Sell Your Book on Amazon-Review of Brent Sampson's Informative Book

Author: Brent Sampson
ISBN: 1-432701967

Although I have contributed several hundred reviews to Amazon and I am even classified as one of their top one thousand reviewers, I never investigated how Amazon provides its authors with some terrific tools that would facilitate the promotion and selling of their books.

However, when I came across Brent Samson's Sell Your Book on Amazon, I realized how Amazon makes it possible to reach a worldwide audience almost without too much effort, as pointed out by Dan Poynter in the book's Foreword.

Sampson is the president and CEO of the self-publishing company, Outskirts Press and he has published two other books, Self-Publishing Simplified and Publishing Gems: Insider Information for the Self-Publishing Writer.

As indicated in the introduction to Sell Your Book on Amazon, it is crucial to grasp that Amazon is one of the most customer-centric companies in the world. Their business formula concentrates on deciphering what customers want and providing it, as well as using technical innovations to discover what the customer even doesn’t know they want, and deliver that as well. Furthermore, as anyone who is familiar with Amazon realize, all customer online experiences are personalized. Amazon has the knack of keeping a record of what we searched for in the past and what we purchased.

Sampson rightfully claims that the last "two components work synergistically to create an amazing online marketing opportunity." With all of this in mind, Sell Your Book on Amazon provides its readers with the necessary tools to leverage these ingredients and profit from them.

Divided into ten chapters, Sampson explores how books are presented and sold on Amazon. To help the reader in his analysis, he provides his own ranking system pertaining to the tactics he examines wherein a five star rating is highly recommended and a one star is one that should be avoided, unless unusual circumstances apply.

The first chapter looks at the way a book is listed on Amazon showing a difficult way and an easy path to follow. We then go onto learn about AmazonConnect, Amazon profile, Author photo & caption, About Me section, your profile Page, your Amazon blog, your bibliography, latest activity, reviews, listmania and Amazon guides, Amazon friends,search suggestions and tags and wikis.

An entire chapter is devoted to a detailed dissection of the Book Detail Page and it is here where Sampson uses as an example his own page pertaining to his book Self-Publishing Simplified. It is advisable when reading this important chapter that you do so in front of a computer in order to reap maximum benefits from the advice and suggestions offered. It is here where we find out about such tools as telling a friend, additional image views, product promotions, best value and better together, customers who bought books of a similar nature, editorial reviews, sales ranking, and the other topics you find on the Book Detail Page.

The remaining chapters discuss such topics as listmania and what this is all about, So You’d Like To...Guides, additional possibilities, BXGY where you pay Amazon to list your book in association with another book, pricing considerations, where I was surprised to learn about the percentage Amazon takes from each sale.

At 164 pages, with many illustrations and sidebars sprinkled throughout that succinctly sum up important tips and a useful index, this book without doubt will prove to be a valuable asset for authors who wish to successfully sell their book on Amazon.