Amazon

Part of my mission at the Career Indie Author is to present to you best practices that work today. This can be good ways to format your books, organize your business, or keep track of your work.

Today, I want to talk about an insanely optimized Amazon page I found. I came across an author who is doing everything right when it comes to tricking out her pages and taking advantage of every tool in Amazon’s box.

As people in the 20Booksto50K group have learned, the shortest route to success as an indie writer is to a) write a series of books on a subject where there’s a lot of demand, b) put those books in Kindle Unlimited to attract the whale readers, and c) align everything else to lure readers to your first book so that they’ll blaze through the rest.

If it works, the result will be a higher rank for your books, to a point where Amazon will help you do the heavy lifting by displaying your books to more readers, giving you a further boost in the rankings and more $$$$.

This sounds easy, but it’s not. It means writing great books and commissioning great covers that are on-brand and clearly identify the genre. It means writing a reader magnet that will encourage you to sign up for the newsletter. And it means putting all this on your Author Page, the book pages, and your website so people can find them.

Now hear me out: I’m not saying you should do this. You shouldn’t have to do anything. It’s your career. In my book, Career Indie Author (still being written at this point), I write that there’s only four things you should do:

1. Write and publish your work.

2. Create a website where potential readers can learn about your persona, your books, and where they can buy them.

3. Create an Amazon Authors Page. Most of your books will be sold through them, and you need to tell potential readers about yourself and your books.

4. When the time is right, advertise your books.

You don’t have to write in a series. You don’t have to offer a reader magnet and start a newsletter. You don’t have to do anything. It’s your career.

But conventional wisdom, backed by my knowledge of the writers who have made a success of this, show that writing in a series and funneling readers through KU works, so long as the books succeed as entertainment.

So How Do You Know Brook Wilder?

Answer: I don’t. My wife and I were looking for books on Amazon recently. She read romances, among other genres, and we came across a cover that caught her eye.

So we clicked over to Brook Wilder’s author page, and found a lot of covers just like it:

You can tell at a glance, from the model and the title, what genre this is (bad boy romances). The type emphasizes the title, but the author’s name is clearly seen. There’s an icon placing the cover within a particular series (and in fact, I just realized that the type font and colors are the same across a series as well. “Ride Rough,” “Ride Wild,” “Ride Deep” and “Ride Home” are part of one series, “Renegade” and “Redeption” another, while “Bought” and “Shackled” belong to a third series.

Let’s turn to Brook Wilder’s author page. Here, she hides behind an icon, instead of an author photo. There are a number of reasons she did this. It could be she’s a man, or not photogenic. This could be a house name for a number of writers collaborating. In any event, using the logo works.

Beneath it, instead of an author bio, there’s a URL link to her website where she’s offering a free book for signing up to her mailing list. There’s also an announcement of her next book (although it needs updating), and then there’s her bio, written with attention paid to keywords useful in searches: hot stories, bossy alpha males, sassy women, hard-bodied tattooed heroes, strong heroines, and stomach-clenching suspense.

Wilder’s book description for “Ruined Mercy” show a similar attention to detail. There’s the headline which summarizes the book. Further explanation in the next section is delivered in three sentences, and then more details in the next six.

The description is capped off with a paragraph delivering more keywords, and telling the romance reader exactly what to expect. There’s even warnings of strong language, strong situations, and possible triggering (which conversely could also be words to attract certain readers).

Clear, easy to read, on-brand and on-genre. I don’t know how this could have been improved.

Actually, it can be. Despite a beautiful looking site, it’s unfinished. There’s nothing else beyond the newsletter call to action. but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is still a well-optimized Author page and book description page.