If you’ve been following my recent blog posts, I’ve been spending time educating myself on selling books on Amazon. I figured I’d document my process to help other self-publishers like me.

Earlier, I’ve talked about the importance of understanding the long tail. Amazon’s book catalog is 32.8 million entries deep, with thousands of new books uploaded daily to the platform. Visibility is an enormous problem. Knowing your audience is paramount: how will they look for your product? How does your book scratch their itch?

One way to overcome the problem is to ensure your descriptions and keywords match what people are searching for. That’s an organic technique where you research keywords and phrases people will use to find your book; you might even use those keywords in the book's title and subtitle to improve its search relevance.

However, optimizing Amazon and web search is just a small slice of the marketing problem. The challenge we face next concerns converting a potential customer into a buyer, and to understand that, we need to explore the Amazon sales cycle.

Your job is to write a product that scratches an itch: it must meet a need. If you think about how your product meets your niche's needs, the easier it’ll be to prepare search terms and descriptions for your book.

When they land on your book, the cover attracts or repulses the customer. It’s the first element of the buying funnel, and it has to meet their expectations.

Next would be the title, subtitle, price, and description. If these elements fail to convince customers that your book fits their needs in approximately seven seconds, they’ll click away.

Okay, if you convince them to stay, that’s a win. The next step a prudent customer might take is to read the first 10% of the book and examine the reviews. Good reviews are exceedingly important in sealing the deal.

The customer exits the funnel when they add your product to a cart. Now, it’s a buy decision. They’ve selected the work because they consider it worthy and must commit to the buy. That commitment is a conversion.

A conversion is a sale. It’s how you get royalties as a writer. Further, every sale triggers an algorithm in Amazon that addresses the fulfillment of customers' needs, and understanding that referral engine is critical to understanding the sales cycle:

• Amazon will now identify you as a preferred author and send emails to customers alerting them to new releases or updates in your catalog.

• Amazon will market Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads similar to your book to the customer.

• Amazon will note the demand for your book and — if there are increasing levels of conversions / more sales surrounding your book — your Sales Rank is increased and it starts pushing your book harder to others who share similar interests, putting your book higher in the relevance scores for searches.

• That means potentially wider audiences and more sales. Even if your book is being offered for free, it’s still increasing Sales Rank and kicking off the referral engine.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t show us how many people land on our page and engage in our funnels or how long they languish in a cart before conversion, but any of these obstacles may prevent a sale. They’re probably on your page because the Title and Subtitle were sufficient to draw them in. However:

• If the cover is bad, they’ll click away.

• If the price is too high, they’ll click away.

• If the description doesn’t scratch their itch, they’ll click away.

• They'll likely click away if they can’t look inside the book, or, if they look inside, they can’t easily find the contents or a writing sample.

• If there is an insufficient number of good reviews (and that number may vary for people — I’ve seen estimates of 3+ reviews are just as good as 100+ reviews, and I’m more inclined to believe that as numbers become nebulous to ordinary people beyond 10) — they’ll click away.

Studying user activities with these elements, doing your market research, and getting feedback from your reader and writing communities is fundamental to walking the customer down the funnel to conversion.