Archive for Amazon Marketing
Create a Private Amazon Store on Your Facebook Page
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I’m excited today and couldn’t wait to share this with you. I always get this way when learning to do something for myself that I thought I couldn’t handle and would have to be outsourced for hundreds of dollars.
Yesterday I learned how to add a new page tab to my Facebook Page. It’s a gorgeous Amazon bookstore selling right from my author Page, Books by Aggie.
Good friend and social media expert Phyllis Zimbler Miller, of Miller Mosaic, posted directions how to use your Amazon Associates aStore to create the inline frame code to place in your Facebook Page’s Static HTML: iframe tabs app.
No, Really!
Now don’t run away. I purposely made that sound as geek speak as possible (though I don’t speak the language myself) just to get the point across that it is so much simpler than it sounds. If I can do it you can do it. BTW: If you don’t have an Amazon Associates account create one now.
Before you’re ready to follow Phyllis’ instructions you need to do one thing. In Facebook do a search for Static HTML: iframe tabs and click on Add Static HTML to a Page. I’ve done the search for you. Just click here. You’ll need to be logged into Facebook.
Now you’re ready to follow Phyllis’ easy instructions found at her blog, Internet Marketing: How to Successfully Market on the Internet No Matter Your Business or What You Know. You can read the directions at “Amazon Opportunities for Book Authors.” And before you know it your bookstore will be in place. And with each sales you’ll earn affiliate monies through your Amazon Associates account.
Scroll to the end for large screenshots of mine and Phyllis’ FB bookstores and more.
And Now This is All I See?
You’ve made it through and are breathing a sigh of amazed disbelief when disaster strikes – but not really. When the page tab is all done and in place don’t be shocked when you can’t even view it. The app’s icon shows up in your bar of page tabs right under your cover image, as shown in the screenshot below. But when you click on it all you see is the code you entered, as shown in the screenshot above. This is because you are the page owner.
No, you did nothing wrong. Just click the Preview button and you’ll see what visitors see, a beautiful store with shopping cart, similar items lists, an about page and more. (See large screenshots at the end of this post)
I’ve included a bunch of juicy screenshots throughout so you can see just what you can have on your very own Facebook Page as soon as you finish. And please don’t be too intimidated to even start. You really don’t have to be a techie to do it.
And You Don’t Have to Stop With FacceBook:
Social Media Posts, Custom Icons, Foreign Bookstores…
You, like me and Phyllis, can go on to add your bookstore to websites, etc. Even post the links throughout your social media that click straight through to your own private bookstore. Click on my direct link in the screenshot below to start shopping at my store right now. The screenshot is from a Facebook post.
Phyllis used the Static HTML: iframe tabs app to create three identical bookstores for the three countries where she sells a lot of her books. Check it out. Her three page tabs are circled in red below.
After I added my own bookstore page tab, I too wanted to replace the ugly default icon that comes with the app, like Phyllis did with those clever country flags. So I grabbed a screenshot of my bookstore and shrank it very tiny. The app requires exactly 111 x 74 pixels. When you edit the settings as shown in the screenshot below, the dialog box will tell you the required size. You’ll need a photo editing program to do this, but there are free ones online if you don’t have one.
Now I was getting into this! It was fun to thumbnail a screenshot of my bookstore to use as its page icon. When it was ready, from my FB Page I clicked Admin Panel in the upper right next to my cover picture, and then Manage, and then chose Edit Page. On this next page I clicked on Apps and edited the settings of my Static HTML: iframe tabs app as shown in the screenshot below.
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I can’t wait to see what you create.
Be sure to leave links to your work in the comment box below.
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This is the bookstore page at Promotion a la Carte Blog. And I can change the colors of any of my bookstores anytime
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Attend 20 Workshops Free at the 4th Annual Digital Publishing Virtual Summit
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I’m extremely honored to be teaching with such an esteemed list of book marketing experts as D’vorah Lansky has gathered under her wing for this year’s 4th Annual Digital Publishing Summit.
You get to attend all 20 workshops for free, or choose those most pertinant from these categories:
- Promoting Your Message
- Book Creation Strategies (that’s where I’m teaching)
- Creating Multimedia Content
- Making Money with Your Message
Can’t make it live because of a conflicting schedule? No worries. Purchase the Full Access Pass and own them all.
But check it out for yourself to get all the details.
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Sign up now to reserve your virtual seat:
Digital Publishing Virtual Summit
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Kindle Formatting Made Easy by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
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Kindle Formatting Made Easy
Guest post by By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Recently I published some quick tips on publishing articles and books on Kindle in my Sharing with Writers newsletter and got tons of feedback, some of it from folks who said they were still worried about “the learning curve.”
