When I first started selling ebooks on Amazon, I don’t remember noticing a “refunds” column. Then, as I started selling more books, a number appeared there. What? Someone returned one of my ebooks? How could they?

Actually, I just shrugged it off, but I’ve seen forum posts by indie authors asking what it means and if they should be worried.

The quick answer is probably not, but I’ll add a caveat at the end, so keep reading.

First off, speaking as someone who owns a Kindle, it’s very easy to buy ebooks (one-click) straight from your device. The Kindle also promptly asks you if it was a mistake and you want to return the ebook. My guess, based on the fact that my returns usually pop up simultaneously with corresponding new sales, is this is what happens most of the time.

It’s also possible for someone to write to Amazon and request a no-questions-asked refund (I believe you have 7 days). I did this once when the story took a steep downhill turn after the sample chapters and was much shorter than the product description implied (novella when I’d expected a novel). If it hadn’t been on the pricier side, I wouldn’t have bothered, but I felt a little betrayed. (In case you’re curious, this was a smell press ebook, not one published by an independent author.)

Given how easy it is to return ebooks at Amazon, I’m surprised I don’t get more returns. It’s a lot less hassle than sending back a physical book.

So, to answer the original question (should you be worried about returns?), probably not. It’ll happen. If you have a high return rate, though, it may mean there’s something worth addressing.

Here are a few things to check:

• If your ebook is not novel length, is that clear upfront? For short stories and novellas, it’s worth mentioning the word count and the corresponding paperback page count (assume about 250 words per page) because word count won’t necessarily mean anything to someone who’s not a writer.
• Does the product description match up well with the story people get? If it’s described as an action-packed adventure, is there plenty of action throughout? If there are lots of explicit sex scenes, is it clear from the blurb that things will get hot and heavy?
• Did you have a professional proofread for you? If you couldn’t afford it in the beginning, consider investing in this once you’re selling enough copies to cover the expense.
• Is the formatting a nightmare? If you uploaded a Word file and let Amazon handle the conversion automatically, it might very well be.

If you’ve returned ebooks for other reasons, please let us know in the comments.

This is my third and last entry in my “So, You Want to Sell More Books at Amazon…” blog series. The first discusses how Amazon starts to promote your books internally once you sell enough copies and the second goes over the role “tagging” plays in Amazon searches and recommendations. Today we’re going to talk about reviews.

How important are they? How do you get them? Will more reviews sell more books? Let’s jump in….

How reviews help you at Amazon

The first way they help is obvious: reviews help readers decide whether or not to give books a try. A book with no reviews is something of a cipher. In the Kindle Store, a reader can download a sample to try, so it might not be quite as much of a sales death knell as for physical books, but not having any makes it look like nobody is buying the book.

The concept of social proof suggests people are more likely to try something if others are trying it (and avoid something others are avoiding). I believe getting those first three or four reviews is a big deal and will definitely improve your sales overall (so long as you’re working on promotion and getting people to your book’s page!).

Are more reviews better?

I’ve read some theories that reviews help sell more books in a non-obvious way, too: maybe this is one of the many factors Amazon use in determining which books to promote internally, so the more reviews you have the more play your book will get.

True? I couldn’t say for sure, but I’m inclined to think not. Amazon has to be aware of services like BookRooster and Ffiver where you can essentially buy reviews for $5 a pop.

As I mentioned in my earlier posts in this series, I believe selling books is the major thing that gets you on the radar (gets Amazon to start promoting you internally).

How do you get your first few reviews?

Well, I wouldn’t use Ffiver.

What I’ve done that I’d recommend to others is giving away review copies. I’ve done this by posting offers on the Kindle page on Facebook and also in forums for various e-readers. MobileRead is my favorite board for this, as many of its readers are savvy about downloading ebooks from Smashwords (where you can simply give them coupon codes to grab the books for free), but I’ve also posted offers on the NookBoards and KindleBoards.

For me, about one out of five people who received a free copy would end up posting a review (in the first couple of weeks anyway — more trickled in later), so if I gave away twenty copies, I had good odds for getting those first ones I needed. Some cool people were nice enough to post their reviews in multiple places (i.e. Smashwords, Goodreads, and Amazon).

That’s my most recommended way to get reviews. You can, of course, also ask beta readers, friends and family, etc., though these people are probably only going to leave five-star reviews and readers can and do leave irritated one-star reviews if they feel they’ve been duped because all of a book’s glowing reviews came from friends.

