How can You Get People to Buy your Book?

There is a significant category of questions on Quora similar to this one:

How can I sell 10K copies of my self-published book in three months?

I just started publishing books on Amazon but I haven’t made sales yet. What do I need to do differently to scale up and make massive sales?

And a lot more questions that ask, more reasonably,

How could I get people to buy copies of my self-published book? No one has bought any of my books before.

What can I do to get people to buy my self published books I tell people on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram about my books I put links to where people can buy my books but nobody cares they don’t buy any copies of my books. What can I do?

Why is my self-published book having no reads?

I wrote a book and published it on Amazon Kindle direct publishing. How do I get people to buy my book?

And so forth, on and on, endless iterations. Some of the people who write these questions direct them to me.

I’m therefore writing this post partly so from now on, I will have something to point to when I am answering a question like this.

If you poke around using the author’s name and/or the book’s title, you may be able to find the book on Amazon. I’m going to take one of these books at random and take a look at it to explain what is wrong and why no one will buy this book. I thought about not pointing to a specific example, but the book is right there on Amazon, it was published last year and the author hasn’t unpublished it, so they must be okay with readers looking at it. Here it is:

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The Wizard In Training And The Secrets Of The Evil Lord the second book in the series

Price: $4.78 Length: 90 pages No sales rank, meaning that this book has never sold a copy OR hasn’t sold a copy in several years.

Cover: Despite the 2 and the title including “the second book in the series,” this is listed as Book 1 of 1 for its series.

Description: Laure Bell is a young teenage girl and things are not going well in Lauren’s life she is not very lucky in life and she doesn’t have many friends and most of the things she tries to do don’t end well. So one day young a witch in training named Kate Sands is sent from the wizarding world to our world to help Lauren to become the most popular student at her high school and if she is able to do that she will get her witchs hat and become a full-fledged witch. Also who is Evil Lord Crack and can Alex Spark Lauren Bell Mack Brickwell and Kate Sands stop him.

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What is wrong? Some of this is obvious, but some is much less obvious.

A) The metadata is screwed up. The stuff on the cover does not match the “first in series” designation. Also, the title on the cover does not match the title as presented above the description. This is a significant problem for KDP. The titles need to match, the metadata needs to make sense. Also, obviously “the second book in the series” should not be part of the title.

Categories are invisible because this book has not sold; categories are not shown until the first sale occurs. I don’t know exactly why, but I bet it’s partly because the book has to rank in a category, and with no rank, Amazon has no way to show categories.

Anybody who wants to self-publish should take a few minutes … or hours, or days … to read posts about metadata best practices. This is particularly true because screwing this up badly enough will get your account suspended or possibly banned.

Metadata Guidelines for Books — KDP’s own guidelines

Mastering Metadata: How to Avoid KDP Account Suspension — from Written Word Media, which I consider a reliable source.

How to Improve Your Amazon Book Description & Metadata — from Jane Friedman, another reliable source.

And I wouldn’t stop there, either. Also, I would definitely look at KDP’s own guidelines, because other posts may be outdated. Though WWM stays up to date, I bet.

B) The price is too high for a 90-page short story or novella. Especially since the story is not actually 90 pages; it’s more like 40 pages; see “Interior Formatting,” below.

A stunning number of self-published books are nine pages long, twenty pages long, forty pages long. A lot of people just do not seem to know what a “book” or a “novel” actually is. Because KDP will allow you to self-publish something really short, they think they have self-published a “book” or a “novel” when they have published a really short novella, a short story, or a vignette.

This isn’t clear from this specific example, but something that I have seen quite a few times now is a self-published “novel” that is actually the summary of a novel. There is almost no setting, very little to zero dialogue, it is literally the synopsis of the novel. The only explanation for this is that the aspiring author does not know what a “story” is at all, never mind knowing how long actual novels are.

C) The cover is crappy. The image is unattractive, cluttered, and cartoonish. The title is basically unreadable, and this happens a lot, with at least some part of the text too close to the background color.

The cover creation tools at KDP are terrible. They are at best a starting point. Cutting a cover in half with the top black and the bottom pink, or anything like that, screams “KDP cover creator tool here.”

The cover creation tools at Canva are fantastic, but can be dangerous to use. One relatively common reason people get banned from KDP is because they have used Canva images without modifying them, the same images that a zillion other people have already used, and KDP brings down a hammer on that kind of image duplication. This is by far a bigger problem for “authors” making low-content coloring books or something of the kind. But it’s important to be careful (very, very careful) about images.

AND, if you use AI image generators, then you can make whatever image and definitely have the right to use that image, but you must check the “used AI tools” box at KDP and if you don’t they will probably ban you for lying to them. If you do check that box, then you’re probably going to find you have a problem sometime down the road, maybe soon, because there’s no division (yet) between “faked the whole book with ChatGPT” and “wrote the book, but generated the cover image.” The minute Amazon decides to unpublish all books where the “used AI tools” box is checked, they can do it. Therefore, all possible questions of ethics and quality aside, I would be very hesitant to use AI tools to generate any part of the text OR the cover.

D) The interior formatting is totally screwed up. Inside this book, half of each page is white space. The text is centered rather than left-justified (!).

The interior formatting of A LOT of self-published books is seriously screwed up, though I’ve never before seen one screwed up exactly like this.

It ought to be easy to do better, because you should be able to open ANY traditionally published book or ANY bestselling self-published book and look at the text. There you go, that’s how the interior of your book should look. Fiddle with the formatting until your ebook looks correct. Use the preview tool at KDP to make sure it does look right. Some authors swear that you have to upload an epub or whatever else they happen to like or else the formatting looks wrong. No, it doesn’t. You can load a Word file and it will look fine. I don’t know what they’re doing to make that not work.

