we could just fill in our details or is that asking too much?
2. I want to do a series of basketball instructional ebooks...is that a waste of time? It is the only area I have real expertise, but I can try to review the niches as you suggest and learn more. Thanks again.
2. I want to do a series of basketball instructional ebooks...is that a waste of time? It is the only area I have real expertise, but I can try to review the niches as you suggest and learn more. Thanks again.
Katja Luft
Newbie
- Mar 24, 2014
- 18
- 2
Thanks for taking the time to write this up.
IMpossible
Supreme Member
- Apr 15, 2012
- 1,344
- 304
How much can you earn per kindle sale on average?
dbk03
Regular Member
- Feb 21, 2012
- 360
- 361
Don't give up so easy! Continue to publish new books, apply my a/m guidance and success will eventually come. Sorry for not posting the last part, yet. I've been busy in the last few days, but I will definitely post the chapter related to reviews very soon.
1. Sorry, but I am not sure about what are you asking here.
2. The 'basketball' keyword looks promising. If you manage to rank your books on the first spots, you could have a winner. However, take into consideration that this keyword alone is quite competitive. Therefore, you need to consider adding some longtails (drills, guide, skills etc) into your ranking strategy.
That's a very general question. Personally, I earn between 2 and 5 dollars per book. An average earning would be $3 (in my situation). But it depends on a lot of factors: niche, quality of your book, number of pages, reputation of the pen name (number of books which have been published under this pen name; the profile etc.), competition, ranking, number of sales, etc.
There is one thing that I never do: pricing my books at $0.99. In most of the cases this clearly shows that the book is a low-quality one...and buyers know this.
Thank you, guys! Please feel free to post your experiences with Kindle Publishing here, if you want.
C C Z
Registered Member
- Dec 18, 2013
- 58
- 7
Thank you for keeping the great advice coming man.
Well I decided that I should just go ahead and outsource books, until I get a steady income from them, and then I will concentrate on a big self-written fiction project. As I said, I'm in college and I'm realizing I don't have as much time as I think I did (plus I'm broke so money comes first, for now)
So I've been researching some niches these few days and today I found a niche (fiction) that looks promising.
The top four books are <10K in rankings for this keyword.
The thing is, the top three of them have 350-450 pages but the fourth one has 100 pages.
I'm thinking of paying a ghostwriter more than average to write a lenghtier book (at least 250 pages). Bad idea?
I'm pretty sure I will end up doing this but I can't lie, I am feeling a little hesitant because of the long page counts. Although the rankings look pretty.
Would you personally pick this niche?
By the way, do you interview your outsourcers through Skype or just by email? Is there a big difference?
Well I decided that I should just go ahead and outsource books, until I get a steady income from them, and then I will concentrate on a big self-written fiction project. As I said, I'm in college and I'm realizing I don't have as much time as I think I did (plus I'm broke so money comes first, for now)
So I've been researching some niches these few days and today I found a niche (fiction) that looks promising.
The top four books are <10K in rankings for this keyword.
The thing is, the top three of them have 350-450 pages but the fourth one has 100 pages.
I'm thinking of paying a ghostwriter more than average to write a lenghtier book (at least 250 pages). Bad idea?
I'm pretty sure I will end up doing this but I can't lie, I am feeling a little hesitant because of the long page counts. Although the rankings look pretty.
Would you personally pick this niche?
By the way, do you interview your outsourcers through Skype or just by email? Is there a big difference?
Last edited:
dbk03
Regular Member
- Feb 21, 2012
- 360
- 361
As promised, here it is the last chapter:
How to get reviews?
The most important factor in which regards attracting customers and increasing sales is the number of reviews that your book has. The more reviews you'll get, the more sales you'll see.
There are two main explanations here:
1.The internal search engine of Amazon is taking into consideration the number and the quality of the reviews which a specific item has, when establishing the ranking order;
2.Reviews are increasing the trust that your customers have in your book. Statistically speaking, people are trusting reviews more than classic advertising. Studies have shown that 80% of the online customers are taking the decision to buy a specific product based only on the number and the quality of the reviews that an item has.
Therefore, the activity of getting reviews is vital for your success in this business. In the same time, you need to be very careful on how you obtain these reviews.
