Mastering Amazon: Make Your Book Shine

We all want to make our books shine on Amazon, but it’s all too easy to get lost in the mountain of stuff there. There’s a secret professional publishers use that – if you publish through KDP – you’ll also have access too (for free!) It’s called Amazon A+ Content. In this article, we’ll explore what Amazon A+ Content is and why it’s a must-have tool to make your book stand out from the crowd.

What is Amazon A+ Content?

Think of Amazon A+ Content as a supercharged upgrade for your book’s product detail page on Amazon. It allows you to spruce up your listing with eye-catching images and compelling text. Essentially, it’s like creating a mini-website you can customize to give readers a taste of what they can expect from your book and pique their desire to hit that order now button.

The content will appear directly on your Amazon product listing page in a section called “From the Publisher”. Mine Looks like this:

Amazon A+ Content for Amazon KDP Book Example

Amazon A+ Modules

From here, let’s talk about the different modules you can select, which ones are popular for books and why, and which ones I used to make my A+ Content for Mortal Tether.

Author Highlight: Standard Single Image + Sidebar

For this section of my book’s page, I used the module Standard Single Image & Sidebar. From Amazon’s list, it looks like this:

Amazon Single Image and Sidebar A+ Content KDP

On the left. hand side, add your author photo
Top Middle: a bit about you as an author
Bottom Middle: keywords for your book
Top Right: an image of your book
Bottom Right: an elevator pitch on what makes your book special and why people should read it.

If you have editorial reviews, you can put them on the bottom right instead, but I didn’t have those yet so I went with the elevator pitch. Here’s how mine looks:

Meet the Characters: Standard Three Images + Text

I chose to do something I hadn’t seen before on a book’s Amazon product listing, which was to create a meet the characters section that uses the Standard Three Images and Text module (without the text). When selecting your module from the Amazon A+ Content list, select this one:

You must fill out the image keywords, but you don’t need to fill out the title section or the text that appears below the images. I made three of these sections, for a total of 9 character previews that include either a quote from the book the character depicted said or a short excerpt from the book.

It’s important to note: your images MUST MUST MUST adhere to Amazon A+ Content’s strict guidelines. You can’t use time sensitive words “coming soon” or call it a “best seller” or use social media logos, links, or web urls, and many other restrictions.

I had originally designed my character cards to have my website address mortaltether.com on them, and I had to remove that from the ones I used on my A+ content. Also, if you do include text, make sure the font is large enough to read on mobile. As you’re building your A+ Content on Amazon KDP, you can use the mobile preview function to make sure any font you include is legible.

Mine looks like this:

Appeal to the Instagram Crowd: Standard Multiple Image

When designing my Amazon A+ Content, I really wanted to think about my audience. I wrote a YA novel and purposefully designed my cover to have a very instagram/bookstagrammable quality to it. (The golden skull and flowers are an important scene in the book where we get the title MORTAL TETHER from – I could have chosen another important scene, but I knew the skull and flowers would be easy for bookstagrammers to pair items with: more flowers, wooden table, candles, skull jewelry or bookmarks, leaves, etc.)

Showing off a beautiful book cover will also appeal to people who want a pretty book on their bookshelves. So, I selected the module Standard Multiple Image Module A.

And here is how mine turned out. For the content on the right, I chose select excerpts from the book:

Mortal Tether Instagram Bookstagram KDP Content

If you need help

Go on Amazon, look at tons of books, and see if you can come up with creative ideas to use A+ content to make your books stand out! There’s so many possible combinations of modules, and it’s also a popular option to combine a design across several modules with breaks in between.

Have fun! And if you need help designing your modules, reach out to me through ElectraFox.com.