The ULTIMATE Guide to KDP How to Succeed on Kindle Direct Publishing

The ULTIMATE Guide to KDP How to Succeed on Kindle Direct Publishing The Ultimate Guide to KDP: How to Succeed on Kindle Direct Publishing What do Andy Weir and Luke Jennings have in common? Not much - at least until self-publishing through Amazon changed their lives. Jennings, with his Booker Prize nomination, already belonged in the writerly mainstream. Weir, on the other hand, wrote code before he ever wrote novels, learning C as a teenager to work with combustion researchers.Since then, both have released books through Amazon’s self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. Jennings’ novella, Codename Villanelle, became the basis for the acclaimed BBC thriller Killing Eve. Weir, meanwhile, saw his first novel, The Martian, turned into a Matt Damon blockbuster by the same name.Amazon turned a journalist and a programmer into international publishing sensations. Want to succeed on KDP like they did? Let’s take a look at everything you’d need to do to make this powerful sales platform work for you. Before we're done, we'll turn the killer book you wrote into a self-published bestseller . How do you turn the book you wrote into a self-published bestseller? How to sell ebooks on AmazonYou’re here because you want to sell as many copies of your book as possible. You might think that’s easier said than done. But truthfully, the formula behind making book sales is simple: Traffic x Conversion = Sales.Traffic gets eyeballs on your book, while conversion turns those gawkers into buyers. On its own, traffic does nothing for your bottom line. Every internet-user in California could find your book page in the same afternoon, but their 18 million clicks will only frustrate you if none of those virtual window-shoppers turns into an actual shopper. On the flip side, you might have a book page so bewitching that everyone who finds it compulsively mashes the orange buy button. But if only three people ever stumble on your page, your black-magic conversion rate still only nets you three sales.Both factors go into making sales. But on Amazon specifically, conversion is more important. You see, Amazon, on top of being a search engine, is also a book recommendation tool. It makes and sends book suggestions to users based on their browsing and shopping history. Most huge Amazon success stories happened because, at some point, Amazon started marketing their book for them. So how can you get them to do the same for your book?Well, Amazon has the same goal as you: selling books. The more books they sell to its users, the happier they'll be. So when their algorithms have a choice between promoting two books with a similar sales history, Amazon will naturally favor the one with greater on-page conversion. They know the extra traffic they send to that book page will turn into more sales than the other book.As a result, one of the worst things that can happen to an author on Amazon is to get a lot of traffic with very poor conversion. This will immediately flag the book to Amazon's algorithms as a "loser," and it'll never get recommended.So in short, on Amazon, conversion is even more important than traffic which is why you must, first and foremost, focus on optimizing your KDP book's Amazon product pages.Optimizing your KDP book’s Amazon product pageNow, let’s talk about how you get the sky-scraping conversion rate of your dreams. Youà ¢â‚¬â„¢ll need an Amazon product page that tempts viewers into hitting â€Å"Buy now with 1-Click.† Remember that workplace cliche about dressing for the job you want and not the job you have? While we don’t recommend aping your boss’s favorite suit, this principle does apply to maximizing conversion on your product page.To be a bestseller, your book should look like a bestseller. That means dressing your words up in the right packaging, so they seem worthy of book club adulation and blogosphere hype. To achieve that, you’ll need to optimize your product page with three things:A polished cover;A punchy description; andBook reviews.As a bonus, set up an author page on Amazon Central with a bio that tells your story as engagingly as possible.1. Create a polished coverSay I'm a bookworm shopping for my next read. As a huge fan of Ender’s Game, I want something in the same vein, so browse around the Kindle Store. Do you know how many books there are in that Military Science Fiction category? More than 20,000.A lot of these might be self-published, but a good number of them also come from traditional publishing companies. These industry behemoths have four-figure design budgets and will producing pixel-perfect book covers. 3. Leverage your existing audienceThis one’s pretty obvious. If you have an existing audience - whether that’s a sizable mailing list, thousands of Twitter followers, or a horde of disciples who follow you wherever you go - let them know about your book.Unless, and we can’t stress this enough, your existing audience doesn’t read in your genre. Make sure you don’t t pollute your Also Boughts!4. Cross-promote with other authorsA great way to reach new readers is to cross-promote with other authors.   Plenty of indie authors do that through newsletter swaps: you promote their new release to your mailing list, and they do the same for you when you launch your book.Of course, this only works if you have a mailing list. So if you don’t, you know what you should do next.5. AdvertiseAnother sure-fire to reach new readers? Leverage the three main advertising platforms that have proven successful for authors selling their books:Facebook advertising : take our free course here;Amazon advertising: yep, we also have a free course for those;Bookbub advertising: I’ll let you guess where this link will take you.Amazon ads can be pretty effective at providing a solid baseline of sales - even at full-price. But Facebook and BookBub will work much, much better if your book is discounted (or free), and they are also a lot easier to scale.If this is your first time publishing a book, don’t worry: you don’t need to do all these things. You just need to plan your launch well, and try at least some of these tactics.And remember, if you want an experienced professional to help you along the way, we’ve handpicked specialist book marketers on Reedsy who do just that. So don’t hesitate to get in touch and ask them for a quote!Have you joined the ranks of indie authors publishing through KDP? What do you wish you’d known before you started? Tell us about your experiences or drop some pearls of wisdom be low!