In the beginning of my journey, I did some mistakes that led to money wasting and jeopardizing my Amazon author account, too. Here it is the NOT TO DO list:
-Don't do any reviews exchange. I know...I know....everybody recommends this, everybody is doing this...nothing wrong could happen...Amazon is too busy to check whether authors/ sellers are exchanging reviews...Except, it isn't! Do you think that these guys are stupid? Do you think they don't care about their multibillion dollar business? Don't you think that the least thing they could do would be to track authors/ sellers which are leaving reviews on each other's books/ products? As a matter of fact, I was thinking like everybody else does in this situation. I didn't believe that the reviews exchange could hurt me. And it worked quite nice in the beginning, when I published just a few books. But, when I managed to get some more books published, and became quite involved in reviews exchange programs, all the reviews that I obtained ended-up deleted by Amazon. Furthermore, I received an official email from Amazon, stating that my account is under review because of some suspicious reviewing activity. Furthermore, they reminded me that it is against their TOS to get reviews through reviews exchange programs. But I didn't quit at this point. I also tried...
-...Fiverr. It looked promising in the beginning: low priced reviews, a couple of nice gigs... So, I said...why I shouldn't give it a try? The first results weren't so promising. There are not too many US reviewers on Fiverr and most of the non-US sellers are writing the reviews in very poor English (of course, except UK, CA, AUS and other English native speakers, which are quite rare on this website). But this didn't stop me either. I started to write my own reviews and send the text to them. However, another problem appeared just after a week or so, after getting the first review from Fiverr: the stick rate was awful. The reviews posted by these people were getting deleted by Amazon very quick. I checked their accounts and they were posting only 5 star reviews on all items. Furthermore, after talking with a couple of sellers, I came to the conclusion that they are not taking any precaution measures: they don't use different real IPs, different browsers, different PCs etc. This last problem finally stopped me. I was afraid that this could make my Amazon account enter in manual review, again. So, Fiverr doesn't work here.
So, what could you do in order to obtain safe reviews?
Methods of getting Amazon reviews that don't imply costs
If you don't want to spend money on this, there are two methods. However, both of them require quite a lot of time and hard work. The bad news is that they are not very efficient, but, they might still bring some results, in the end:
1.Top Amazon reviewers.
You all know that Amazon has a top of reviewers. But, here, I will not be referring to the first 500 reviewers. It's pointless to try to contact them, because they are very busy and chances of making them reviewing your book are very low. But the rest of them (500-10000) might be interested in helping you. What you need to do, is to check their profile page and see if they have any email address through which they can be contacted. If they don't have an email address, look for their blog. If they don't have a blog either, try to search for them in Google. You will be amazed to see how easy you could find their Facebook/ Linkedin/ Google+ profile. Contact them through these platforms and ask them politely to review your book.
TIP1: in the Amazon Profile page of each reviewer there is a section in which they ca write about what they like. Most of them are not putting any info here. But, if you notice that a reviewer has strictly specified that he/ she is looking to read only romance books, don't ask him/ her to review your dog-training book
TIP2: My business partner used Zennoposter (search for it on this forum) in order to create a bot which extracted the email address, the name and the interests of all the reviewers from the a/m Amazon Top (Except top 500, of course). This piece of software is quite easy to work with and doesn't necessarily requires programming skills for creating an easy bot like the one described above. This could seriously increase your efficiency.
I did obtain some reviews through this method, but nothing impressive.
2.Reviewers that have already reviewed your competitors' books.
This method was a bit more efficient. I clicked on my competitors' books and, then, on the profile pages of these reviewers. I gathered their email addresses (where available) and send them an email, mentioning that I noticed that they reviewed a book in a specific niche. I also mentioned that I have a similar book in the same niche and I was wondering if they would accept to read and review my book, too. Of course, this method implies sending the book for free to these guys.
As mentioned above, this method proved to be a bit more efficient. I obtained some more reviews through it.
Methods of getting Amazon reviews that imply costs
The a/m two methods weren't enough for my need of reviews. So, being aware oo the fact that I cannot go back to exchange groups and Fiverr, I started to develop my own technique of posting reviews.
I noticed that the sticking rate of my reviews grows each time I was adding one of these factors: unique browsers (all tested in panopticlick.eff.org; tuned them until I lowered the uniqueness rate to 1 in 50k browsers tested so far on that website; a normal user will obtain a uniqueness rate of 1 in 4 million browsers); unique REAL IPs (not proxies! I tested them and, sooner or later, the reviews posted through machines running on proxies ended up deleted by Amazon); unique PCs (I know that I already sound a bit paranoid, but, believe me, this increases the chances of making the reviews stick), different locations ( different cities, different states) etc.
It is not recommended to log into multiple accounts with the same browser because the cookies (especially the flash ones) will reveal your identity. However, there is a major problem here: deleting or blocking cookies will look unnatural to Amazon. A normal user doesn't clear cookies all day long and doesn't bother to block them either. Therefore, logging into multiple accounts cannot be done from the same browser or PC.
