NOTE: this won’t automatically boost sales, which depend on visibility and conversion. This helps with the first part, but you need to test to make sure your conversion stays the same or improves (generally, it will, because you want to be specific right off the bat – people won’t read your description unless they ALREADY know what kind of book it is).
As I mentioned earlier, most creative people struggle with procrastination, anxiety or creative production in general. It’s REALLY important to identify the true causes of artistic resistance, so in the next email I’m going to tell you why you should procrastinate more, why done is better than perfect, how to embrace failure, a simple trick to stop feeling guilty about not being more productive. I’ll also tell you how to get a million eyeballs on your project.
“Everybody else is doing it…”
A final thing I need to mention, as of now Amazon requires your subtitle and title to match your book cover, so I recommend getting your book covers without your subtitle or tagline, so you can update them quickly to add subtext that matches your book info on Amazon. Even though they can’t check easily and many people still break this rule, you should be careful. I experiment with strategies all the time to find what works. Inevitably, scammers will take effective strategies and abuse them, until Amazon is forced to make new rules to combat unethical behavior. For instance, in early 2018 Amazon took legal action against some authors who were making multiple-six figures by “stuffing” their KU books with many recycled books to boost page reads.
In specific cases, the waters can be murky: certain publishers can circumvent the rules without technically breaking Amazon’s terms. In general, I’m against finger pointing and being quick to assume intentional malice, as opposed to accident infraction (I know a lot of “legit” authors who were penalized after running completely acceptable, mainstream promotions; and new authors will often pay anybody who promises results without fully understanding the methodology). You need to learn the rules and be careful – that said, Amazon changes quickly: I have lots of content on my site that is outdated and what used to be clever marketing is now against the rules. It can be hard to keep your books updated, especially since Amazon doesn’t broadcast changes and there’s a lot of guesswork involved in why certain books outperform others.
Make sure you join my book marketing group to stay up to date.
