How to Revive a Dead Book on Amazon KDP - Step-By-Step
About this video
Sean lays out a step-by-step process for reviving a KDP book that has stopped selling. Step one is diagnosing why the book died: either there are problems with the book itself or there is a lack of marketing. Book problems include a poor keyword nobody searches for, an unattractive cover, a bad description, missing or bad A+ content, a poor title, or bad reviews caused by bad content. He stresses fixing fundamentals first, because marketing a flawed book only earns more bad reviews. He points to BookBeam’s listing analyzer, which scores a listing by ASIN and flags issues; in his example the only gap was missing A+ content, which he says can increase conversion rates by up to 10%. If the book itself is fine, the fix is marketing: gather more reviews (he contrasts a book with 20 reviews against competitors with 200 or 2,000) and run Amazon ads. As a last resort, he describes unpublishing and republishing the book as a new edition: update at least 10% of the content, upload it as a new listing with a separate ISBN, publish it, then unpublish the old book — but he warns not to abuse this because it looks sketchy to Amazon.
Key takeaways
- Diagnose first: a dead book either has fundamental problems (keyword, cover, description, title, content/reviews) or simply lacks marketing
- Fix book-quality problems before spending on ads or marketing, or you will just accumulate more bad reviews
- Use BookBeam’s ASIN analyzer to get a listing score and see exactly what to improve; missing A+ content can cost up to 10% in conversion
- If the book is sound, get more reviews and run Amazon ads — competing books may have 200 to 2,000 reviews versus your 20
- Last resort: update at least 10% of the content, republish as a new edition under a new ISBN, then unpublish the old listing — but do not abuse it
Episode details: published September 5, 2022 · 8:45 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Sean Dollwet’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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