I recently received this question from an author:
I have three books published in the Amazon Kindle store. Sales have been okay, but they have slowed in recent months. What can I do to make more sales?
There are several things that can increase book sales, but I am just going to look at a couple of things you may not have considered.
First, the more books you have, the more books you can sell. Writing and publishing more books can help you to sell more. One reason is obvious: more books available means that you have more to offer customers. But there is another reason: Amazon rewards newness. Publish new books and they will be more visible on Amazon. As the new books start to sell, that makes your older books more visible, too.
Not ready to publish more books? Publish the ones you have in more places. Here are three simple ways:
Publish your current ebooks in more stores. Most ebook stores do not use the same format as the Kindle store, but if you have your original file in Microsoft Word or a format readable by Microsoft Word, you can upload that file to Draft2Digital. They will take it from there, formatting your book and putting it in the stores you choose. There is no charge to get started, but D2D will keep about 10% of the retail price when you make sales. In my opinion, it is worth 10% for D2D to handle all of the uploading and accounting.
Publish your ebooks as print books. Amazon’s CreateSpace is an easy way to create print versions of your ebooks. This is a little harder than putting your ebooks in more stores, but it can definitely be worth it. Font choices and other layout issues matter do not always matter with ebooks, but they do with print books. Your book has to be formatted the way you want it look when printed. Fortunately, CreateSpeace has a lot of free resources to help you get your book the way you want it. (I don’t recommend that you pay them to format your book, but that is also an option.)
Create audio versions of your books. Amazon makes this easy with ACX. You can create and upload an audio version yourself, or you can hire one of the many voice artists available on the site to produce the audio version for you. Some charge by the finished hour, so if your ebook is four hours long, you would pay them their hourly rate times four. Others will work on a revenue share model, where you share royalties with them.
Ebooks are popular, but there are lots of people who prefer print or audio. Making your books available in different formats can multiply your sales. Additionally, having your books available in multiple formats gives them more credibility.
Want to sell more books? Have more books available for people to buy!
