Improve Your Amazon Search Results

As self-published or indie authors, almost all of us rely heavily on Amazon to sell our books. Anything we can do to improve the search results for our books on Amazon is something we as authors have to consider. For many of us the biggest part of the marketing/sales battle is helping readers who would enjoy or benefit from reading our book finding the book among the millions of titles available on Amazon.

A new tool is available for sale that can help authors improve the search process for readers who use the Amazon search engine to locate books that might interest them. The tool, AK Booster, is now available for sale and allows authors to determine the best search words to use for the seven keywords Amazon allows authors to provide for their Kindle books during the uploading and publishing process.

Rather than duplicate a detailed review of the product, simply visit this review. I have purchased AK Booster and was surprised by the keywords it provided for some of my books. I experimented with a couple of my Kindle books and to my surprise, both of them moved up in the search results as a result of changing one, or in some cases, two keywords recommended by the results of AK Booster.

Current Topics of Interest in Self-Publishing

Here are a few recent blog posts I have found of interest as related to the business of self-publishing. Hope they are of interest to the readers of this blog.

Great post on J.A. Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing

Questions from Steve Zacharius, CEO and President of Kensington Publishing

From Morris Rosenthal - data on Kindle sales and Kindle borrows - Self Publishing 2.0

Prime Holiday Usage Data

Kindle Sales Comparison for Fiction and Non-Fiction sales

From Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer

Forming a self-publishing cooperative

Update on the Ingram Spark Program for Indie Authors

More on IngramSpark from Aaron Shepard

The 40% Error 

Marketing tactics and strategies from The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn

Info. on the task of marketing for authors

eBook Architects - Customer Service You Can Count On

Any author who has dealt with "author services" in an effort to self-publish their work is well aware how many companies are out there, competing for our limited and hard earned dollars. Many of those companies are best described as "wolves" looking to prey on unsuspecting authors.

Others are reputable and provide excellent service and a reasonable price. One such company is eBook Architects.

I have reviewed them in the past and posted a positive review.

Recently I needed to have two of my files sent to me again, and to my horror, I found a misspelling on the title page of one of my books. It was my last name no less.

I e-mailed the good folks at eBook Architects and asked for the files and how much it would cost to have the misspelling corrected.

Not only did they resend the files I requested at no charge, the made the correction in spelling at no charge and sent me the corrected file.

Keep in mind, I offered to pay for the correction as I considered it my fault.

If I wasn't already a loyal customer when I need to pay for a book to be converted to Kindle and ePub files, I am now.

eBook Architects could have charged me or taken their own sweet time in getting the files and the corrected file to me. I received the files within two days of my request. In this day and age, when getting the run around is the norm, it is nice to get that kind of service.