A Little Book First Aid, Please

Lately, my newest novel, A Collateral Attraction, hasn't been getting much attention from me compared to my earlier book, Loving Ashe.  As a result, its sales are languishing.  My one excuse is that I'm getting book 2 of the Loving Ashe Trilogy ready, and so all my attention is on fine-tuning the manuscript and getting it ready for its release.

But it's not a good excuse considering that I released A Collateral Attraction just last December 15, and the last thing I want to see is to have it languishing on digital bookshelves barely a month later.  It feels like I've just ignored one of my kids, or put them on mute or something - and it's not a good feeling.

But how exactly does one give TLC to a digital book?

If you're traditionally published and therefore, have no access to your Amazon KDP dashboard, you can't.  That's up to your publisher.  But as an indie author, I can do at least three things to hopefully make my book more visible on the Amazon Kindle Store (cross my fingers and wish me luck).

Tighten up my book's keywords

What exactly are keywords, you may ask.  Well, if you've ever gone online to Google something - let's say, identical twins romance, you're going to type those words on Google: identical twins romance.  However, that's just too vast. I mean, you're looking for a book, right?

So where would you go to find books?  Unless you've got something against Amazon and refuse to shop from them (I know a few people), then the answer is Amazon: Kindle.  So I'm going to head on over to Amazon and click on the Kindle Store and in the search bar, at the top, I'm going to type identical twins romance, and pick a book that interests me from the search results.  In the case of A Collateral Attraction, it's the third result out of 970.  But honestly, who looks for identical twins romance?   I need to come up with a better term, but it will be one of the seven keywords that Amazon KDP will allow my book to have.

What you've just done right there, whether it's on Google or on Amazon, is type a set of keywords.  Search words would be another way to look at it.  And if the right search words (which can be a group of words, not just one word, separated by commas in the keyword entry box in your KDP dashboard) can get my book noticed, then I need to tweak it now and then.

Fix up my book blurb

This is important.  And this is where I have not been doing well at all.  When you click on my book, this is the first thing you see:

Unfortunately, I did my screen shot too late.  I had a crappy blurb to begin with and what you're seeing, the quote from RT Reviews is the newest version of my blurb that I just uploaded less than 20 minutes before writing this post.

What I really wanted you to see is that, with Amazon truncating the book description to the first five lines, you've only got a teeny-tiny bit of digital real estate to catch the reader's attention after their eyes leave the cover.  That's why I finally decided to use the quote from RT Reviews, something I should have done from the very beginning.

This was the first blurb I had before the change you see above:

Some days, it can be tough being an identical twin — especially when your other half is in deep trouble. 
Billie Delphine has always been content standing on the sidelines while her identical twin sister, Blythe, gets all the attention, including a glamorous lifestyle with billionaire, Ethan Kheiron, who will do anything to wrestle back control of the family fortune from his younger brother, Heath.
But when Blythe disappears with Ethan while Billie is visiting her in New York, the last thing Billie wants is to be mistaken for her sister — or be falsely accused of a crime that Billie knows Blythe did not commit. So when Heath suggests they work together to find them, Billie agrees.
But a life of luxury, personal shopping sprees, and private jets cannot hide the years of unresolved differences between sisters, nor the decades of lies that have left the Kheiron family divided. And even as Billie slowly falls for Heath, she knows that until they all settle their differences, they're just pawns in someone else's game of power — where some of them are more expendable than others.

Honestly, it was way too much chatter that didn't tell me anything interesting, especially the first line in bold.  Is this the reason why people just thought, meh, let me move on to something else.

This was the final blurb I just uploaded today:

"A mistaken identity story that straddles the line between romance and chick lit." - RT Book Reviews 
There's nothing more annoying than being mistaken for your more glamorous twin sister everywhere you go - especially when you're also being accused of a crime you know she didn't commit. And for small-town girl, Billie Delphine, learning that her socialite twin sister, Blythe, is in trouble is all she needs to step out of her shell, even if it means working alongside the one man her sister despises for taking over her boyfriend's company, his younger brother, Heath Kheiron.
But the world of personal shopping sprees and private island retreats cannot hide the years of unresolved differences between sisters, or the decades of lies that have left the Kheiron family divided. And as Billie slowly falls for the Kheiron family's black sheep, she realizes that there's also another player in the game, and until they can all settle their differences, they're all expendable - some of them more than others.

I think this one, outside of the overlong sentences, is much better than the first one.  I'll still tweak it, but the first line will remain the same throughout - that quote from RT Book Reviews.

What do you think?  Which one is better?

Create a book landing page

For authors who don't have their own website yet, one way you can direct attention to your book is to have a landing page dedicated to that book.  If you're like me and you created your book using Pressbooks (normal price: $99 for epub, mobi, and pdf versions - the pdf is for print, like if you're going to have a paperback or hardcover book printed though they also have specials where you get 30 - 50% off), then Pressbooks has a landing page just for that book in question, including sample chapters that you designate to be freely viewed online, and a BUY page with links to online bookstores like Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, or Barnes and Noble.

This is what the page looks like on Pressbooks.

While the Pressbooks landing page is for those who wrote and formatted their books using Pressbooks, there's also Booklaunch as an alternative, and I talk about that here.  I think it's great for those who don't have an author website yet, or would like to set up a dedicated page for their book with buy links, an author section, testimonials, and also a way to integrate your mail list service for your newsletter.

And one more thing! With Amazon's embed feature, you can embed your book right on your website, like this:

From here, there's not much I can do but wait and see if those changes do help gain the book more organic visibility.  In the meantime, I can figure out ways to advertise the book.  I have a few more days of KDP Select free days to use though I'm not sure if I'm going to use them or not.  But if I do, I'll let you guys know so you can download it for free.  

Guess my next post will have to deal with promotions, right?

In the meantime, since I've talked my book till you're blue in the face, here's the link to buy A Collateral Attraction from Amazon.  And if you'd like to be updated about my latest books, giveaways and author events, please sign up for my newsletter.