Dave Chesson, founder of Kindlepreneur.com, stresses the importance of a book’s landing page, keywords, book cover, and book description to attract and retain shoppers on Amazon. He also advises authors to approach marketing their book as a skill and to keep practicing and learning. Dave discusses Amazon’s slow pace of updating and improving various tools and systems.
Key Points
- Dave emphasizes the importance of a book’s landing page (Amazon sales page) and suggests testing the effectiveness of the book cover by covering up the title and information and guessing what the book is about
- Dave explains the process of an Amazon shopper and how important it is to have the right keywords, book cover, and book description to attract and retain shoppers
- Dave and Lisa discuss companies cutting costs and the future of Amazon’s book selling and KDP
- Dave explains his personal workflow for publishing books on different markets and using Draft2Digital
- Dave discusses Amazon’s slow pace of updating and improving various tools and systems, including the dashboard and category system
- Dave’s advice for authors is to approach marketing their book as a skill and to not get discouraged by initial lack of success, but to keep practicing and learning
Lisa: I’m here today with Dave Chesson, who a lot of people know as the Kindlepreneur. Welcome, Dave.
Dave: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: I know I’m on your newsletter list, and I go to your website a couple of times a month to see what’s new there. Why don’t you tell us how you became the Kindlepreneur.
Dave: I grew up with dyslexia, so I never really thought I was meant to be a writer. I struggled mightily in English class. And so you go through and you think, not for me. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t like writing. I loved analyzing stories. I loved being able to teach. And so when the day came that I decided I wanted to write a book, I knew I wasn’t at a level, especially my writing style, to be able to just sit down and write anything and have it really resonate with people. So I actually started looking at the Amazon marketplace, and this was years ago, kind of when it was like a new thing to think of Amazon truly as a marketplace and as full of data and information that you could learn about the market as a whole. And so when I started to do this, I started to realize that there were all these things that were really unique to Amazon, like trying to understand why Amazon would make this book show up more often than this one. Why is it that one’s beating mine? How is Amazon sending people? And so when I started doing this, I realized that nobody else was writing about it. And so I created Kindlepreneur, which has been focused on all the things we authors can do in order not to just be authors, but also to be bestselling authors and to make those sales. And that’s really where it came from.
Lisa: What year was that?
Dave: Oh, jeepers, that had to be maybe 10, 11 years ago. And like I said back then, it was sort of like the Wild, Wild West. A lot of the ideas back then it wasn’t as competitive, so it wasn’t as necessary for authors to really understand the nuances. Hey, you got a good book. Get it up there. People will find it. Now there’s a lot more books. And so it’s funny is that even over the years, that information and that understanding just a little bit more gives authors a competitive advantage over those that don’t take the time to even look at it or read.
Lisa: Yeah, I know. I’ve been asked sometimes by people who say, I’ve put my book up on Amazon. Can you tell me how to promote it? And I take a look at it. I say, well, first of all, you should have had it edited before you uploaded.
Dave: You know, it’s interesting that there’s a lot of times where I’ll see people who say, how can I promote my, you know, the first thing I like to do is go right back to the book and look at, look at its cover, look at its information, the book description. Because what’s interesting about book marketing is there’s really two parts, okay? The first is your landing page. It’s the place where you want people to go. And in this case, it’s your Amazon sales page. Now, if your product is not good, if your landing page doesn’t convince people, if your book cover or the image of your product is bad, it doesn’t matter what else you do, you’re not going to sell well. So you really need to get that done right.
But then after you’ve done that, it’s about how do you bring people to your landing page, aka your Amazon sales page. And when you’ve done that, you start to really see that next level. So really the first thing the author should do is start by looking at their landing page.
One of my favorite tests I like to do with an author, when an author sits me down and says, okay, Dave, what should I do? And when they bring up the book, I’ll immediately cover up the title and the information. And what I’ll do is I’ll look at the book cover and just by the book cover, I’ll try to actually guess at what the book is about. Now, if I am way off, then that means there’s a huge issue with the cover. And if I’m right on, then at least you’ve got a good cover.
Now, what I mean by that is, for example, there was this one author and this book cover showed the silhouette of a woman and she was holding a gun. And you could kind of maybe tell there was a cop hat in the silhouette, right? It was like a shadow, and then it was some hot fuchsia and pink swirling in the background like a storm. And you could see the outline of the city. So this is probably about a cop. Maybe it’s a female cop. It’s probably like a sleuth detective, and she’s in the city trying to solve a mystery. And the person said, well, no, it’s an ex-detective and it’s a girl, but she’s investigating these horrendous murders. And I was like, oh, so it’s not lighthearted? They were like, no, this is actually like a slasher kind of thing. This is a mass murderer on the spree who is murdering women in gruesome ways. Well, your cover does not fit that whatsoever. Your cover looks too lighthearted. It looks like Charlie’s Angels kind of thing. And when I said that, she goes, oh, yeah, I see what you mean.
