How to Market a Kindle Book

With "The Runaways" recently hitting its 750th sale, I figured I would make a post on what I've learned on marketing in the Kindle store.  Being that I'm 13 ^_^ I can't afford to go and spend a crap load of money on TV trailers and website ads all over the place like a Big 6 author could, so all of these steps do not require ANY investment of money.

While many of the big ebook authors will cite Facebook or blogging as what drives all their sales, most of them simply got lucky, so they aren't the ones we should be asking about kindle marketing for mere mortals like ourselves.  If you think I was just lucky to have almost a thousand sales in a month and a half, you are mistaken.   I spent dozens of hours doing marketing research before I came anywhere NEAR the KDP website, and I found that Facebook really won't boost your sales much, unless you are already a celebrity who already has ten million followers.  Here's why, E-Book millionaires such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke had roughly a thousand Facebook friends/Twitter Followers before they published their books.  They ended up selling several million books.  Can a thousand people buy a million books? No.  (At least not on one Amazon account)

So what is the best marketing plan?  Your best bet for selling more ebooks is to put most of your marketing inside of Amazon.  Most ebook sales come from people typing a keyword in the search box and buying the first thing that catches their eye.  The secret to selling a lot of kindle books, then, is by landing in that first page of results.

To do this, you need to use keywords in your description and your tags when going to publish your book so that it turns up higher.  Have you noticed, when you search "Epic Fantasy" the Runaways is one of the first results?  That's because I used the term in my title, description, and tags.  I have discovered that the more times you type the same keyword in the tags, the higher your book will show up.

Once your in that first page of results, you will need a good cover to catch their eye.  Good covers are often expesive, and it is not reccomended that you make your own in photoshop, as that is the death of many author's sales.  Good artists can be found for cheap and good stock photos can be found online for cheap on Shutterstock or even free on flickr and Wikimedia.  All four of the covers for my current books were homemade and attractive, so you don't have to spend money for a good cover.


There are many other aspects than can help a book sell, however I won't go over them here.  If you want to continue researching Kindle Ebook Marketing, than I highly reccomend "The Kindle Publishing BIBLE" by Tom Corson-Knowles and "Make a Killing on Kindle" by Michael Alvear.