How To Boost Your Book Sales

The sad truth is that there is no magic solution to promoting your book. No one course of action will get it to sell consistently but there are lots of individual actions you can take, both simple and complex, which will help.
You can spend a fortune on promotion and get nowhere.
There are expensive courses available to teach you how to be a 'bestseller' but you'll be lucky to make more money than you've spent even if you are a 'bestseller'.
Strange as it may seem you don't even need to write a good book! There have been many best-selling books which are full of mistakes, have a poor plot and will never be acclaimed as literary gems.
The most important factor in author success is one you can't buy—Luck. Despite that there's an old saying which applies—The more I practice, the luckier I get.

Here's what I consider you can do to get lucky as an author:

• Use the right keywords/tags. If you have problems here, steal them from the top selling books in your genre. To do that create a blank book in calibre and in the meta tag ID section paste in the ASIN number of a top ranking book in your genre. Then download the meta data. You'll get the tags and the book description. More on selecting keywords here.
• Get a remarkable cover which attracts the attention of readers browsing for books. Few can do this themselves so it is worth spending money on this. If you think you can design a good cover yourself then consider:

1. Do I know about the golden ratio?
2. Do I know the rule of thirds?
3. Do I know about how colour impacts emotions?
4. Do I  understand the placement and choice of fonts?

A good cover will give a book browser the interest to check out the book. Remember - that cover image has to attract attention at thumbnail size. At Amazon that's 133 by 200 pixels - the size outlined red below. There's even a smaller size used of 58 x 87 pixels. (blue outline):

 

There are some more hints on selecting a cover here.

• Spend a huge amount of time and effort getting a book description which makes the reader think "Wow! This is a book I have to read." Your description should use emotive language and use your keywords. Try running the sentences through a headline analyser.
  In this post I compared two book descriptions.
• Make sure your book starts with a powerful hook to keep the book browser reading. Your book's first three pages should be gripping.
• Create promotion pages for your book which get high rankings on Google. If you are not discovered on the first three pages of search results when you enter a keyword and your book's title, you never will be discovered. Use an incognito browser window when doing this. (See http://authorbookpromotion.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/authorhow-easy-is-it-to-find-your-books.html)
• Video, pictures, headlines and subheadings are effective in promotions in that order. Run headlines and sub headings through checkers for emotive language such as http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm and https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer. This works for Tweets and Facebook posts too.
• Make sure promotion pages have a clear 'call to action'.
• Get the price right. If you've already published your book at Amazon, try Amazon's book pricing beta service. To get to that select your book from the Amazon KDP bookshelf. Find the book you want to modify and in the "Book Actions" column, click "Edit book pricing." Next scroll to the 'Royalty and Pricing' header and under KDP Pricing Support (Beta), click "View Service."
• Recognize that a promotion at best will produce a spike in your sales but you need to sustain that spike for at least a month for it to produce a rise in your sales rank at Amazon. You'll need to stagger effective promotions.
• Know that not all promotions are effective and some are downright scams. There is no point in tweeting to fake accounts or putting book links on sites with no visitors. See this post. Learn how to recognize the fakes and how to use UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) codes to spot those sites which work.
• Facebook adverts work but NOT 'Buy my book' adverts. Instead make an attractive offer which people can get if they add their email address to your mailing list. Email lists are effective at selling books.
• Twitter posts work but not until you have 10,000 real, active followers. Few will see your posts. People will unfollow if your posts are solely 'Buy my book' posts. These should never make up more than 10 - 15% of your feed. DON'T auto follow-back because you'll end up with fake followers; vet your followers. Never send out 'Thanks for following me' direct messages. Aim to get 100 new followers per day. Remember people are only on Twitter for short periods of time so the vast majority of your tweets will be unseen. Make sure you have a pinned post there.
• Twitter and Facebook are NOT the only social media platforms. Get a presence on Tumblr, LinkedIn (if you write nonfiction), Google+, YouTube also. There are also vital forums such as Kboards.
• Although I dislike Goodreads, it's an essential platform for an author to be on if you want recognition as an author. Be careful what you say—lots of Trolls there. BEWARE! never log in to Goodreads using your Facebook account. You don't want Amazon to associate your Facebook friends and reviews.
• Amazon paid advertising appears to work but paying for keywords there works better.
• Preorders work for new books, especially if you follow them with promotion during the release week.
• If you are not using affiliate accounts you are wasting an opportunity to earn at least 4% extra at Amazon and much more elsewhere. You can use this as a sales tool too. 
• Remember there are only 24 hours in a day and you can't do all of this at once. Some can be automated though.
• Ask people to help you promote! Hey if you have not already downloaded one of my free ebooks (Immortality Gene and Raging Storm) please do so. Even if you don't read them it will help my sales rank.

Darn that all sounds complicated. Maybe there should be a magic promotion button. I'm working on it but it's not quite finished yet. Take a look here.