So now imagine I’m a shopper. I go to your Amazon page and I’m expecting, this is lighthearted. I start reading your book description, I’m like, whoa, that’s not what I thought this was. And I’ll back right out. So this is what I’m saying about kind of identifying problems with your book and making sure that because you as the author, you know all these things, but your market, when they’re trying to discover you for the first time, they don’t know these things. And so it’s things like that that I think are really important for authors to understand to ensure that the health of their sales page is good.
Lisa: Yes, definitely. One of the things I really love about your website is that it runs the gamut as far as you talk about writing, you talk about designing the book and you talk about selling. Oh, and then, of course, optimizing, not just selling, but optimizing your Amazon page. And there is just so much that goes into that? How much do you think depends on the book cover? How much of a percentage is the book cover versus the description?
Process of an Amazon Shopper
Dave: Well, let’s walk through the process of an Amazon shopper, and that might kind of helps. When shoppers go to Amazon, they go to the search bar and they type in a description of the kind of book they want to read. A lot of times they’ll start by saying, let’s say a detective story. And then they look at the covers and they look at the titles and they quickly see if Amazon has presented them with what they visualize as their kind of book. Okay, now, most of the time they start this. It might start with some broad phrase. And then they’re, okay, wait, I want an ex female cop detective book. And so then all of a sudden, Amazon will present them again with a list of covers and titles. And they’re looking at the covers and they’re seeing if anything interests them.
Now they might be like, oh, man, you know what? I want a slasher. So now it’s x. And usually what we do is just add a word to the phrase that exists. So that’s why you get some really crazy keyword phrases. So it’s x, Detective Cop, thriller, slasher. And now all of a sudden. So what we’re doing is we’re now judging whether the cover fits the kind of story we’re looking for.
And then we’re looking at the title, and we might see the reviews, and if there’s enough there that says, okay, this looks like my kind of book, or that book looks interesting. That’s when we’ll click, okay, and we’ll go to your Amazon sales page. And then as the shopper, we will go, and what I found is a lot of people will scroll down first and just kind of look at some of the information, like the reviews or any of the editorials. They’ll come back and if they’re still interested and it looks legitimate, they’ll click to read the book description.
The book description is that final sales point. If you have done a great job of writing a very crafty book description and it’s clear this book is the kind of book they thought it would be, it matches their expectation and it seems interesting, then they will buy. So if we go through that step quickly, we’re typing in keyword phrases at the top to figure out what it is we want. We’re looking for book covers that fit that and then we’re looking at book descriptions that fit all of that. And if somewhere in that chain you don’t have it right, you are going to lose more shoppers than you will. And when you lose shoppers, Amazon says to themselves, oh, well, this isn’t a good book to show for that because people aren’t buying, they’re not clicking. And so that’s when books start to disappear on the Amazon store.
Lisa: Do you think people pay much attention to how many stars a book gets?
Dave: Absolutely. We did a heat map kind of analysis on Kindlepreneur, looking at where people were searching on Amazon. And the number of stars is sort of like social proof. And what I mean by that is that, look, if nobody’s read this book, so there’s no review, I don’t want to be the first person to do that. Or if this book has 100 five star reviews, like, wow, this has got to be a good book, right? If it’s got 100 two stars, then, wow, why did so many people try the book when it’s clear it’s a bad book? So that would definitely affect your sales if you have like 100 two stars, right? But I’m going to be more likely to buy if I see other people have bought it and other people have liked it.
Amazon Getting Out of the Book Selling Biz?
Lisa: Well, that’s definitely true. And you’re talking a lot about Amazon specifically and of course, because Kindle is in the name of your company. But the big thing that I’ve seen lately is I talked to this one publisher and he said that because of all the layoffs within Amazon, specifically with Kindle, he said he thought that within the year Amazon would be getting out of the book selling trade. Do you think that’s true?
Dave: No, I don’t think so. The fact that Amazon has spent so much money in developing so many new, no, they’ve invested like from author advantage to they’ve invested like other smaller companies in the publishing realm, it seems as though that’s too lucrative of a model for them to just decide to ditch. It seems that they’ve put too many resources, even just recently for this to be something.
Now maybe I could see them no longer like they might start cutting some of those programs, right? If they require a certain operational cost and they’re not cutting it, they might cut it out. But to get rid of the KDP process as a whole, I think would not help the bottom line. I think it would hurt.
Lisa: They really are the biggest resource for independents. With my book, I got author copies from Amazon and I got author copies from Ingram Spark. And I actually liked the ones from Amazon better than I did the author copies I got from Ingram Spark. So I think Amazon does do a pretty good job. So I’m really hoping that they don’t quit.
