Nobody’s buying my book.

The six checks

Work down the list.

1. Your cover doesn’t say what kind of book it is

   A cover gets about one second to tell a browsing reader which shelf the book belongs on. Not whether it’s beautiful, but whether it’s for them. People who love cozy mysteries are looking for what cozy mystery covers look like. A cover that ignores that says “not for me” before anyone reads the title.

   This is the most common reason a good book doesn’t sell. It’s also the note authors fight hardest, because the cover usually means something personal.

   Try this: pull up the top 20 books in your category. Put your cover in that grid at thumbnail size. If a stranger couldn’t sort yours into the right pile in one second, it isn’t working, however good it looks full size.

   Read more: The thumbnail test · Genre cover conventions

2. Your description tells the plot instead of selling the book

   Most indie book descriptions explain the story. That isn’t the job. The job is to make a stranger want to know what happens, and that usually means saying less. Name the character, what they want, and what’s in the way. Then stop.

   The first two lines do almost all the work, because that’s all a reader sees before they tap “Read more.” If those lines set the scene, you’re spending your best space on warm-up.

   Try this: read your first two lines out loud with nothing after them. Do they make someone want the next line? If they’re about the weather, the town, or the backstory, cut straight to the thing that goes wrong.

   Read more: How to write a book blurb · Try the free Blurb Writer

3. You’re in categories nobody browses, with keywords nobody searches

   A book in the wrong categories is invisible in the one place readers go looking. Big, broad categories feel ambitious, but they’re a trap: you sit at rank 40,000 forever. A narrow subcategory can put you on a list people actually scroll.

   Keywords work the same way. Use words a reader would type, not words you’d use to describe your own book. “Literary” isn’t a search. “Small town mystery series” is.

   Try this: search the phrases you picked. If the results aren’t books like yours, the readers typing those words aren’t looking for what you wrote.

   Read more: Categories and keywords

4. The sample loses them

   A reader who liked the cover and the description opens the sample. That’s the last gate, and it’s decided in a page or two, usually before anything has happened in your story.

   Two different things go wrong here. One is the writing: a slow start, or backstory before the reader has a reason to care. The other is how the page looks. Uneven spacing, straight quote marks, a stack of hyphens, or a chapter that starts halfway down a messy page all read as unfinished. Readers can’t always name what’s wrong, but they feel it.

   Try this: open your own sample on a phone, cold, like a stranger would. Read one page. Would you turn it?

   Read more: Look Inside and samples · What good typesetting looks like

5. A reader who finishes has no way to come back

   If the last page is just the end, every reader you win is a reader you have to win again for the next book. That’s the treadmill most indie authors never get off.

   The fix is plain and it works. At the back of every book, offer something free, like a short story, a bonus chapter, or a deleted scene, in exchange for an email address. An email list is the one audience no algorithm change or platform rule can take away. Authors with a few thousand readers on a list often outsell better books that have none.

   Try this: open the last page of your own ebook. Is there an invitation there, or does it just stop?

   Read more: Newsletters and reader magnets · Back matter

6. There’s only one book

   Nobody wants to hear this one, and it’s the most reliable. One novel is very hard to sell at indie scale, because you pay to find each reader once and earn from them once. The math starts working when a reader who finishes one book can buy the next one right away.

   The same goes for books spread across four unrelated genres. That’s four audiences built from zero instead of one that grows. Readers pick a genre before they pick an author. If you write in several, choose the one you want to be known for and give it a run of books before you decide the writing is the problem.

   Try this: if you have one book out and it isn’t selling, you probably don’t have a marketing problem yet. You have a “next book” problem.

   Read more: Writing a series arc

If you want bookstores

Shelf space runs on terms, not taste.

A bookstore buyer decides on two things before they open your book: the discount they get, and whether they can send back copies that don’t sell. Miss either one and most stores pass.

That’s why a book printed only through Amazon KDP is almost impossible to stock. KDP doesn’t let stores return unsold copies, its store discount is low, and Amazon is every bookstore’s biggest competitor.

Know this before you pitch a store. A buyer who likes your book and then can’t order it on normal terms is a door that closes twice.

Getting into libraries and bookstores →