Bottom Line
Your index is one of your strongest sales tools!
Selling is a process of building familiarity and trust. This requires good communication and keeping in touch with your audience. As you build your book it will have many parts that work together to help you market it. Those parts will capture readers’ attention, draw them in, get them to recognize your special expertise, and want to take your book home with them.
Your book cover, title, and subtitle will grab your readers’ attention. Your table of contents and other frontispiece material will pique your readers’ curiosity. Finally, for many readers, your index will show them whether the knowledge or insight they seek is in your book. Your index seals the deal. It gets your readers to buy your book.
Bottom line: A bad index can cost you sales and lose your book readers.
Make sure your book doesn’t lose sales! Get my free “Ten Tips for Spotting a Bad Index.” Along with “Ten Tips for Spotting a Bad Index” you’ll get a copy of my free The State of the Publishing Industry in the 21st Century: A Three Part Report. And you’ll get a subscription to my free newsletter, Wordmaps Tips, for as long as you wish.
Once you have a good index for your book there are many ways to market using it. Readers need to be able to look at your index before making that final decision whether or not to buy it. That’s why Amazon is so popular with book authors. Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” feature lets readers look at an image of your index. That’s a great sales tool!
But first you need to get prospective readers to go to Amazon and find your book! Why is this a problem? There are millions of books on Amazon and other online bookstore sites. How do people find anything on Amazon or other online stores? Library studies show that most people find things in libraries using “known-item” searches, i.e., the author’s name or the book’s title.
This means that you need to get your name and your book’s title to become “known items”! Want to know the best way to begin doing that? Click here