Help Yourself

We all started to buy and read ebooks. They're great. Part of us, writers, realized that ebooks is a great oppurtunity to bring back in electronic formats out-of-print novels, collections, novellas, to bring together stories from different anthologies and magazines. Now writer shouldn't wait when publisher will decide to finally publish short story collection of non-commercial author. Part of us, readers, now can buy cheap books and no longer track used bookstores trying to find expensive out-of-print copy of some book.

However writers not only bring back old titles, but publish new self-pubbed novels and collections as ebooks. That's great, too. A lot of experimental works can reach readers now. A lot of good books refused by traditional publishers now will get their readership. But it seems not all self-pubbed writers realize that they have to not only upload their books on Amazon, but have to bring information about their books to reader.

If you start to browse on Amazon among self-pubbed works, you can see that lots of books don't have proper information. You click on Amazon page of some title, and all you see is a couple of sentences on book. How a reader could decide should he buy your book or not, if you don't give him proper info what this book is about and who are you, a writer. Reader just clicks on another book with proper info and buys it. You sales remain the same.

Now I want to give some advises to writers who upload their works on Amazon/Smashwords. I hope they will help your sales.

1) Post on your book page proper info about plot. It's really important. Not a couple of words: a couple of paragraphs. Covers on Amazon are small, and they don't really matter. Proper info is far more important.

2) If your book had been published by traditional publisher on paper somewhere, say so. Maybe a reader after finishing your ebook will decide to hunt and find this out-pf-print title.

3) Get some blurbs from good writers. Maybe not so famous, but good. Writers you like. Blurbs are important too. You wrote a book and couldn't make a good writer read it? It's a shame. Blurbs make readers feel that you are good: writer X praises you!

4) Small bio would be good. Yes, maybe you don't have awards, you hadn't been published much, but you wrote a great thing. We read not bios, but short stories and novels.

5) If it's possible, include in description your website link.

Interesting but even books published by Amazon imprints don't have proper description.

If you want that your book haven't been lost among a thousand of different titles, spend an hour to write a decent description to your book. You spent 2 years on your masterpiece and can't spend an hour to write a description? Well, in that case no one will read your masterpiece.