BK Blog Post
Help Your Amazon Product Page Look Its Best
Posted by
Zoe Mackey,
Director, Digital Marketing,
Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc.
Zoe works with our ebook distributors to maximize visibility for our ebooks. She is leading our efforts to expand our direct to customer marketing through online methods.
Many customers are going to learn about and purchase your book through Amazon, so it’s important your book’s product page looks its best.
If you are a Berrett-Koehler author, we control your title’s print and digital metadata through a central database called Coresource. Coresource sends an updated metadata feed to all online distributors, including Amazon, once a week. It can take additional week for changes to be reflected on a distributor’s product page.
The product page for your print book appears on Amazon about six months ahead of publication date. It will have an early draft of your content description and author bio and no cover image, but this is okay. The product page will evolve as we finalize product details like page count and price, develop marketing copy and create the cover for your book.
About two months ahead of ship date, the product page should be in its final state displaying final product details and content description, author bio, and editorial reviews from author approved cover copy (unless otherwise requested). We work hard to make sure your book’s information is correct complete throughout the process but occasionally errors will appear either because a retailer has failed to update or Coresource has not been updated. Around this time, it is a good idea to check out how your book is looking on Amazon. Search for your book on Amazon and spot check the following:
- Cover image
- Title, Subtitle, Author name(s)
- Page count, Trim Size, and Price
- Author bio(s) (should match your bio from your jacket copy unless otherwise requested)
- Content description (should match your jacket copy unless otherwise requested)
- Reviews in Editorial Reviews section (should match your Endorsements, unless you’ve gotten press reviews)
If you would like to see modifications to your book’s metadata at any point, or if you see anything that looks wrong or outdated, please notify us immediately, and we will locate the source of the error and fix it immediately. It is important that BK is made aware of these issues because we need to make sure the error is not feeding out from Coresource. Additionally, we must work within the structure of the system to ensure the datafeed is not interrupted down the line.
Note: We make every effort to make sure the process goes as quickly as possible, but can sometimes take a few weeks to make corrections to your book’s data. Author Central enables you to adjust information displayed on your book’s product page yourself, and generally is a quicker route to mending any errors, but any field you adjust will mean that BK no longer has control over the data that appears there. Please NEVER do this without consulting us. If modifications are made through outside sources like Author Central, it can interrupt the data feed and prevent us from making further updates.
Related Books
How to Be Your Best When It Matters Most
By Rick Peterson, Judd Hoekstra
How to Be Your Best When It Matters Most
By Rick Peterson, Judd Hoekstra