A+ Content Is Another Thing For Authors to Try in the Quest for Sales

 On Friday's post I talked about things I learned from being in a group with some other authors.  Another thing I learned was about A+ Content.  It's something I had seen on the Promote & Advertise page for books before, but I hadn't really dicked around with it.  Then I think it was Ms. Queen Bee who mentioned books with A+ Content seemed to sell a little better, so I thought I might try it.

Chances are you've probably seen A+ Content on Amazon pages without even realizing it.  For example, if you look at a computer on Amazon and there's a list of other models and a chart comparing their features, that's A+ content.  Or there might be editorial reviews or some other highlighted review from Kirkus or something like that.  Here's a good example of a professional one for John le Carre's Silverview:

And that was the reason I hadn't really bothered with it, because I didn't really have that kind of stuff.  I didn't have reviews from the New York Times, Time, and Vanity Fair and I wasn't a #1 New York Times Bestselling Author.  But you can do other things with it.  

Here's the one used for Alex Cavanaugh's Cassa series:

Looking at a couple of Ms. Queen Bee's books, she used a graphic with the title and maybe a quote from the book or something.  I figured I could do something like that--so I did.

My first attempt didn't go well.  I thought I could do a two-piece thing sort of like a book trailer.  The first graphic would have a setup, showing a resort like in my story Invitation to Paradise.  Then the second graphic would show a couple of frisky women or something.  Buuuut...it didn't really work.  The only thing you can do with just a graphic is a "logo" which turned out pretty small, and you can only use it once so I had to have another thing for the second image and put text over it and the whole thing looked stupid.

I refined my approach with one for The Swap Box and just used one thing with elements of the cover, a quote from the book, and the title.  Below that I basically just put the description of the book in a second time:

The only problem then was I had to wait a full week before they approved it to put it on the book.  Once I saw that worked decently, I started to do more for upcoming books.  And for the hell of it, I did some for my Chances Are books.  The first one didn't turn out great because the PowerPoint I used to set it up didn't match the size on Amazon exactly so stuff got a little cut off.  I squeezed it together better for the Second Chance one:

And the Last Chance one too.  The funny thing is, those ones got approved right away!  Like literally in seconds.  Maybe because they weren't erotica, though the Invitation to Paradise one wasn't erotica either.  So maybe after you do a couple it starts approving them quicker?  I don't know.  It's weird.  It's Amazon. [shrug]

I probably wouldn't go back and do a bunch of these for my older Eric Filler books or the Scarlet Knight books or whatever because at this point, what would it matter?  But I'd probably do this more often going forward because why not?  

It's really not hard to do.  I used just the standard PowerPoint slide and put my cover elements and text in there.  Though like I said, I had to kind of scrunch things together so it'd fit on the Amazon page.  If you use PhotoShop or whatever it would be basically the same thing.  I'm not sure exactly what size you'd need, but something that's a big rectangle.  Then just put something from the cover in and some text and then below the graphic I put a headline and basically just the description at the top of the page.  You can write some new text if you want.

The point is, it's pretty easy to do.  And my philosophy on this stuff is:  if it don't cost a lot, why not give it a shot?  Hey, that rhymes! 

The other thing to remember is the A+ box is landscape while your cover is most likely portrait.  So like with the Chances Are ones I just took the elements of the cover and put them into a landscape format.  Or for the Swap Box one I took the picture of the woman and box and the title and used a generic black box.  It can be more difficult if you have a cover image with a background that isn't easy to drop out or to extend.

In that case you might want to do like with Knocked Up Surprise where I used a completely different picture and pregnant woman.  This is the cover it published with:

And this is the A+ content:

I'm sure Ms. Queen Bee would say you have to spend a bunch of money on your A+ Content graphics, but I try to just use free ones.  Since I don't know whether this stuff really does much good, I don't want to spend a bunch of money on it.  You can if you want.

One final caveat:  if you do A+ for Amazon.com that only applies it to the main site.  You would have to recreate it and get it approved for each country site like the UK, FR, DE, AU, etc individually, which seems like a real pain in the ass.  I mean, not only do you have to load everything again, you have to log into each site individually and then you'd probably have to do a 2-step verification before you can even do anything.

I haven't really bothered doing that yet but if I did, I'd probably just do like UK, DE, AU, and CA as those are the ones I get most foreign sales to.  But as long as you have to log into each one separately and load it separately, it seems like too much effort.