How to make your #Amazon book landing page look awesome #WriterWednesday #AmWriting

How your book landing page looks is vital to book sales. In a bookstore, potential buyers spend an average of eight seconds looking at the cover and only fifteen seconds reading the back cover before deciding to buy. These times are even shorter when it comes to browsing at an online store such as Amazon. Can you say EEK? Today’s blog concentrates on the actual look of the landing page and not how to make the actual text compelling for readers. (Stay tuned for that)

Have you ever seen a book description on Amazon full of different fonts and bold and wondered how in the heck it was done? I don’t know about you, but I’ve tried to make my blurbs exciting with different bells and whistles, but the changes never were visible. Until now. My first mistake was changing the blurb via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. I’d go to my bookshelf in KDP, click on edit eBook details, and then wait a day or two for the changes. Not only was it a pain in the butt, but changing details in KDP makes me nervous. What if accidentally hit unpublish (not possible by the way) or change the price to $2,000,000 (probably impossible as well)?

Luckily, there’s a simpler way to change your book description. Author Central. Just log into your author central account and go to the book tab where you’ll find all of your books listed. (N.B. I self-publish and have automatic access to Author Central. If you are traditionally published, you may need to ask for access.)

Click on the book you are changing. This will bring you to the book’s landing page. In order to make changes, click on editorial reviews.

You can now make changes to the book’s description to make it POP by using bold, italics, and underlines, etc. Click on the edit box next to product description and a box will pop up. You can compose or edit html. I’ve found that only by using html am I able to use bold and italics and special fonts. As I’m not a programmer, I use a word to html converter (this is the one I use).

If your novel has different formats (kindle, paperback, hardback, etc.), make sure to change each version as the changes do not automatically carry over to each version. You may find you have several paperback versions. Don’t curse out Amazon (as I do), but take a deep breath and change each version.

That’s it, folks! Now, I’m off to make revisions to my books. All sixteen of them. Pfff…