By Madeleine Dodge

Are you an Amazon author looking for a way to track your sales, connect with readers, and ultimately sell more books? You may think that once your book is posted, your work is finished. But think again! There is more you can do to manage and market your book. In our ongoing series, Amazon 101, we offer tips about how to use Amazon most effectively.

Here, we discuss the Detail Page.

Every book on Amazon has a Detail Page, or the page that customers see when they click on your book. Think of it as your book’s personal storefront. Since you can’t be there to individually tell every customer to read your book, you need your Amazon Detail Page to do the talking for you. And if your Detail Page is out-of-date, lacking information, or downright boring, it’s doing the wrong kind of talking.

New authors may feel overwhelmed by the many features Amazon has to offer. We’re here to break it down for you. Here’s what you need to know about each section of your Detail Page:

Book Description

The book description is the most important part of your Detail Page. It tells customers what your book is about while hooking their attention and making a killer pitch. Here are a few things to include that will make your description great:

• Include any awards or honors your book has won. Readers are more likely to pick up critically-acclaimed books.
• Use evocative language. Put those writing skills to use and leave your readers yearning for more. One tactic is to include a gripping sentence from your book in the first line of the description or pose leading questions to capture your audience.
• Compare your title to other best-selling authors. This is an easy way to attract fans of popular authors to your own book.
• Amazon offers one default text style. If you want to create more visual interest, use Kindlepreneur’s Book Description Generator. It will let you choose different font sizes, italics, underline, bullets and so on to your description

(Read this blog for mistakes to avoid when writing your book description.)

Look Inside

If your book is available in ebook format, you can include the “Look Inside” feature on your Detail Page. This allows readers to view select pages of your book before they purchase it. Customers like seeing a preview before they commit to the full thing, so letting them Look Inside may boost your sales and favorable reviews.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial reviews are those written by professional review institutions and are another way to give your book the credibility customers seek. Amazon gives editorial reviews their own section on your book page, but they won’t appear automatically, so you have to remember to add them to your page.

From the Author

This is where you get to write a special message to your readers. You may want to include information about your launch, new releases, awards and so on. Ideally, you will update it regularly so it includes relevant news about your book.

About the Author

If you’ve already set up your AuthorCentral page (which you can learn to do here,) then an author bio will automatically pop up in this section. If not, you can add a bio yourself.

Categories

Pinpointing the right book categories allows readers to find your book more efficiently. It’s also important in determining your ranking among other Amazon books.  (For more information about choosing categories, read our blog on the Amazon Algorithm.)

If you’ve published your book through Kindle Direct Publishing, you can choose all features of your Detail Page through the KDP website. If you published through another distributor like Ingram, you can call Amazon support and go to your AuthorCentral Book Page to designate your desired categories and get other help.  

Madeleine Dodge, a BlueInk Review Summer 2018 intern, is a Rhetoric and Media Studies Major at Lewis & Clark College and author of the children’s book Does A Giraffe Ever Feel Small?

BlueInk Review is a fee-based book review service devoted to self-published titles exclusively. For more news and writing and marketing tips, sign up for our mailing list. And be sure and visit us at https://www.blueinkreview.com./