They helped me to see that the little secrets I shared may have been too advanced; many writers need something that’s more A to Z. It’s so easy that I thought I’d take the worry out of for those who have been procrastinating.
Just remember, e-book readers don’t have page numbers. The pages change every time a reader changes the size of a font. If you keep that in mind, formatting is mostly intuitive. And if you want those extra little tidbits I published in the last newsletter, go to my Sharing with Writers blog where I posted it for your convenience.
OK. Here goes:
- Use Word. Save your copy as a .doc., not .docx or .rtf.
- Use a simple font, preferably Times New Roman or Verdana. 11 pt works nicely for e-readers.
- Single space your text.
- Make margins one inch all the way around.
- If your book is fiction, change the paragraph indent from .5 to .2 inches. If you write nonfiction, don’t indent at all. Put spaces between your paragraphs instead.
- Remove any headers or footers you may have. That includes text of any sort and page numbers.
- Set justification. That’s the little section in the Word ribbon at the top of your screen that lets you move text all to the left, all to the right, centered, or justified on both right and left. Most suggest you use the latter so the copy looks even on both sides.
- Don’t leave lots of space between chapters or sections. A single space is all that’s needed. In fact, Nook won’t accept more than one blank line.
- You can use formatting in your chapter headlines. Make them bold or larger but don’t use fancy fonts (type faces). Some readers (like Nook and Kindle) don’t support the ornate ones. Arial, Verdana or Times New Roman are safe bets. You can use italics, but I see no reason for the clutter. People will be reading on a screen, after all. Chapter subheads can also be given some attention with bold or larger type face but, again, don’t get too fancy.
- If your book is nonfiction, be sure you mark the headings so you can make a table of contents with them—all automated and courtesy of Word. You should be able to find the heading formatter in the Word ribbon at the top of your screen.
- Your Contents page should have live links so that readers can skip easily to the sections or chapters in your book they want to read. Use the “references” tab at the top of your Word screen to make a Contents page automatically after you’ve formatted each headline.
- You can also use caps for the first three or four words in every chapter. That helps cue the reader that he or she is in a new section or chapter.
- It is acceptable to add information about your other e-books or forthcoming ones to the backmatter of your book. Why not? Be sure to use live links to their sales pages. It’s something I often suggest to my clients. Some authors even charge for a couple of ads in the back to offset the cost of publishing.
- The first page of your e-book is your title page (or the picture of your book cover—but Kindle provides an option that does that for you). Keep it simple. But include the ISBN. If you don’t have one, Kindle will provide one for you—f r e ^.
- Here is a tip that no one seems to tell those of us who love our front matter—you know—our acknowledgments, dedications, etc. Kindle eliminates them if you leave them in the front of the book. Your e-book must start with the cover image/title page/first chapter. So I cheat. I move selected pieces of my front matter to the end of my book. I think it’s important to thank people, and think it would be a shame not to put them somewhere!
- Just repeating here. Find a few additional tips at Sharing with Writers.
- Be sure to proof read the whole book once it’s set up as an e-book. You’ve made a lot of changes, right?
Click to Buy The Frugal Book Promoter: Second Edition.
I just loaded it to Kindle and you’ll get amazing bonuses in the process!
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CAROLYN HOWARD-JOHNSON
Author Bio: Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a multi award-winning novelist and poet. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed and multi-award-winning series of books for writers, How to do it Frugally, including the second edition honored by USA BOOK NEWS, and was named Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment by members of the California Legislature. She has been an instructor for nearly a decade at the renowned UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
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Amazon Still Deleting Books and Reviews Inexplicably. Or is There an Explanation?
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Are We Unintentionally in Violation?
Are Amazon book and review deletions actually inexplicable? I’ve been following the controversy about Amazon deleting thousands of book reviews, even authors’ entire books, with no explanation to them other than that they are in violation of Amazon rules. See Reviews Accidentally Deleted by Amazon or Cover-ups and Denials? for info, links and comments from a multitude of authors starting March, 2011.
Are the Book/Review Deletions Actually Inexplicable?
Many authors have reported that despite repeated contact begging for an explanation from Amazon, they were denied. But now I’m wondering if there is an explanation, or two. I’ve spent much time researching this issue. I am absolutely the last person who can explain legal/copyright matters, but my own research has uncovered the following, if I understand it correctly.
Authors and professional book reviewers are up in arms and for good reason.
- Reviews are our life blood. There is no other way readers can find unbiased descriptions and recommendations.
- Amazon reviews are the only way to make their readers’ choice Top Rated list, which is frequented by readers to the extent a top listing there can create an instant bestseller.
