The Magic Formula of Amazon Marketing

By Vincent Davis

Let me start off this blog with a statement that might seem to contradict the title: there is no magic formula to book sales. If you meet a guru who claims to have one, they’re a modern-day snake oil salesman and should be avoided at all costs.

That being said, there is a magic formula for managing your stress and blood pressure levels as you traverse the crazy world of digital marketing.

Traffic + Conversion = Sales

When I published my first book, I woke up every morning and checked my sales reports before anything. Before my coffee was brewing or my shower started running, I was digging through my Amazon spreadsheets in search of projected royalties, trends, et cetera. The first few days felt like Christmas morning. But after a few weeks every day began to feel like the end of my career.

The problem was, I was trying to control sales. I was trying to control the uncontrollable. If you’ve ever tried to do that, you already know how the story ends: intolerable stress, high blood pressure, and grey hair.

After I realized this wasn’t going to work if I wanted to make a career out of writing, I went back to the drawing board. And I created the magic formula. It’s plain and simple, to say the least, but “Traffic + Conversion = Sales” changed my life.

Because, you see, traffic and conversion are both things you can control. You can influence them. You can’t directly control sales, but you CAN control the activities that lead people to your book page, and the things you need to do to convince them to click the big orange “buy now” button.

To clarify, traffic is getting people (hopefully readers in your genre) to your Amazon book page. There are several controllable elements that go into this. Your website, social media, newsletter subscribers, advertisements, and price promotions all come to mind.

Conversion, on the other hand, is what turns those shoppers into readers. Conversion is what convinces them to pull out their credit cards and purchase your book over the closest competitor’s. It’s what convinces them that your 300 pages book is worth 8 hours of their life, the emotional energy, and more important than other books they could spend their time on.

That’s a lot, right? It is, but thankfully the elements of conversion are controllable as well. Although there are an unlimited number of factors that can feed into a consumer’s decision to purchase something or not, the five big ones for books are title, book cover, description, reviews, and price. Some of these are obviously more difficult to influence than others, but ultimately, they’re ALL under your control.

Doesn’t that feel a little bit better? Maybe not. That’s a lot of new things we have to consider. But I can promise the Magic Formula—combining the traffic and conversion elements addressed above—will not only alleviate your stress at not having enough sales, but it will also give you a lot of new ideas on how to increase your exposure.

In my next post, I’m going to jump right in to traffic, and the tools available to us to generate a lot of it. After that, we’ll attack conversion.

One step at a time, and maybe we can keep the stress, blood pressure, and grey hair at bay.