Paperback formatting is harder. Use a KDP template of the size you want and copy and paste your chapters into the template. Boom, there you go, the formatting should now look basically correct, as long as the Word file you used for the ebook is basically correct.

E) The description is completely awful.

In this case, the description is awful because of the lack of punctuation. This is so screamingly obvious that everything else sort of disappears into the background and it’s therefore hard to evaluate any other aspect of the description. Here it is, this time with the punctuation corrected and a tiny bit of editing to make it less painful to read:

Laure Bell is a young teenage girl. Things are not going well in her life. She is not very lucky in life, she doesn’t have many friends and most of the things she tries to do don’t end well. So, one day, young a witch in training named Kate Sands is sent from the wizarding world to our world to help Lauren become the most popular student at her high school. If Kate is able to do, that she will get her witch’s hat and become a full-fledged witch.

Also, who is Lord Crack, and can Alex Spark, Lauren Bell, Mack Brickwell, and Kate Sands stop him?

Now, this is plainly terrible, but what precisely is wrong with it? And what are other common problems in self-published book description?

Description is genuinely hard to write, except for people such as commenter Mary Beth, who has an astounding knack for great, pithy, evocative book descriptions. However, this particular example of description is terrible because

–It’s repetitive and uses vague words like “things.”

–It’s confusing because it’s hard to tell who the protagonist is. I vote for Kate, who is the person in this story trying to achieve something.

–Why does Laurie’s problem concern Kate or any of the witches? That’s mysterious, not in a good way.

–Who are all the other people mentioned in the last line? That’s also mysterious, not in a good way.

However, this description is in fact good in one way: It is short. A typical failure mode for description of self-published novels is the attempt to cram the whole plot into a 2000-word description. This is a bad idea. The description is supposed to be evocative and intriguing. It is emphatically not supposed to be a plot summary.

My favorite book description ever is for The Hands of the Emperor —

An impulsive word can start a war.
A timely word can stop one.
A simple act of friendship can change the course of history.

Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary of the Last Emperor of Astandalas, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, the god.
He has spent more time with the Emperor of Astandalas than any other person.
He has never once touched his lord.
He has never called him by name.
He has never initiated a conversation.

One day Cliopher invites the Sun-on-Earth home to the proverbially remote Vangavaye-ve for a holiday.

Everything that is mysterious in this description is mysterious in a good way, and also in a way that appeals to me personally, but I think this is just objectively great description.

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It’s also entirely possible for a good or great book not to sell either, and the reason that happens is

LACK OF PROMOTION

If everything else is okay — if the metadata is okay, the title is okay, price, length, cover, description, interior formatting — AND the book itself is good, then the only thing left is promotion.

Every now and then someone on Quora asks me for advice about promotion. Where I’m far from an expert! I can only suggest the things I have used, not the things I haven’t figured out myself, such as Amazon ads! Which I should indeed take a stab at figuring out! But, my point is, sometimes this person’s book looks just fine, which is a real pleasure to see.

This is a good cover, the fonts are good, the image is good, the design is good. The book is short, but not insanely short — 160 pp — and it’s priced at $2.99, which is as low as you can put it while still having a royalty of 70% rather than 35%, so that’s a reasonable price. Sales rank is over a million, so it’s not selling a lot, but I bet it could do better with promotion. Here’s the description:

The last place Tuskegee Airman Bob Dale pictured himself was shot down and surviving on the ground.

Yet here he was after his crippled plane caught fire and crashed, dodging Nazi patrols when he stumbles into the arms of a nun and a Partisan who determine to guide him to safety. They lead him to an orphanage just as Nazi SS troops are closing in on seven little Jewish children hiding there. Now Bob’s mission of survival takes on an urgency even larger than his own life!

This well-researched historical thriller captures the spirit of the heroic nuns of the Sound of Music and the courageous soldiers of Saving Private Ryan in a book you will find both exciting and inspiring.

And so on, various reader quotes added to the description.

There’s a lot to like about this, isn’t there? This description is short, it’s evocative and engaging, it’s clear about the problem. I would personally only bold the first line, but fine. I actually picked up a sample myself, which I haven’t ever looked at because, sigh, I don’t have time. But it looks to me like this book could be boosted effectively with reasonable promotion. As far as quality goes, it’s not just in a different zip code compared to the first book shown above, it’s on a whole different continent.

If an aspiring author hasn’t looked at well-presented books so they have an idea of the standard they should try to meet, they should absolutely do that, and the sooner the better. If that’s you, then just google “bestselling [my genre here]” and look at the top fifty books in whatever genre you have in mind. If you don’t know what genre your book is, here you go, this will get you started: 144 Genres and Subgenres Explained.

It does absolutely no good at all to throw an unreadable thirty-page “book” up on Amazon with a crappy cover and terrible description. You can do that if you want; it doesn’t cost anything but some of your time. But it won’t sell, and it very definitely won’t sell “massively” or ten thousand copies per month; it won’t be a bestseller; it won’t make you any money to speak of, and there is just no point.

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I hope this post was interesting even though ALL my regulars here are VASTLY more aware of what a book is, what a novel is, and how a book ought to be presented and therefore you knew all the above.

For anybody who is just starting out and has discovered that their book isn’t selling, that zero readers are buying it or reading it, I hope something here clarifies why there is a problem.

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