Other options are to participate in blog-based book tours (I did that with Encrypted and Flash Gold and, though it wasn’t mentioned as a part of the tour deal, a couple of bloggers left Amazon reviews as well as posting reviews on their blogs) and to submit your book to review sites (though book bloggers tend to be backlogged and this can be quite the wait).

Also, don’t forget the value of getting the people who actually bought the book to review it! Those are the most genuine reviews you can get since they come from your target audience, people who read the blurb and chose to buy the book.

How do you get these people to review? I always make a request in the afterword. If you enjoyed the book, please consider leaving a review….

My book with the highest reviews-to-sales ratio is Flash Gold. I worded things differently there, something like, “If you want to see more adventures with these characters, please leave a review.” I did it because that story was an experiment with the novella-length ebook for me, and whether or not I wrote another one was going to depend on reception and sales. (I’m editing a sequel now, so clearly things worked out!)

What about those paid review services?

Someone always asks, so I’ll finish up with my thoughts on this. I don’t think there’s any reason to pay someone to review your book, and readers are going to be suspicious of a paid review (the assumption being that receiving money makes a reviewer more inclined to review the book favorably) if they’re aware of it.

What are your thoughts? Are there any other ways you’ve snagged your early reviews?

The other day, I blogged about how Amazon starts to promote your books internally once you sell enough copies to get on their map. Today I want to talk about tagging and the role it may or may not play in increasing sales.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check the bottom of any Amazon book page. People can “tag” a book with terms such as steampunk, paranormal romance, mystery, thriller, space opera, etc.. Amazon uses this information to help place a book in its search results (it may play a role in what Amazon chooses to display for personalized recommendations too).

Will tags help me sell more books?

The short answer is… not by themselves, no.

Based on my experience with my own books and some very official and very thorough observations (AKA fifteen minutes of typing in various search terms and looking at book pages), tags seem to play a small role in the big picture of how Amazon ranks search results for various terms.

For an uncompetitive term, tags may help you appear on the first page of search results. For more competitive terms, you probably won’t see a move up the results unless other factors are in your favor as well. (I’ve seen lots of examples where authors have done tag exchanges with other authors and have 100-odd votes for their chosen terms, but their books appear nowhere on the early pages of results.) The top results for competitive terms tend to be 1) popular 2) tagged and often 3) have the tag/keyword in the title.

There are exceptions, and some of them are downright puzzling (hey, Amazon wouldn’t want to make its search engine too transparent, or authors would have an easier time manipulating it), but, in the areas I checked, four out of five top results would follow that pattern.

So, are tags worth worrying about?

Personally, I don’t. I actually have some pretty strange ones on my earlier books thanks to, well, it’s a long story, but they’re not terms that are applicable to the book or that would ever help it sell copies (since no one would search for those terms). The ones in the first picture are for Flash Gold. It ranks 12th for “steampunk” even with only a few votes for that tag. Maybe when it’s been around longer and has sold more copies, it’ll place higher, but I’m not going to try and get 100 tags for steampunk in the mean time.

It’s not that I don’t think tags can’t help a little; it’s more a personal aversion to doing anything that could be construed as gaming the system. I did search engine optimization as part of my day job for years, and I’ve seen a lot of people use tricks to rank highly in Google search results, and Google inevitably gets wiser with each update and things that work one month can get you penalized or even de-listed (essentially banned) down the road. I don’t know if Amazon’s search engine is quite as sophisticated (or vindictive), but I’m not willing to risk it.

But, as a bit of evidence that they probably do help… As I write this, my fantasy novel, The Emperor’s Edge, comes up 10th when you search for “steampunk” in the Kindle store — higher than Flash Gold which is more of a steampunk story and has the word steampunk in the title. That it ranks for that term has to be based on tags (and possibly reviews using the word), because I don’t use steampunk in the title or blurb (aside from its steam-age setting, it’s more high/heroic fantasy).

So, in summary, my research approach wasn’t entirely scientific (please let us know if your experience has led you to different opinions on the usefulness of tags), but I believe ranking highly for Amazon searches is a combination of sales ranking/sales history, keywords (tags) in the book title, tags submitted at the bottom of the page, and possibly the prevalence of the term in user reviews (that order would be my guess on what gets the most weight too). Again, I have found puzzling exceptions.

So, should you run a tagging campaign and try to get more votes for your preferred terms?

I’ve already shared my stance on that. It’s up to you if you want to try it. I’m not sure having 100 votes gives you any more weight than a more natural looking ten or twenty. I also don’t think the Amazon search box is the way most readers find books, so even being #1 for a term may not increase your sales noticeably. But, if you haven’t bothered tagging your own books at all, you might want to do so to set a precedent for reviewers who might be inclined to do it. (Note: if you have an account, go tag them in the UK and DE stores, too, as tags don’t carry over.)

