Regular readers will know Issue 20 was supposed to be released last Sunday (the 18th Feb) and was about learning to write in flow.
I wrote the issue….but before I hit publish I was email chatting with one of my readers who suggested that this content might work for my business goals better if it was part of a paid book on Amazon.
I spent days thinking about that….and I’m still thinking about if truth be told…and it totally derailed me. So there was no issue last week.
This week is the first part of a two parter on adding A+ Content to book listings.
Before we get started, some notes:
I’ve no idea if adding A+ Content will lead to greater sales or not. (So I plan to add it to one book and see if those sales go up noticably - I can at least compare with sales for a similar period last year and also last month too.)
Because my music bookshelf now contains 23 books….with two more on the way…I don’t want to get sidetracked with creating A+ content for all of them if the return on investment isn’t worth it. (Though there is a possible short cut that we’ll get to.)
The one other drawback with A+ Content that excarbates the above point: you can’t create it for one book and then it appears for all listings for that book on different Amazon stores. Instead you have to add it one by one for each store. So that’s 23 books x 12 or 13 stores if I’m going to do it for everything. (Even if I get to this point….that will be a job for ‘the youth.’ But it’s still a job that needs paying for…and no point doing it unless it’s worthwhile.)
In Part 1 - this article - we’re going to look at A+ Content with some examples…and then in Part 2 I’ll create some and explain why I’ve made the decisions I’ve made.
#1 So What Is A+ Content
A+ Content is additional content that every book can have, but not every book does. A+ Content is distinguished by having a tag above it that says ‘ From The Publisher.’
Here’s part of the listing page for 100M Offers by Alex Hormozi which shows three disctint elements. Those elements are:
Popular Highlights In This Book
A+ Content
Editorial Reviews
Here’s the screenshot of that:
A couple of quick notes:
If you have a kindle version of your book, the quote cards’ under the popular highlights of your book are auto generated by Amazon. (Using AI I think.) As far as I’m aware, you can’t affect this. Though as only one of my books has a Kindle version - and you can’t highlight in that version - this feature has never crossed my radar. (Though that will change soon….and if the info changes that I’ve got access to, then I’ll update in PTWS of course.)
You can upload the content for ‘Editorial Reviews’ yourself. From what I’ve seen on Amazon, these need to be quotes from magazines or significant people in your field. Although I’ve seen some authors post quotes from their Amazon reviews (and from Amazon customers), the last time I looked this was against the TOS!
#2 Focusing On The A+ Content
Here’s a screenshot of just the A+ Content on 100M Offers with the different elements in the A+ Content numbered on the left hand side:
So conceptually this is pretty simple….I think each of these four items are images that are uploaded to the A+ Content Creator in Amazon. (Which we’ll get to in Part 2.)
Notice the structure of this:
The first rectangle sets out the transformation the book offers….how to get more people to say yes more cheaply AND for higher prices. Plus a nice pic of the book and the yellow ‘sticker’ with the caption ‘OVER 250,000 copies sold.’ They might wanna update though as the main description says Over 500,000 Copies sold.
The second rectangle is a quote block.
The third rectangle is an image from the book. And it creates curiosity.
The fourth rectangle is a CTA - it you want to go to the next level….how to make a grand slam offer.
So that’s a possible model. Let’s look at some other examples.
#3 Building A Story Brand
If you check out the listing for this one, there’s an interesting Carousel style group of images with the heading: ‘From The Brand.’ First time I’ve seent that….I’ll be checking out how to add that too….here’s the A+ Content:
2 and 3 might be the same panel - I’ll work that out when I get to the uploading phase in the next issue. The last item - number 5 - is a comparison chart where you can define all the variables and ticks and so on. I quite like that though, it’s a visual way to let potential first time browsers be aware of (some of) your other books. If of course you have other books.
#4 The 1 Page Marketing Plan
Here’s the A+ Content for the 1 Page Marketing Plan (by Allan Dib):
This is obviously much simpler than either of the authors.
#5 Andy Weir Project Hail Mary
This example is a fiction book:
While this quite a simple example - note how the image in the left hand side of Image 1 continues down to Image 2. Very cool.
#6 Atomic Habits
Here’s another non fiction example:
Again, this is pretty straightforward. But all these example should give you a good idea of what’s possible.
The Ride Out
So that’s Part 1 of ‘A+ Content' and hopefully that gives you an idea of what’s possible. Most of the images shown in the various different examples can be created pretty quickly using Photoshop or Canva or similar programs.
Issue 21
I’ll follow up this page with actually creating my first A Plus Content, detailing how I decided what to include, and screen shotting it….and hopefully starting to see if leads to any extra sales.