Images in Posts and an Amazon Anomaly

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by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

A note today on what I’ve been working on images in our social media posts and a question for trad-pub to self-pub authors regarding Amazon.

First, the relatively new importance of images on our posts.  Any posts.

I’ve heard for a while that images are vital for visibility.  That can mean getting a really solid book cover design to make your book more salable, but it also means that blog posts and other social media posts get more visibility with a good image attached.

Although I was aware of this for years, I had one big thing  standing in my way…my horrid design skills.  Fortunately, that is no longer a problem.  My design ‘skills’ are just as horrid as ever, but I’ve got free design help through Canva and DesignFeed  . Now I can fake it better.

One of Twitter’s updates appeared to focus on images in its feed–automatic grabs of images on some posts (I’m assuming posts that have the appropriate image size for this type of automatic sharing).  I share a lot on Twitter, but I never deliberately attach photos through TwitPic or whatever the app is…images just upload themselves, which saves me a lot of bother.

I’ve noticed over the last few months that it’s true that posts with images are shared more and get more impressions than Twitter posts with text only.  Even articles I’ve shared that related to poetry, which never used to get shares now get lots of retweets and clicks.  The only thing that’s changed is the fact that Twitter is lifting images to accompany the article.

Second, an oddity with Amazon. Continue reading

How Writers Can Use Amazon’s “Look Inside” Feature to Get More Sales

by C.S. Lakin, @CSLakinStrategic Planning for Writers by CS Lakin

We writers just want to write, right?

But the sad truth is we have to be savvy marketers. And since most authors see the most sales on Amazon, and particularly through the Kindle Store, it behooves us to learn all the tricks to optimizing our product pages to entice customers to buy.

One of the ways you can help your potential customer to make that big decision to click “Buy Now” is to use the “Look Inside” feature to your advantage.

Usually when a potential customer lands on your page, the first thing she might do is read your description.Continue reading

Follow Up–Amazon Warning Labels

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigAmazon

Once again, I chose to focus on being patient as my New Year’s resolution.  By this point,   it’s my top recurring resolution of all time.

As I’ve written recently, one interesting thing about being a self-published writer is how quickly we can become accustomed to…indeed, addicted to…control.  We have control over everything as a self-published writer, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Actually, however, we don’t have control over everything.  One glaring exception is our retailers.

For a week, my addiction to control and my patience were both sorely tested. Continue reading

Kindle Preview Embed

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigKindle Preview 4

Do you read your newsletters from Amazon?  I’ll admit that I haven’t for years…not until the final couple of newsletters arrived in my inbox.  I’m not much of a newsletter person, usually.  This may explain why it pains me to send out newsletters to my readers. I feel as if I’m bothering them, even though they signed up for the thing.

This last email from Amazon had an interesting note about Kindle Preview (not Kindle Previewer, which is how we all proof our mobi files before hitting publish).  Kindle Preview is a bit of code that we can embed on our website to allow readers to see a preview of our book or purchase the book (from Amazon, naturally) without leaving our site.Continue reading

Amazon Pushing Quality Control

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraigAmazon

Amazon is sending out emails warning authors that they need to upload corrections to their books or else receive a quality-related warning label on their book page starting February 3rd:

Starting February 3, 2016 we will begin showing customers a warning message on the Amazon.com Kindle store detail pages of books that contain several validated quality issues. We will remove this message for a book as soon as we receive the fixed file from you and verify the corrections – typically within 2 business days.

We understand that even with the best quality controls, defects sometimes make it through. That’s why we’ve limited this messaging to books with several issues. Books with more serious quality issues will continue to be suppressed from sale.


Before the warning message appears, we would like to work with you to ensure these issues are fixed. After you’ve made the corrections, please upload your revised content through the ‘Book Content’ section in your KDP Bookshelf and republish it by clicking “Save and Publish” so that we can verify the corrections and prevent the warning message from being displayed on your book’s detail page.

Sadly, I received one of these emails. As you can imagine, it made me jump into action.

The book was one of the first self-published books that I published.  In 2011, I paid a pretty penny for a formatted file with an absolutely gorgeous interior design.

Unfortunately, pretty penny or not, the formatting makes text either difficult or impossible to read on certain Kindle devices (many of which launched after the formatting was created in 2011), according to Amazon.  This includes my title page, dedication, chapter headings, and the first letter of each chapter.

I have a new formatter now and I sent it to him yesterday. Rik Hall was good enough to immediately take care of the issue.  I’ve already uploaded a corrected file to Amazon.

There were also two inexplicable items Amazon listed. They referred to two typos:

Issue: Typo. Details: "down" should be "down" ". Location: 1144.

Issue: Typo. Details: "moment" " should be "moment". Location: 2453.

But neither location included either of those words, either in dialogue or in the narrative. What exactly was the issue that they needed corrected?

The email, if you get one, does refer to an address to write for more help.  I did send an email (regarding the ‘moment’ and ‘down’ mentions) and heard back nearly immediately that they’d forwarded my email to their ‘quality team’ for follow-up and that I should hear back in a couple of days.

Despite the drop-everything-and-work-on-this-one-issue feeling that I got from the email, I’m glad that Amazon is implementing some quality control measures. I definitely want my book to be easy to read and as error-free as I can make it. That only helps me in the long run.

I do wish I’d heard of any formatting problems before now.  Maybe an email was in my spam folder for a while? Usually readers are quick to either email me regarding issues or write about problems on a review.  Hard to imagine this just popped up when the book has been out for 5 years.

But this post is just to say…watch your inbox for an email like this one.  None of us want warning labels on our book pages! Ugh.

Keep an eye out for quality control emails from Amazon: Click To Tweet
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