Come back next week for the last post in this series, one on Amazon reviews.

Over the next few days, I’m going to attempt to answer some of the questions authors ask in regards to book sales (specifically selling more of their books) at Amazon.

If there’s anything you’re wondering about that’s related to this topic, leave a comment below and I’ll try to answer it. (Just don’t ask me how to sell a thousand books a day or make it into the Top 100 overall. The best sales rank I’ve managed in the Kindle Store is 2,300 or so.)

Let’s start out with the biggie, the one people actually email me about…

Why aren’t I selling more books?

I’m going to assume you have an exciting (typo free!) blurb, professional-looking cover art, and at least a couple of positive book reviews (if not, address those potential pitfalls first).

The short answer is: people don’t know your book exists.

There are millions of books in the Amazon store (hundreds of thousands of ebooks in the Kindle store), so it’s hard to get noticed.

In the beginning, you have to drive readers to your Amazon book page. This can be via advertising, social media, your blog, guest posts on other blogs, forums, etc.

If you can get an ebook listed for free, there’s less competition (for now) in that arena, so odds are better of people finding your work. If your freebie turns readers into fans, they might check out your non-free offerings.

If you sell enough books, you will reach a point where sales occur whether you’re driving traffic to Amazon or not. This is because people are finding your book through the internal Amazon search engine, by browsing the Top 100 lists, by checking other books’ “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section, and via Amazon’s recommendations (which are personalized based on reader purchases).

In essence, the more you sell, the more Amazon rewards you. They want to push books that people are buying since that presumes an inherent saleability in the title. AKA they know they’ll make more money this way.

How many books do you have to sell to reach this point?

It’s more of a gradual process than a switch being flipped, but I’d probably hit about 750-1,000 total sales of The Emperor’s Edge when I noticed it was selling itself on Amazon whether I did any type of promotion that week or not. My guess is that most people find the book via the “Customers Who Bought…” feature, as it doesn’t fall into any of the fantasy sub-categories (it’s not a good match for the Top 100 lists it shows up in). I don’t have any way of knowing if Amazon recommends it to folks or not, though I’d be curious to find out!

Now that I’ve rambled on here, let me summarize the answer to the original question (how do you sell more books at Amazon?): work your book-promotion buns off to sell that first 1,000 books.

The next post will be on tags. Stay tuned (or subscribed via your RSS reader!).

If you’re an author, you may be aware of a couple of small promotional opportunities you can make use of by leaving reviews on Amazon.

First off, your reviewer profile can include information about you so you can sneak in a plug for your work. You can also include your website or a link to your Amazon author page (which should list your books).

Second, you can customize your reviewer handle to use your author name (and you can even add on “mystery author” or some such).

If you’re a prolific reviewer, this can be a way to get your name out there and perhaps entice a few Amazonians into checking out your work.

A few suggestions in case you want to try promotion through reviews:

Try reviewing books that are similar to yours (similar but more popular, eh?), so it’s likely your target audience will notice you.

If it’s possible to be first, then go for it. I’m not positive how Amazon chooses which three reviews get to show up on the main book page, but it seems to be a combination of being early and posting something substantial.

Don’t expect too much out of this. If you already love reviewing, then this promotional strategy makes sense (as long as you’re leaving reviews, they might as well help you sell books), but reading and reviewing is time-consuming so if it’s a job and not for pleasure (i.e. you’re reading popular books you might not otherwise try because you want to be the first to leave a review…) then you’ll probably find the whole process tedious and not particularly rewarding.

Caveats

Personally, I don’t do many reviews and not any with the idea of promoting my own work. There’s an art to writing good reviews, the kind that entertain and inform, and if you’re not publishing that kind, you’re probably not going to get folks clicking your name to check out your profile.

I tend to be too critical (a common faux pas amongst writers — some of us think we know everything ), and I can’t imagine my overly analytical reviews winning me any fans. I’ve known other authors who leave short 5-star reviews praising everything they read. Again, that probably wouldn’t get you a lot of profile views, especially if it’s not even clear you read the book.

I’d be leery, too, about leaving harsh reviews for other indie authors if you’re an indie author. I’ve stumbled across some clearly retaliatory reviews on Smashwords, and I suppose they exist on Amazon too. A one-star review probably isn’t going to matter when you have ten other four- and five-star ones, but I imagine that could be a real sales buzzkill if that’s your first review.

Do you guys have any thoughts? Do you review on Amazon or not?