- If our book is banned from being sold on Amazon we lose hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of their ingenious free book promotion.
Since I write extensively on the limitless marketing value of listing and selling our books from Amazon.com I covered this question in a section of my how-to book about using their Categories to earn bestselling status, and untold other promotional benefits not available elsewhere. The following is excerpted from Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers.
Excerpt (read that: my own humble conclusions)
Why Should I Care How to Get an Amazon Category Bestseller When They Can be a Bully?
It’s true Amazon can seem like an obnoxious giant child at times, but like it or not, readers have made it clear that Amazon is where they want to purchase books and eBooks. And like them or not, Amazon makes bestsellers out of more writers than any other site. So why not take advantage of their system that makes it possible to sell more books than nearly anywhere else?
Many in the industry have had irreconcilable differences with them. We’ve all heard the highly publicized publisher’s beefs. And I personally know authors and reviewers who have suffered ongoing injustices from some of Amazon’s automated ‘bots. These algorithms are actually set up to keep the system fair but occasionally they read things wrong. And boy howdy if they err against your book!
To cover just a few complaints, a multitude of reviewers have had hundreds of their reviews permanently deleted for no apparent reason, and met with refusal from Amazon to correct mistakes made by their own ‘bots or even be given an explanation of their offense. I posted here about one such reviewer, and at several of my online professional groups. It sparked a lot of debate.
One angry author wrote,
“Amazon accused me of posting my own review for the first book of my series and “threatened” to delete my book’s listing if I didn’t take it off. I offered them proof that I did NO activity on the day in question.
”After a lengthy dispute with Amazon, and some investigation, I discovered Amazon mines sites it is linked to and PULLED the review that was actually a ‘press release’ I emailed to several affiliate sites on the day they claim I posted it on Amazon. I again confronted them with this discovery and they backed off and my book remains listed, but the review deleted. Since then I don’t do any activity on Amazon.”
Occasionally the author/reviewer is in the wrong too because they didn’t read Amazon’s regulations, or the regulations are vague and/or nearly impossible to find as is so often the case. But whether a transgression is innocent ignorance or not when Amazon’s ‘bots detect offense anywhere online they treat them all as guilty.
Amazon owns copyright to all the reviews on their site. If they see their review reprinted in full anywhere else they will delete that review and possibly your book. But we are allowed Fair Use rights to excerpt a few lines from our best reviews. See How to Get your Book Reviewed by Dana Lynn Smith for more in depth information pertaining to Amazon’s review regulations. And I’d recommend periodically Googling it to see the newest reports and ongoing dialog.
In support of their full rights to anything written upon their site’s pages here is the Amazon help file reference to those who write the review. But this is pertinent to authors too, whether regarding reviews that we wrote about other books or readers wrote about our books.
Excerpted from Amazon’s reference file: “If you do post content or submit material, and unless we indicate otherwise, you grant Amazon a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media.” Unspoken here: or delete it without explanation.
They also prohibit: “The upload, download, or transmission of any domain names, URLs, or hyperlinks. The use of the Service for commercial purposes such as advertising, promotion, or solicitation.”
Did you catch the relevance of this prohibition to the use of our book reviews? We are prohibited from using hyperlinks & domain names, such as you’d naturally include in a press release where you quoted in full their review of your book, or say a blog post quoting a great Amazon review, etc. etc. These are all places where we are definitely reprinting it as “advertising, promotion.”
How many of us have already done something similar? There are so many ways authors can unknowingly break yet another of their regulations. When it comes to reprinting anything from an Amazon page it might be best to call and ask where to find their guidelines before doing so.
Amazon is unrelenting in their enforcement of perceived violations, whether justly or unjustly. Make sure you’ve read their guidelines thoroughly. If you still have questions, contact Amazon with them before proceeding and possibly inadvertently violating their rules.
End of Excerpt
Obviously there are many more layers to this issue. If you have any experiences that may help shed light please post them below so we can all benefit. Maybe if enough of us are talking about this online it may come to Amazon’s attention. Possibly we’ll get some answers straight from the horse’s mouth.
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What’s Up With Kindle Direct Publishing’s Select “Opportunity”?
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Unpublish My eBook From Everywhere but KDP?
What’s Up With KDP Select’s Restraint of Trade? Kindle Direct Publishing recently launched an opportunity to enroll your book in their new “Select” eBook lending library. They offer a chance at earning thousands per month by tallying the percentage of times your book is borrowed against that same percentage of their large monthly kitty.
And authors have signed up by the tens of thousands already.
