Learning From the Amazon Pages

I'll cop to being pigheaded. All my published books were designed, blurbed, and priced the way I wanted to do it. My covers didn't conform to genre standards; in fact, they wildly diverged from them. The apparent rule of thumb with women's fiction is, don't put an actual human on the cover. Just make it flowery (daisies preferred) or abstract with a font that seems to sail off the page. And be sure to use orange or yellow. I don't like those covers; they have no personality.

As for blurbs, the only time I've read any of them was when I was searching for comp titles. And I priced my books arbitrarily, mostly based on their length (a full novel, $2.99; a novella, $1.99). I did start out pricing them higher, but that didn't work out.

An author researching these factors can stumble upon a million different articles, most of which aren't helpful. Or an author can research in one spot ~ the Amazon bestseller pages. Why read a bunch of opinion writers telling us what sells, when we can actually see for ourselves what sells? 

Granted, we might not always like what we see. I detest the covers, but I can't deny that they work. Am I willing to surrender on that? I still haven't decided, but if I stick to my guns, I could well be sabotaging my book's chances.

Covers aside, I will definitely mimic the blurb format. Why wouldn't I? I have slaved and sweated over writing blurbs that in the end did nothing for me. Amazon's bestseller pages show me that I focused too much on the plot and not at all on "emotional words". The majority of women's fiction bestsellers' blurbs have two or three sentences about the plot, and the rest is filled with manipulative adjectives ~ courageous, devastating, heartbreaking, blah blah blah. Well, I can play that game, too.

I haven't taken the time yet to study pricing, and some of it is dependent on an author's name recognition, but I have no doubt I will find that most of the lesser-known authors' books are priced uniformly. 

Now that I'm done editing, I'm ready to proceed to the next steps. At least with Amazon's pages, I now have an authoritative guideline.