Having in mind the a/m factors, I came to the conclusion that the best option for me is to actually create a network of real reviewers. Each of them is using a different PC, a different real IP, a different browser etc. In total, there are more than 20 factors which differentiate each reviewer from another. In this way, 100% of the reviews that are posted on my books, are still sticking.
It's very expensive and I invested a lot of efforts into it. But, it certainly brings outstanding results: it's safe, it's anonymous and it is seriously increasing my sales.
The End.
This was the entire guide for Kindle Publishing. As mentioned in its beginning, it is a mix of methods that I gathered from different books (WSO's) and combined with my own experiences.
It's a quite long process and it requests a lot of efforts from your side. However, I found it to be very remunerative.
For any question you might have, don't hesitate to write in this thread.
Good luck with your Kindle Publishing journey.
How to get reviews?
The most important factor in which regards attracting customers and increasing sales is the number of reviews that your book has. The more reviews you'll get, the more sales you'll see.
There are two main explanations here:
1.The internal search engine of Amazon is taking into consideration the number and the quality of the reviews which a specific item has, when establishing the ranking order;
2.Reviews are increasing the trust that your customers have in your book. Statistically speaking, people are trusting reviews more than classic advertising. Studies have shown that 80% of the online customers are taking the decision to buy a specific product based only on the number and the quality of the reviews that an item has.
Therefore, the activity of getting reviews is vital for your success in this business. In the same time, you need to be very careful on how you obtain these reviews.
In the beginning of my journey, I did some mistakes that led to money wasting and jeopardizing my Amazon author account, too. Here it is the NOT TO DO list:
-Don't do any reviews exchange. I know...I know....everybody recommends this, everybody is doing this...nothing wrong could happen...Amazon is too busy to check whether authors/ sellers are exchanging reviews...Except, it isn't! Do you think that these guys are stupid? Do you think they don't care about their multibillion dollar business? Don't you think that the least thing they could do would be to track authors/ sellers which are leaving reviews on each other's books/ products? As a matter of fact, I was thinking like everybody else does in this situation. I didn't believe that the reviews exchange could hurt me. And it worked quite nice in the beginning, when I published just a few books. But, when I managed to get some more books published, and became quite involved in reviews exchange programs, all the reviews that I obtained ended-up deleted by Amazon. Furthermore, I received an official email from Amazon, stating that my account is under review because of some suspicious reviewing activity. Furthermore, they reminded me that it is against their TOS to get reviews through reviews exchange programs. But I didn't quit at this point. I also tried...
-...Fiverr. It looked promising in the beginning: low priced reviews, a couple of nice gigs... So, I said...why I shouldn't give it a try? The first results weren't so promising. There are not too many US reviewers on Fiverr and most of the non-US sellers are writing the reviews in very poor English (of course, except UK, CA, AUS and other English native speakers, which are quite rare on this website). But this didn't stop me either. I started to write my own reviews and send the text to them. However, another problem appeared just after a week or so, after getting the first review from Fiverr: the stick rate was awful. The reviews posted by these people were getting deleted by Amazon very quick. I checked their accounts and they were posting only 5 star reviews on all items. Furthermore, after talking with a couple of sellers, I came to the conclusion that they are not taking any precaution measures: they don't use different real IPs, different browsers, different PCs etc. This last problem finally stopped me. I was afraid that this could make my Amazon account enter in manual review, again. So, Fiverr doesn't work here.
So, what could you do in order to obtain safe reviews?
Methods of getting Amazon reviews that don't imply costs
If you don't want to spend money on this, there are two methods. However, both of them require quite a lot of time and hard work. The bad news is that they are not very efficient, but, they might still bring some results, in the end:
1.Top Amazon reviewers.
You all know that Amazon has a top of reviewers. But, here, I will not be referring to the first 500 reviewers. It's pointless to try to contact them, because they are very busy and chances of making them reviewing your book are very low. But the rest of them (500-10000) might be interested in helping you. What you need to do, is to check their profile page and see if they have any email address through which they can be contacted. If they don't have an email address, look for their blog. If they don't have a blog either, try to search for them in Google. You will be amazed to see how easy you could find their Facebook/ Linkedin/ Google+ profile. Contact them through these platforms and ask them politely to review your book.
TIP1: in the Amazon Profile page of each reviewer there is a section in which they ca write about what they like. Most of them are not putting any info here. But, if you notice that a reviewer has strictly specified that he/ she is looking to read only romance books, don't ask him/ her to review your dog-training book
TIP2: My business partner used Zennoposter (search for it on this forum) in order to create a bot which extracted the email address, the name and the interests of all the reviewers from the a/m Amazon Top (Except top 500, of course). This piece of software is quite easy to work with and doesn't necessarily requires programming skills for creating an easy bot like the one described above. This could seriously increase your efficiency.