Dave: I haven’t seen any signs of that. Also, if we look at history, Amazon started as a bookstore. That’s what it was at first. Their first product was selling a book. And you might say, well, things change. But Jeff Bezos still uses the same desk that he had when he first started, which is a door. It’s actually a door. And that’s out of a reminder of where they started from. So still with the leader of the company still sticking to his roots, and truly have started as a bookstore that would be huge if they got rid of it. But again, the financials don’t make sense of them cutting.
Lisa: But they have made a lot of cuts in employees and budgets and all this. So can you give me kind of a rundown about the recent changes at Amazon?
Dave: Well, I can give you some of my theories, and I think it’s supported by a lot of Silicon Valley. But if you look at all of Silicon Valley and all these large digital monsters out there, scaling was a major thing, wasn’t really about profit focus and that there was a very large increase. Of just hiring and kind of building out as many systems. And I think it’s caused a lot of inefficiencies.
And now we’re kind of coming to a time where a lot of companies aren’t looking at just scaling at all costs, that they’re looking at cutting costs. And so therefore, that’s realizing that, hey, we hired eight people to do one job. We have these parts of our system that don’t need as much.
Not to stir any controversy, but when Elon Musk took over X or bought X, he cut a very significant 80% comes to mind, of the workforce. And I was just talking to somebody. It’s very interesting that as a company, now, granted, I’m not saying leadership here. I’m just trying to say operationally, X is still working Twitter, right? It’s still working. It hasn’t crashed. And that’s very interesting. And if you look at companies across the board, they’re doing that. So Amazon is definitely looking at cutting costs. I think profitability is a little bit more of a concern, but I think there’s just too much revenue coming in from books. And I don’t see it being such a costly endeavor to maintain that they would want to just get rid of the entire thing. That would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Lisa: So Amazon bookselling won’t go. KDP won’t be going away. But still, do you encourage authors to sign up with Ingram Spark and Draft to Digital and those kind of services?
Recommended Publishing Process
Dave: That depends. I think everybody has different needs. Like, for example, some authors hate Amazon. And I’m like, well, then definitely don’t do personally the way that I do my books. And this is just the best way to answer it, is that I have my books, I upload them to KDP myself. I upload them to Barnes and Noble myself, and I upload them to ibooks, Apple books myself. Then I go to Draft2Digital, and I tell Draft2Digital, all right, put my books on all the other markets as well, just not Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or ibooks, because I did that myself. And so they do it, and that gets my books on every market. And I think it’s the most optimal for my profitability. And the way I see it is any books that are sold on any of those other markets is money I wouldn’t have made anyway. So Draft to Digital, you take your cut. I’m proud of you.
Publishers Rocket
Lisa: You don’t just do books. You also offer tools. I know I’ve used Publishers Rocket. And so are you going to keep up with that?
Dave: Absolutely, yes. So publisher Rocket and Atticus are the two companies that I’m a part of, and both of those were built because as an author, there were certain things I wish I had with Publisher Rocket. It was kind of frustrating back in the day because publishing companies had access to amazing information. Publishing companies don’t just randomly choose a book. They don’t randomly choose a genre. They don’t kind of just choose out of thin air where they’re going to put their marketing money. They’re using key data and market trends and analysis to kind of figure out where they should focus and how they should approach things. They’ve been doing this for years and years. And back when I started getting into Amazon, that data was not available to self published authors. And so it was my goal in creating Publisher Rocket to take that kind of information and bring it to the fingertips of self published authors so they can make those same kind of decisions. But I took it a step more because it’s important
for authors to know what keywords to choose for their book, which helps their book to show up more in Amazon, as well as what are the right categories to be a part of and some of the pitfalls that exist in the category system. So that’s why I created publisher Rocket.
Then I created Atticus because I’d used Scrivener for writing my books. I then would use Google Docs to coordinate with my editor, and then I would use something like judo or another book formatting software to then format it, which kind of stinks if you think about having to write, collaborate and format your book in three different programs. And so my dream was to have one program that I could write, collaborate and format within with ease. And so that’s why I created Atticus. And so far we have our formatting, I think is one of the easiest and most robust for the self published author to be able to create beautiful books. You can absolutely write your books in it. And this summer we’re coming out with collaboration. And so by this summer, authors will never have to leave the program. They can literally write inside of it, collaborate with their editor, and edit within it with track changes, and then be able to format it. And the coolest part about that process, by the way, is that when you’ve done it insid
e of your program, if, say, two years later, you want to edit something, or let’s say after you publish, you find out you had a mistake, all you have to do is just click on that book, add the words, and then hit export. It’s all done. Which to me is like the greatest thing. Now, updating your book is super easy. If you’re using a formatter, you have to go back to the formatter. And sometimes they charge you just to add a word or fix a mistake. And let’s face it, it’s so much harder to do at that point. A lot of people just don’t do it.
