Thanks Amazon

Yesterday was what my father would have called a Red Letter day: the section on The Blue Cabin’s page on Amazon headed ‘Customers who bought this item also bought..’ was properly populated for the first time, and now shows thirty or forty titles. Not a big deal for bestselling authors but crucial for first time authors like myself.

In practice what it means is that when someone visits the Amazon page of one of those cross-referenced titles, The Blue Cabin will be in their ‘Customers who bought..’ section - extra visibility and one of Amazon’s most valuable marketing tools, which can help to maintain the currency of a book and eventually invoke the much-vaunted and rather elusive Long Tail of marketing..

Amazon is great for this - as long as a title is in print and in stock at the major UK wholesalers (a whole other area), it will have it’s own listing on Amazon, with a picture of the cover and all those (hopefully) favourable reviews - a bit like a permanent face-out display in a high street chain. It’s especially important a couple of years after publication, by which time your book is likely to have been superseded, or at the very least swamped, in those same high street chains by the half million or so titles which have come out in the meantime.

All you have to do is encourage people to go to Amazon, and that’s another whole other area..

This is the link to The Blue Cabin's page on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blue-Cabin-Living-Tides-Islandmore/dp/0856407933