The majority of the books sold by Medusa's Muse are sold via Amazon.com, so on day one of my marketing my book more effectively challenge, I focused there. I quickly discovered that Amazon is still the mysterious, controlling behemoth it appeared to be when I first started publishing books two years ago. I couldn't find a how-to or any kind of guide, so I updated my profile by trial and error.
After signing in, I clicked on "Terena's Amazon.com," then selected my profile. I uploaded a photo of me from the the What You Need to Know to be a Pro photo shoot, one of the top three we debated to be on the cover of the book, but wasn't the one we chose. I updated my bio and interests, added a list of favorites, and wrote a couple of reviews. but then I realized that although updating my profile was good to do, none of the information was appearing on my book page. Why am I spending all this time updating a profile that is basically there just to show off my reviews?
I noticed on Pete Masterson's page (I reviewed his book, Book Production and Design, which is fabulous, btw) there was a link to an Author Page. His was blank, so I went to my friend Jody Gerhman's Amazon page for her novel, Tart (also a fabulous book) and clicked on her Author Page. Scrolling down her page I found the link to make my own author page.
The process was quick and easy, but it takes up to 7 days for the profile to be "verified," so I can't post the link to my author profile yet. When it's finished, I'll let you know. This is a beta feature, which means it's new and may still have some kinks, so I'll also let you know how the feature is working and what problems I run into. One problem I found was that Amazon wouldn't let me use the word "ass" in my bio. Instead, I had to write the title of the punk book as "Punk Rock Saved my A**." I wonder how much of an issue it will be when the book launches.
Lastly, I contacted Amazon to upload text for the "search inside" feature, and requested more information about allowing my books to become Kindle books. We'll see how that process goes.
The next phase of the marketing on Amazon challenge is to post reviews of every single book I listed in the resource guide of What You Need to Know to be a Pro as well as the publishers/writers who provided advice in the book. This could take a while, and I already sacrificed writing time for navigating Amazon. But as my muse said, why did I publish my book if I didn't plan on selling any copies?
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