Getting Technical: SEO Optimisation & Other Tactics.

It’s all about tactics.

As a self-published author, I rely on my own marketing and communication skills to get my work out there – no one else is writing a strategy for me. With this in mind, I’ve been trying a few different tactics of late to increase the downloads of my eBooks from Amazon. Here are a few of the things that have worked for me:

– Getting a great book cover: I let my original eBooks loose on the world with self-made covers. Once I started to get decent covers designed, more downloads started flowing. You can still see one of my original designs here on Qan’s Adventure (it’s a fantasy short story set in the Empire. Feel free to check it out!). The new covers are infinitely more engaging.

– Working on my book descriptions: I researched what makes an engaging description, and adjusted my book descriptions to fit these parameters. Again, this led to a small bump in downloads.

– Building an effective social media presence: Having a great Amazon page for your book isn’t enough – you need to get people to that page. I recently passed 10K followers on Twitter (yay!) and have found this to be a great channel to drive downloads and sales. I don’t push my work relentlessly, but I do remind people that I write, and tweet about writing regularly.

The thing is, I’ve recently seen a plateau in my free eBook downloads and sales of The Vanishing Villa. I had a minor breakthrough while listening to a podcast where another self-published author suggested using keyword phrases rather than individual keywords in the Amazon KDP keyword section. So, I dutifully changed up a few of my words to be sentences. The verdict? Well, so far it appears to be working – I’ve seen about a 25% jump in downloads, especially on Amazon.co.uk. I’ll be adjusting words and phrases over the next few weeks, and will report back on my success!

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