What I've learnt, part three

I need to stop kidding myself that this is going to be a finite process. There isn't going to be a point when I stop learning new things about indie authorship and publishing, and if I do stop learning, that'll be a bad thing, because things are going to keep changing.

So here are some things I've learnt recently:

 Although Amazon allows you to put a book in two categories when you set it up to publish, you can ask them to add up to eight more categories. It's a bit of a faff to find the right page, so I'll include it here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/contact-us. The categories have to be included in this format:
Books>Science Fiction & Fantasy>Fantasy>Fairy Tales
It's probably good that it's time-consuming, because it focuses the mind on getting it right first time.The category structure for books and e-books is completely different, so you need to think through the categories separately for each. I found this easier to do on the amazon website than it was in the set-up process through the kdp interface, not least because it's useful to see which other books are in that category so you know whether or not yours fits there.The category structure for each marketplace is different, so you need to do it twice more for the US and then twice more for anywhere else you decide is worth your while.A website called https://www.bklnk.com/ creates links which direct your potential readers to the appropriate Amazon site. It's free because it funds itself by using its own Amazon Affiliate links when authors/publishers don't provide theirs.Another site using Amazon Affiliate codes to fund itself and therefore providing a really useful service at no cost, is https://www.yasiv.com/ It allows you to visualise links between products (e.g. books) using information about what customers bought together. In other words, it allows you to see what other books your own readers are buying, which is invaluable information in targeting Amazon ads (which I haven't got on to yet).For anyone wanting to learn how to make the best use of Amazon ads, I can recommend Bryan Cohen's 'The 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge'. I don't have enough books out to make it worth using Amazon ads yet, but Bryan's videos helped me enormously in understanding more about how they work.I've experimented with Facebook ads and had a frustrating few days of having them knocked back for 'unacceptable business practices'. The examples given in the policy weren't relevant to my ad and the whole thing was very confusing. When I appealed against these automatic decisions, they were overturned very quickly. I did get some increase in page views as a result, but there's no sign of that converting into sales.I was too wordy in my book descriptions and this post from Kindlepreneur helped me improve them.