If you read my post about first impressions you saw my best attempts at a cover that gets attention and sells books. The cover and the blurb – those are the levers the indie author can manipulate to get the prospective reader to give a book a look.

Writing and cover design are different disciplines, so I admitted my shortcomings and hired a pro. Here’s what he came up with:

I really like it. If the response from my forum friends and Facebook followers are any indication (my weekly reach hit an all-time high of 400 following my cover reveal) this one’s a winner.

What did it do for my sales? In the words of Flora Bugatti*, niente.

I’m happy with the blurb and the cover. My formatting is good and the sample chapters are well constructed. Either this book has no appeal at all, or no one is seeing my book page.

I finally got the analytics to work on my Amazon page. I now can see how many people are looking at my book and where they’re from. Here’s the graph from the last week, during which I sold two books:

That’s 137 looks from thirteen countries and two sales.

To be fair to myself, I’m pretty sure most of these looks came from people on the forum and not by shoppers happening on my book while browsing Amazon. Which led me to a realization.

Those folks on the forum who brag about selling 1000 books in a few weeks with no promotion at all must be driving a lot of traffic to their book pages. (In case you’re wondering if my forum buddies are lying, it’s easy to verify their sales figures from their ranking. They’re not shitting me.) That traffic must be coming from Amazon itself and not from the outside.

There are two ways that can happen, first, in a search, and second in the “also bought” section at the bottom of someone else’s book page.

I tried changing my categories and my search terms. It definitely had an impact on the number of looks. So I’ll be tweaking them and watching the effects.

As for linking to other books, well, I’m pretty sure that will only happen after I hit a tipping point and Amazon’s algorithm starts showing my book. Some people hit that by chance. Looks like I’ll  have to work at it.

Then my cover will get a chance to work for me.

Copyright © [2016] by Charles O’Donnell, All Rights Reserved

Author Website | Amazon Author Page | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter

*Flora Bugatti is a character in The Girlfriend Experience