The Most Important Sales Tool for Your Kindle Books (and how to perfect it) – Part Two

By Karon Thackston. © All Rights Reserved

In part one of this series I showed you the first three steps to creating an Amazon book description that is designed to super-charge your Kindle sales. In part two, I’ll walk you through the remainder of the tips so you can start improving the performance of your Amazon listings today.

4. Use formatting as well as words.

Take some time to click through a few dozen Amazon Kindle book listings. Scroll down and just look at the descriptions. You don’t even necessarily have to read them.

Which ones catch your eye the most? If you’re like me, it’s the ones that make good use of formatting. Many simply upload the text in paragraph form. That’s hard to read. It isn’t eye friendly.

My experience is that book descriptions that incorporate bolding, italics and bullet points work best to guide the shoppers’ eyes to the information most valuable to them.

I prefer to create my book descriptions in Amazon Author Central instead of the Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard. Author Central gives you the ability to use bold, italics, numbering and bullets freely.

I make a point to include a bullet list in every description I write simply because it draws the eye and helps improve readership of that section of the description. Likewise, bolding only those most important messages can also improve the effectiveness of your description.

5. Create a call-to-action.

Even for novels and other fiction works, inserting a call-to-action points people in the right direction. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Something simple such as “Follow along as Angie turns turmoil into triumph” or – for a business book – “Buy now and start [reaping this benefit] today.”

Here’s the completed description from one of my best-selling books.

6. Include keywords.

Since Amazon functions as a search engine of sorts, you’ll want to include the same keywords in your title and book description that you used when setting up your Kindle listing. (Amazon says you don’t need keywords in your description, but I’ve found evidence to the contrary.)

Unlike with Google or Bing, there isn’t a lengthy list of dos and don’ts about keyword use in Amazon. Make it sound natural, NOT like this example:

This internet marketing e-book will introduce the ‘newbie’ marketer to free internet marketing techniques, strategies, tips and solutions that will help resolve the internet marketing promotions dilemma that most newbie marketers face online.

It is an internet marketing tool and internet marketing training course that will guide the marketer towards becoming an internet marketing specialist bringing about online success and a profitable internet marketing business experience.

Oh please! Most of those instances of “internet marketing” could be removed and it would read much better. Don’t butcher your description by inserting keywords at every possible turn. It’s simply too much and isn’t necessary. Amazon rankings revolve around much more than keywords in book descriptions, so there’s no need to ruin the message people will read for the mere hope of improving rankings.

The bottom line when it comes to Kindle book descriptions is to write your copy so people must buy your book to satisfy their curiosity about your topic. When you do that, sales will follow.

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