The downside? You must withdraw your book from every other site, including the iBookstore, B&N and even your own website sales page, not to mention NOT selling it through Android and iPhone Marketplaces and through your own app with a built-in e-Reader.
That’s right. You can’t sell in anywhere but KDP Select through Kindle Direct Publishing.
Need I say more?
For most authors there is no need to say more. And I won’t, but I urge you to read this informative article by Smashword’s founder Mark Coker. We can always rely on Mark for great information.
Amazon Aims to Empty Competitor Shelves of Indie Ebooks by Mark Coker at the Huffington Post
I’d LOVE to hear your own opinions and thoughts in the comment box!
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How I Got Two Kindle Best Sellers by Choosing My Categories Wisely
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Do You Want a Kindle Best Seller too?
Choose Your Categories Wisely
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Today’s the Day
For some reason I woke at 5:30 a.m. and couldn’t sleep until I got online and checked my book in the Kindle Bookstore. Am I ever glad I did.
On that day my (then) new how-to book, self-published for only a little over a month, The Rewritten Word: How to Sculpt Literary Art no Matter the Genre, obtained bestseller status (top 100) in three categories at the Kindle Bookstore. (See here for info about this book winning the 2011 Global eBook award.)
This was my second book since April 2010 to each reach bestseller and top 10 status, in three categories. I took this screenshot (below) to remember this moment because status changes every 4 hours and I may not be a bestseller later today, or tomorrow. I want to help you do the same. It really isn’t hard.
Could Today be the day for YOU too?
Order the in depth book here, ebook & print here. (COMING VERY SOON!) DO NOT list another book with Amazon (print books) or Kindle (eBooks) before you read this. (The processes are different for each.) You may never never reach category best seller status. That’s right — you may not even be eligible for category best seller status without following the steps here.
This info is vital and takes a lot more thought than you’d think, though it is utterly simple and easily understood. Includes categories; one for choosing the right Kindle categories, and one for your Amazon print book categories, plus so much more information.
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Track Your Book Sales
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We all need to know how our book sales are doing. There’s not much that tops finding out we’re a bestseller in our category(s), or even better, in the overall Amazon bestseller list.
CHECK YOUR AMAZON PAGE
For those with books listed at Amazon and Kindle you can check right in the book’s sales page. Scroll down to Product Details. (Numbers 1 and 2 in the screenshot.)
Screenshot 1
- Listed first is your overall status; how your sales rank against every single book sold at Amazon in the Kindle Store and Amazon (print) Store, respectively.
- Following that your Product Details tally your category bestseller status. If you’re not a bestseller in any category this section is absent.
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BUT THERE’S MORE
In order to wage wise publicity campaigns there is much more we need to know about our sales, such as patterns. Did your cookbook sales rise at Christmastime? Did your Y/A book sales drop during summer vacation? We need tracking stats, for one thing, to access when and how to invest our publicity dollars.
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NOVELRANK
NovelRank tracks only Amazon books. They track overall print books sales not only at amazon.com, but also .uk, .ca, .fr, .de and amazon.co.jp. This also includes your Kindle book sales.
Among the many functions available at NovelRank:
- Grab the code to display your sales rank widgets
- Study charts for book sales and sales history for the week, month and year
- Compare book stats
- Subscribe to your own RSS feed alerting you every time a book sells or get hourly sales rank
- Amazon review count
- Download stats to spreadsheet
- Search twitter for mentions of your book title
- Search blogs for mentions of your title
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TITLEZ
One benefit of using TitleZ, in addition to NovelRank, is that it can find books through all publishers, including Amazon. They even listed the books published under my company, Ceilos Rojos Publishing, which publishes only me. If it has an ISBN # you can find it at TitleZ, but there may be no data attached.
Unfortunately, as of September 2009 Amazon stopped providing Kindle sales rank data via the data feed service, so TitleZ can only track your Amazon print books now.
Among the many functions available at TitleZ:
- Instantly retrieve and print historic and current sales rankings from Amazon for 7, 30, 90 days and lifetime averages.
- See how topics or titles perform over time
- Measure the competition
- Understand what’s hot
- Decide the best time of year for a new book release
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GOLDEN DATA
I really like the research/comparison function at both sites. Enter a keyword (topic) into the search bar and they’ll return a list from Amazon of the current top selling books on your topic.
You can use these searches to mine golden information. For instance, before signing a new book a publisher could use TitleZ to quickly gauge the historical success of similar, competitive books. A travel writer can identify trends in travel book sales,a marketer to determine what time of year might be best for releasing a new book on the topic at hand.
