Amazon page “autopsy” on Gary Vaynerchuk’s new wine book

I saw a tweet this morning from @garyvee, aka Gary Vaynerchuk, where he was thinking about new ways to promote his book. Gary’s a master of social media marketing, and I’ve been looking forward to reading his book for a while.   Instinctually, I went to his Amazon listing page (ok, so I maybe I was just looking to see when my pre-order would ship). and saw a couple of things that he could do immediately to help sales of his book.

1. Search inside - no, the book hasn’t shipped yet, so that’s probably why. But this is a must for any book. How can customers virtually “leaf” through your book without it? We’ve seen this make a noted difference in sales of titles, so he should make sure his publishers have this feature enabled at publication.

2. Author comments - authors can put blog posts on their pages. I know some authors who don’t like to duplicate posts, or want to drive all traffic to their own blogs. Regardless, authors should put some blog posts on their page. It’s as if you were standing at the front door of a store waiting to hand sell your customers. And who doesn’t want to hear what Gary has to say?

3. Better Together - some of these are automatically selected, some are picked by publishers as coop (can’t for the life of me remember how to tell the difference). Ideally, you want the book you are paired with to be ranked higher than yours - they’re getting more traffic, which means more visibility for your book. Right now, the Better Together is probably doing more for the Dornenburg book than for Gary’s.

In less than 5 minutes, I came up with these three things.  If I spent more time there, I would probably find even more.  Well, to be truthful, I work with the best marketers in the industry, and THEY could really do some big pimping here, along with our Amazon rep, who is also aces. 

Every author should do an autopsy on their Amazon (and B&N, and Borders eventually) pages and make sure they and their publishers are doing everything they can on them, in an effort to help the customer and eventually maximize sales. 

Now, off to find a good red zin…