With over 190,000 other books currently cataloged in the Kindle store, how can you make your books stand out in the crowd?

Whether you’re using leverage method 1 or leverage method 2 as described in Part 3 of this series there are several things you can do to give yourself an advantage when selling your ebooks in the Kindle store.

You’ve got 2 weapons at your disposal…

1) You absolutely MUST maintain some form of exclusivity.

Trying to sell the exact same book as everybody else is a real quick way to get your book into the 99 cent bargain bin.

Unfortunately, a lot of Kindle publishers know about sites like Project Gutenberg and they also know that the vast majority of books on Gutenberg are copyright-free so you’ll find a lot of stuff taken from there and republished on Kindle.

And… Amazon has cracked down – they just don’t allow you to republish public domain content “as – is” if someone else already has that book published.

Consequently, you’ll find many publishers competing with each other trying to sell copies of the exact same book – for obvious reasons that’s not a position you want to find yourself in.

If you are leveraging method 1 (generating new revenue streams by only selling books made with content that you wouldn’t be monetizing by other means anyway) then you would really be shooting yourself in the foot as far as price is concerned.

Try to stick with titles that no one else is using.

Check the Kindle Store - Try to avoid the same content that others are using.

Public domain stuff from the years 1923-63 works great for this because most of the well-known online public domain repositories like Project Gutenberg avoid this golden 40 year span like the plague even though there are millions of public domain works from that timeframe.  That is exactly the content I provide in the Public Domain Book Club!

They avoid this time frame simply because it takes more effort to perform copyright renewal searches to clear the works and if they miss a renewal and mistakenly use something that is still protected, they could get sued – therefore the overall commitment of time and resources (not to mention the risk) is much, much greater.

This is great news for you and I as info publishers because it means that we have a HUGE pool of public domain books to pull from that should have absolutely zero competition in the Kindle store simply because most of these other publishers are either too lazy or too ignorant to pursue public domain works from this time frame – but we know better don’t we?

2) Put your marketing and copywriting knowledge to good use…

In order to make your Kindle products really stand out you can put your marketing and copy writing skills into play. This is something that a most Kindle publishers have no clue about.

Here’s a few pointers for making your ebooks stand out…

Title – they actually give you a very generous amount of room in the title field for your book, 128 characters. Use this to your advantage by using powerful benefit-driven keywords at every opportunity.

You should have enough room to insert the actual title of your book followed by these keywords. Think of this as a headline.

This is one of the first things (along with the cover image) that perspective buyers will see so make it count. It’s every bit as important as your auction title on eBay or your headline in a Google Adwords ad.

Cover Image – no explanation should be needed here – you already know how important this is. A really nice, vivid cover image will draw eyes off of competing products and on to yours.

Description – I don’t know yet exactly how many characters you are allowed to fit in this field but I can tell you one thing – it’s a lot! Your description is where you can really let your copywriting skills shine.

You can’t do any real formatting like bolding, italicizing, or underlining but there are more basic ways to draw attention to the various parts of your text if you use a little creativity – asterisks, clever uses of the right and left arrow symbols, tildes, hyphens, and underscores are useful for drawing attention to certain aspects of your copy when used correctly.

Think of this area as a mini sales letter.

Use strong benefit-driven bullet points to describe your product. Most lazy publishers use this field to provide a really quick summary of what the book is about.

You can go way beyond this and actually compose a full blown sales letter.

Tell your prospects why they need your book and what problem it will help them solve. This is also the part where you would discuss any bonuses that you are including with the purchase of your book.

TIP: Always, always place a URL at the end of your book directing your readers to a related website that you own.

The Kindle store now let’s shoppers download a preview of the first 10% of your book so if you’ve got the download link on the first page or anywhere within that first ten percent, you’ve just lost an edge (unless you really don’t care whether or not they ultimately buy your Kindle book because you were just trying to get them back to your site and collect their info anyway! In that case stick the URL right in the front).

Author – most publishers overlook this field but there is a lot of power here.

You can use this field for branding yourself (or whoever wrote the book) as an expert and establish instant credibility with Kindle store shoppers.

You could follow up the name of the author with some sort of impressive tag line or title.

Remember, you’re competing with a lot of other books on the same or similar topics so credibility counts.

Would you rather buy a dog book by a guy named Bob Smith or a dog book by A. BARTON, B.S., D.V.M., Veterinary Surgeon or perhaps Barbara Callahan – The Dog Whisperer? See what I mean?

Category – This one’s a no brainer but I’ll say it anyway – make sure you place your books in the right category, ok?

That may seem silly to say but if you don’t it will be very unlikely that interested shoppers will ever find your book as I believe that the majority of shoppers in the Kindle store find what they need by browsing by category.

Okay… now I know you have Got To Be Pumped about publishing your first Kindle Book!  Right?

Make sure you don’t miss all the “parts” in this Amazon Kindle Tutorial:

Amazon Kindle Public Domain Connection Part 1

Amazon Kindle Public Domain Connection Part 2

Amazon Kindle Public Domain Connection Part 3

How To Publish On Kindle – Free Video and Report

p.s. Just so you know… some of the subscribers to the Public Domain Book Club have already used a few of the books for just this purpose! They have made “new” books using of the 5 “Modes” Of Public Domain Publishing.

Tagged as: Amazon Kindle, kindle, Public Domain, Publishing