So for me, it’s like being an author and having your own programming team is super fun because it’s like sometimes I’m sitting around just saying to myself, oh, man, nice. If I could just do that. Hey, guys, guess what? I got an idea. Come in here. Let’s work on this. Us. And so yeah, it’s been fun.
Lisa: I really appreciate your tools with the publisher’s know. I’ll have a client call me up and say, oh, I need categories, I’m going to put up a book and Publishers Rocket is just great with that. And you keep it updated and stuff because Amazon is always changing. As a matter of fact, I heard you speaking recently about all the different changes with the categories and everything. This year they made a bunch of changes to the categories and with all the things going on, what do you think they’ll be doing next? What should we be watching out for?
Dave: I think Amazon is very slow with things. Case in point, ten years ago we didn’t have the ability to see how many sales in a day we made. It was a weird system, the dashboard. You would think you would want a good dashboard for authors using Kindle Direct Publishing. And it was horrible. Six years later they finally updated it and it wasn’t that great, but they haven’t touched it since. It’s like, okay, that’s strange. That’s such a huge problem. Why aren’t you fixing it? Same thing with their free formatting tool for just ebooks, right? Kindle Create that thing they created way back in the day, they haven’t touched it. It’s problematic, but it might be on his last legs. You would think they’d want to improve that, but they don’t. The Amazon ad system, they created this. It brings in a lot of money for them. They have added some things to it because it is such a cash generator for everyone. But there’s a lot of things you would think they would have done in a couple of years and they haven’t.
The category system you mentioned, same thing. They had a very complicated system that required a lot of people to help them maintain and it took them years to finally update it. And I think the reason why they update it was just kind of cutting cost. There’s a lot less people working on just the category system now with this new system. And so while we do talk about this thing, they changed. Notice that many of the things I brought up still haven’t changed. And the things I have would be super important and only changed once in the past ten years. That’s to kind of highlight the point that it’s hard to tell what they will update or improve, or change. But truth be told is the best way to think about it is they’re super slow about everything. So I wouldn’t expect anything crazy in the next year or two just based off of historical data points, but we’ll see. They could always surprise me.
Lisa: What do you have coming up? Do you have anything in development for your own company or for new books or anything?
Dave: I’m always working on books. That passion has never gone away, but there’s a couple of projects I’m working on. I’ve started to become more of a consultant for others. I’ve been a consultant for publishing companies for a long time. But what’s interesting is because of my experience with Publisher’s Rocket and Atticus and Kindlepreneur, so I’ve started to become a bit of a consultant to other publishing companies or tools or software companies as well, just kind of helping them with understanding, because it’s rare to find an author with that software and businesses software background. So there’s a lot of things that will be coming out very soon that I’m very proud of, and I think it’s been wonderful, but I’m not at liberty to say yet.
Lisa: Okay, but do you have any parting advice for authors in general?
Dave: Yeah. My favorite piece of advice to give to authors is that authors need to look at marketing a book like a skill. Now, I know that sounds obvious, but let me break that down so that it’s more clear. Skills are things that take time, right? Let’s say you want to learn to juggle. You might be able to juggle two balls right away, but what happens when you add the third and then a fourth ball and a fifth ball and 6th and 7th? Like, these things take a lot of time before you can juggle eight, nine balls in the air. But every day you go out there and you try to juggle, you get better and better. The same thing comes to marketing a book. It’s a skill set.
So for all the authors out there, where they’re discouraged because they didn’t make thousands of dollars on the first try, note that the next try will be better. It’ll be easier, it’ll come faster. You’ll know what to do and what not to do. And if you really approach it like a skill and think of it like you’re practicing a piano, you will have a much better go of it than discrediting yourself because you didn’t see instantaneous success on the first try.
I found that working with lots of authors over the years, the ones that understood that principle most and were still devoted to it, are the ones that I’ve seen hit that mark that everybody dreams of more so than the ones that don’t.
Now, granted, there are lottery winners out there, okay? Lottery ticket winners. I have seen people on their first go just slam dunk it. Right book, right place, right time. But to the mass, mass majority of it, it’s those that have really looked at as, like, a skill. And that’s why a lot of people call it an author career. Right. Well, when you become good at your career, it’s because you’ve built up a lot of skills in what you do. And the same thing goes with being an author. So don’t discourage yourself when you didn’t hit it. Just know that every time you go down to your computer and you start to read and learn and apply and try, your skill set is growing more and more with each day.
Lisa: That’s really good advice, and I really thank you a lot for doing this interview. Appreciate it. I think you’ve helped a lot of authors feel a little bit more secure that whether they love Amazon or hate it, at least it won’t be going away in the next couple of years or so.