Amazon and Vendor Central

it is important to make the most of your Amazon listings.  As you know, the percentage of book sales that goes through Amazon is very high.

Here is some helpful information about making your Amazon listings more robust.

Because Amazon is such a powerful presence in today’s book selling environment, you should be using all four of these tools to market your books – all of which are FREE:

1. Amazon Book Listing Pages
2. Publisher & Vendor Guides
3. Search Inside the Book
4. Amazon Connect

We encourage you to leverage all of Amazon’s publisher-facing features to enhance your sales.  Let’s start with your book listing pages – the cornerstone of the Amazon book selling engine.

Because we are a Publisher with an active sales force and agreement in place with IPS (Ingram Publisher Services) are included in the IPS umbrella. The advantage of this inclusion is more consistent and manageable order flow, consolidated reporting through IPS, and inclusion in Amazon’s Automation & Personalization basic merchandising package. Through the Automation & Personalization package, each title receives an opportunity for a single new product e-mail as well as 24-7 title merchandising inclusion.

Amazon Book Listing Pages
Here is how to add information to a book’s page on Amazon:

• Go to your title’s Title Page
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and select “Visit Our Help Department”
• Under “Publisher & Vendor Guides,” select “More”
• Under “Related Topics,” select “Books”
• Select “Add Descriptive Content”

You can now enter marketing-oriented information about your book, such as:

• Description.  You can cut-and-paste data from the “Book Description” section of your author questionnaire or rewrite as necessary (300 words/2,400 characters).
• Publisher’s Comments.  If you can help us help you, we can write this together (1,000 words/8,000 characters).
• Author Comments.  As the author can provide some personal comments here about the genesis of the book or why it’s an important project for him/her (250 words/2,000 characters).
• Author Bios.  These can be taken directly from the author questionnaire or rewrite as necessary (500 words/4,000 characters).
• Table of Contents.  Insert a list of chapters here, but don’t include leader dots or page numbers; a numbered list of chapters is ideal (1,000 words/8,000 characters).
• Inside flap copy (1,000 words/8,000 characters).
• Back cover copy (1,000 words/8,000 characters).
• Reviews.  You can include up to 5 review snips here, to include the source and date.  Besure to provide author and publication in the “source” box (20 words).
• Excerpt/first chapter.  This can be the Introduction, Preface, Foreword/Afterword, or sample chapter.  You may use a Word or PDF file here.

Search Inside the Book
We’ve got you covered here as well via Ingram Digital Services via their CoreSource solution. It takes a few weeks after we finalize the book.

AmazonConnect (recap – see original post here)
AmazonConnect is a highly targeted blog where writers can post messages directly to their own book pages and individual blog page, as well as to the Amazon Daily of their customers.

This is how you sign up for AmazonConnect:

• Go to Vendor Central home
• Click on the “More” link
• Click on the “Books” link
• Click on the “AmazonConnect” link
• Click on the “AmazonConnect” link to learn more about the program

Consider yourself aware!