Publishing E-Books For Dummies

Modeling the Success of Other Authors in Your Genre or Niche

The e-book world is still in its infancy, with e-books only starting to achieve mass popularity in 2007 with the release of the Amazon Kindle e-reader. Now is an exciting time for independent authors — but figuring out what works and what doesn’t can be difficult, especially in marketing an e-book. By learning from successful authors in your genre or niche, you can improve your chance of success.

Look at the top five or ten books in your categories, and study their pages on Amazon.com and their authors’ pages at Author Central (if applicable). See whether your e-book is missing any elements or whether you can do something more effectively. For example, you might find that other e-books’ Amazon pages include an About the Author section with a couple of lines of biographical information. You can add this information by way of your Author Central account. (See Chapter 13 for more details on Author Central.)

Do what you can to find out how certain authors have marketed their e-books outside Amazon, too. Search for the author’s name and the e-book title at Google to see what results are returned. For example, you might find that a popular author has a lot of reviews on book bloggers’ sites or has a website of her own that seems to have a large audience.

Find out whether any best-selling e-book authors in your genre ...