I did obtain some reviews through this method, but nothing impressive.
2.Reviewers that have already reviewed your competitors' books.
This method was a bit more efficient. I clicked on my competitors' books and, then, on the profile pages of these reviewers. I gathered their email addresses (where available) and send them an email, mentioning that I noticed that they reviewed a book in a specific niche. I also mentioned that I have a similar book in the same niche and I was wondering if they would accept to read and review my book, too. Of course, this method implies sending the book for free to these guys.
As mentioned above, this method proved to be a bit more efficient. I obtained some more reviews through it.
Methods of getting Amazon reviews that imply costs
The a/m two methods weren't enough for my need of reviews. So, being aware oo the fact that I cannot go back to exchange groups and Fiverr, I started to develop my own technique of posting reviews.
I noticed that the sticking rate of my reviews grows each time I was adding one of these factors: unique browsers (all tested in panopticlick.eff.org; tuned them until I lowered the uniqueness rate to 1 in 50k browsers tested so far on that website; a normal user will obtain a uniqueness rate of 1 in 4 million browsers); unique REAL IPs (not proxies! I tested them and, sooner or later, the reviews posted through machines running on proxies ended up deleted by Amazon); unique PCs (I know that I already sound a bit paranoid, but, believe me, this increases the chances of making the reviews stick), different locations ( different cities, different states) etc.
It is not recommended to log into multiple accounts with the same browser because the cookies (especially the flash ones) will reveal your identity. However, there is a major problem here: deleting or blocking cookies will look unnatural to Amazon. A normal user doesn't clear cookies all day long and doesn't bother to block them either. Therefore, logging into multiple accounts cannot be done from the same browser or PC.
Having in mind the a/m factors, I came to the conclusion that the best option for me is to actually create a network of real reviewers. Each of them is using a different PC, a different real IP, a different browser etc. In total, there are more than 20 factors which differentiate each reviewer from another. In this way, 100% of the reviews that are posted on my books, are still sticking.
It's very expensive and I invested a lot of efforts into it. But, it certainly brings outstanding results: it's safe, it's anonymous and it is seriously increasing my sales.
The End.
This was the entire guide for Kindle Publishing. As mentioned in its beginning, it is a mix of methods that I gathered from different books (WSO's) and combined with my own experiences.
It's a quite long process and it requests a lot of efforts from your side. However, I found it to be very remunerative.
For any question you might have, don't hesitate to write in this thread.
Good luck with your Kindle Publishing journey.
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masterpuff
Newbie
- Nov 11, 2012
- 4
- 0
Thank you for this great thread! I would like to know how do you manage to get the most downloads in the 1 day free-promo sessions?
radiant13
Power Member
- May 19, 2010
- 794
- 423
Op, just had to tip my hat off to you for the fantastic effort you've given forth in this epic thread.
I had contemplated this method last year but decided it was going to be too difficult for me to implement. You've inspired me to give it a shot again. I have a somewhat serious case of writer's block so writing anything do not come easy for me. But I see that you're recommending outsourcing the writing part of it as the way to go, so I'll try it.
Thanks again for your contribution.
I had contemplated this method last year but decided it was going to be too difficult for me to implement. You've inspired me to give it a shot again. I have a somewhat serious case of writer's block so writing anything do not come easy for me. But I see that you're recommending outsourcing the writing part of it as the way to go, so I'll try it.
Thanks again for your contribution.
dbk03
Regular Member
- Feb 21, 2012
- 360
- 361
How are the prices in this niche? If they are a bit higher (like between $5 and $10), then you could publish a less lengthier book and price it below $5. If all of them are priced below $5, then you need to find a subject which is related to this niche but has not been 'touched' yet. In this way, you can come up with less pages in your book and still have chances to sell it properly.
The thing about 1 day free promo is related to the fact that there is only one or two days/ week when the sales are at a maximum level. During these days Amazon receives the highest amount of traffic in a specific niche (I know it sounds awkward, but believe me it;s just like that). Therefore, you need to run free promotions only during those days, so that you could register the highest amount of downloads. In all my niches, the best day to run a free promotion is Saturday. But, don't forget to apply all the techniques, that I advised you, before running a free promo ( price the book higher on Createspace, price it higher on Amazon before making it free etc.).
Outsourcing is a great idea, especially in your situation
Also, I forgot to add the following quotation at the end of my guide, but I think it fits perfectly here:
"You will fail only if you stop writing" - Ray Bradbury