Book Sales Rising – Let’s Continue the Climb

In May of 2015 I read two books that helped me to understand that I was marketing my books incorrectly. I submitted myself to the 7 month long course of change. I had to change my keywords for Amazon and Google; I also had to change my categories for KDE which proved to be an undertaking. (More on this in another post) I changed my book descriptions to include keywords not in my keyword search. I also used HTML descriptions that included SEO. By July I had completed all this work, but it would not be until December that I would see results. After completing a novel the author must do the above correctly the first time and then do a full book launch. But when is the best time to do a launch? In all the source material I read it stressed launching a new title from December 26th to December 31st. WHAT! Here was the reasoning. Many people get tablets for xmas and by the end of day December 25th they have it set up and ready to go, but reading a book on a tablet is new to those who may have gotten a tablet so at the launch of a book offer it free for the full 5 days to encourage new tablet owners to download your book.
As December 26th approached I thought to myself that I don’t have just one title, I have three and I marketed them all wrong for years. So I opted to re-launch two titles at the same time. On December 26th 2015 “The Boy in The Wood” and “David’s mark” was re-launched for the full five day period for free. There were nearly 1,000 new downloads making my total sales to that point of all three titles in excess of 5,000. I was happy, but would stage two be just as successful? On December 31st near the end of the day the price of both went to .99 cents. Again the sales were strong. I left the price at .99 cents for a full 5 days, at the end of which set all titles to $1.99. Since December 31st I have had continued sales of all three titles in the Kindle versions and in Prime. I am happy but wish they were stronger.
So what is lacking? Two things that I am aware of would help if readers were to follow through. First; leaving feedback is critical to authors for readers that enjoyed the book to express their views in the form of feedback. Why? Leaving your positive thoughts on the book will encourage others to purchase the book as a good choice to read.
The second point is simple, if you enjoyed the book and want to share positive thoughts simply talk about it with friends and family. Tell others what you liked and why you would recommend it as a good read.
These two very simple steps can increase the awareness of indie authors all throughout Amazon and increase their sales. In order for the Amazon indie author program to survive readers that have positive thoughts need to leave those on the site and share them with others.