As part of the Great Kindle Publishing Experiment, I must research as I run the “experiment.” So, I’ve been reading TONS of Kindle books on (you guessed it) Kindle marketing and the related topics.
Steve Scott has quickly become one of my favorite authors in this genre, for a couple of different reasons. First, you don’t get a lot of bullshit fluff from his work – and I appreciate that. I am busy, y’all!
Second, his stuff is legit. I mean, it actually works and it’s not underhanded in any way. It’s actually all about producing high-quality, useful and or entertaining stuff for your readers.
(I’ll be introducing all kinds of new favorite Kindle authors over the next several months of the project – so stay tuned. If you know of one who I should know about, hit me up!)
Scott is quite an inspiration as well as a pretty great teacher. (And he’s incredibly, refreshingly honest in his work.)
He recommends 9 add-on pages for Kindle best-sellers – and they make sense to me. I’ve been looking into formatting for awhile now and have seen most of these in some combination or another – but there’s one that I hadn’t even considered. Don’t worry, I’m sharing it with you, below.
As a result of this research, I’ll be going in and double-checking each of my currently published Kindle ebooks and adding in any pages I’ve missed. I’m creating this quick checklist of Scott’s formula for both your benefit and mine, but I highly recommend that you pick up that book, too.
Here’s my slightly-more detailed version of the checklist of the 9 add-on pages every Kindle best-selling ebook must include.
1. Title Page – The first page of your book should include the following elements:
- Title
- Subtitle
- Author
- Website
- Publisher Name (if applicable)
2. Legal Disclaimer – This is just to protect yourself. I’ve got a standard one I use – you can pick them up at various sites, or you can have an attorney draw one up for you. (Disclaimer: nothing said on this site should be taken as legal advice – be sure you check with your attorney before proceeding.)
3. Table of Contents – The TOC should also be hyperlinked to the top of each chapter and back again.
4. A Free Offer – I’m not going to go into a bunch of detail here, but basically, Scott suggests that you offer something up in your first few pages such as a free ebook or course. You ask for the reader’s email addy and in return, you give them something valuable/useful. It makes sense to me, especially since your email list is your most valuable selling asset, according to most of the research I’ve done.
5. A List of All of Your Published Titles – If a reader likes what he’s reading, he’s likely to want to read more of your stuff. Why not make it easier by providing a full list with links inside? (That spells more sales/promo opportunities for you, obvs.)
6. Contact Information – Let your reader know how to get in touch with you, should they have questions, concerns or things they want to talk about. You can include an email address, your Twitter, Facebook or other contact info – it’s totally up to you how much or how little you include.
7. A Request for Reviews – It never occurred to me to ask for book reviews RIGHT IN THE BOOK. But Scott says it works like a charm, so I’m going to give it a try.
8. Social Media Shares – Make it easy for your reader to pass along your book info if he loves it. Reader recommendations are among the top ways to cause a book to hit the best-seller list.
9. URL Forward – I’m not sure why he lists this here, except that he’s saying he wants us to use an easy-to-remember URL to forward to your Amazon.com author page. So before I read this, I had the same idea and set up one at TinyUrl – http://tinyurl.com/angieatkinson. But I might also go ahead and set up another, easier to remember and better optimized one. Scott says he uses one called ebooksthatmatter.com and he offers instructions for setting it up in the book.
So, tell me – do you have anything to add to this list? I’m all ears, people! This is only an experiment. 🙂 By the way, it turns out? The experiment is going exceedingly well, financially speaking. I’ll keep you posted! In the meantime, let’s connect on Facebook, shall we? We’ve got lots to discuss!