You can while away hours at this, but can’t come away without valuable information about your field. At TitleZ I entered the keyword “authorship” and was delighted when my friend Larry Brooks’, Story Enigineering, came up 13th at the rank of 2,034. And upon entering “how to edit your writing” my friend Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s book, The Frugal Editor, came up #11 and ranked 208,123. Way to go guys.
Notes:
- Many sites don’t track Barnes & Noble sales as they only update monthly and this provides little benefit.
- I’ve written to ask, but so far none of the sales tracking sites I know of can track your Amazon category sales, but all track your overall sales rank.
- Want to get quick emails listing your rankings? Set it up with Booklert.
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How to Contact Amazon With Your Problem
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Many authors get upset because they think they can’t contact Amazon. As a huge part of our marketing campaigns we’re told to make sure our books are listed there and on Kindle, but when problems arise feel abandoned because we can find no ways to contact them.
And it’s true that Amazon makes it hard to find the help sources they offer beyond emailing them. Here’s a few contact sources to alleviate our abandonment issues with the Giant!
Get Amazon to Call You
Go to this help page: http://www.amazon.com/help
Scroll down, and on the right there is a big Contact Us button.that will take you to your Sign In screen.
You must fill out the form about your query first, and then the E-mail and Phone buttons at the bottom will highlight. Chose Phone for them to call you back, or E-mail if you prefer email support.
If you chose Phone then just pick if you want them to call you right now or in five minutes.
Or Call Them Directly
If your country isn’t listed or you’re unable to take advantage of the Contact Us feature, you can call directly at 1-877-453-4512 or 1-866 216-1072. If you’re calling from outside the U.S 1-206-922-0844.
Reviews Accidentally Deleted by Amazon or Cover-ups and Denials?
Posted by: | CommentsA friend emailed me Irene Watson’s article at ReaderViews Newsletter about Nicole Sorkin’s (Pacific Book Review) who lost all her reviews on Amazon, wiped clean in an instant, and the same thing happening to an unnamed man. When I read about the predicament I called Amazon immediately. I’m an author who receives and sometimes writes reviews there so this was of great urgency to me too.
Plus I write vital industry reports about the free promotional genius Amazon has constructed and makes available to authors. I really needed to know what was going on. Especially since every time I’ve contacted Amazon about a problem they were extremely helpful through to the resolution, though admittedly I always had to wait days – weeks for that resolution. This time; not so much.
I spoke with a representative wanting to remain anonymous, who admitted having no knowledge of author or reviewers practices. And though she put me on hold a few times to consult with peers she refused every time I requested that she put me through to someone knowledgeable in this area.
After reading about half of Irene’s article to her, the representative told me the one and only reason Amazon would remove a review is if they got a complaint that it was offensive, and then they would only remove only that one review, not all reviews by that person. She even suggested maybe the reviewer removed them herself. So I asked, “Can an author/reviewer do that?” The response: I don’t know.
The conversation got frustrating as she repeated that Amazon would not have removed the reviews, and I repeating that they in fact DID. I pressed the issue that clearly these was nothing offensive and the author did not delete them herself, and that obviously Amazon deleted them, so could she please let me talk with someone who might be able to tell my why. The request was refused each time.
I asked, since she had no knowledge of the topic, where could I go to find instructions or help files about writing reviews on Amazon. Her response: there is no such thing.
I also asked about Jim Cox’s discovery (see Irene Watson’s article). Jim ran a search for the 60,000 reviews he’s done at Amazon for Midwest Book Reviews and found only 1,319. I asked what happened to the rest.
The rep said maybe there is a limit on how many reviews you can do on Amazon. I asked where I could find the official rules that explain these details. Again, she knew of no such thing.
Summary of our frustrating conversation:
Amazon denies they are on any such “rampage” and that there is no effort being made to remove anyone’s reviews. They deny ever deleting any review (unless it was reported as offensive). Yet Nicole Sorkin’s inoffensive and unreported reviews have been deleted by Amazon.
I can only conclude that they are indeed on a “rampage” as Watson suggests, or Amazon made a mistake. They deleted them and now have no knowledge of doing so; at least that is the “official” answer from their phone representative, who in the end said if I was just going to repeat the same questions she would have to hang up.
Let us know what you think,
or your experiences trying to get a problem resolved at Amazon.
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UPDATE: The problems seem to be increasing according to Watson.
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If you have been affected by reviews disappearing from your books sales page, or reviews you’ve written been pulled with Amazon refusing to tell you what are your violations, please see her article:
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Amazon Removes More Reviews: Targets Individual Reviewers and Sites Causing Authors to Become Victims
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And Joylene Nowell Butler’s post where Phyllis Zimbler Miller answers the burning question:
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