As part of my ongoing e-publishing quest, I have listed some Amazon Cover Creator pros and cons.
I also created an article about how the Visual Impact of the e-Book Cover can drastically affect sales. I have some bad/good cover examples based upon my experiences.
I also discovered the hard way that if you pick erotica as a category for your eBook, Amazon discards the other category selection. That is discussed here.
I found some charts on Author Rank vs guesstimated sales that I reference here
A few weeks ago several of my best sellers suddenly tanked. I could not understand what happened. I discovered that if I searched on my name, only part of my titles showed up.
It wasn’t that I was buried among a bunch of other books by similarly named authors.
I have a unique name, that is I’m the only author with my name on Amazon. I tried again on a friends computer with the same result.
I emailed KDP and asked if there was any reason why my books would not show up. I also spoke with someone at Author Central and they all told me everything was fine. I couldn’t understand it.
THEN, I discovered the Sales Rank Express tool. I used it to search for my name and the titles that were not showing up had an ADULT flag on them. This is different than the EROTICA category – you can have erotic books without an ADULT flag.
Hmmmm. I said — SO, I wrote back to Amazon and sure enough, they had slapped an ADULT flag on those eBooks. Post publishing. That keeps the books from showing up in searches UNLESS you go to the AUTHOR PAGE, OR you search on the exact book name. I negotiated with AMAZON KDP folks to make some changes to my tags and they removed the ADULT flag on one book. Next I sent a list of about six eBooks from as many authors with similar, if not worse content and asked why I got the special attention. They removed the ADULT rating from all but two of my eBooks (The Barbarian series).
SO – if your books aren’t showing up in searches – and you are writing about controversial subjects (erotica), you may have an ADULT tag problem.
I use the Search Rank Express for two reasons now – it lists your latest sales rank for all books and also tells you about the ADULT flag.
Ken Rander 