How Amazon Book Marketing Works in 2026

Today is the Amazon book marketing strategy that works in 2026 and beyond. And what I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about the A10 or unofficially A10 Amazon algorithm update. This is something that we’ve been looking at for a long time. Amazon has totally shifted away from manipulation and fake bestsellers and all of that, which is fantastic. and they’ve shifted towards trying to at least come up with what they consider more authentic buyer behavior. And that’s really good. That’s good for us because authentic buyer behavior is what our books create because we have real people that are coming to them buying our books and exhibiting that behavior. I’m going to talk through six different points and I’ll give you kind of some next steps to think about. So, this is stuff that we’ve been applying to our launches. Those of you who have been around bestseller publishing for a long time have noticed more than likely that we’ve started to do things differently with our launches, and that’s as a response to the A10 algorithm update. Okay? It’s all about authority. It’s about visibility. It’s about external traffic. It’s about creating consistency. It’s about how your book and your brand is positioned. Okay? So, we’re going to talk all about that today. Uh, understand this. I mean, Amazon is not the enemy here, right? They care about what you care about, and that’s selling books. They’re they want to make money, and you want your book to make money as well. You want it to be in front of people. So, if your book gets clicked, if it gets purchased and reviews, then Amazon wins and you win, right? So, this is all about creating a win-win scenario. And so it’s not like there’s a terms of service update that gives us the A10 Amazon algorithm update. There’s not. But we can extrapolate over the last few months of what Amazon is really paying attention to. So I want to give you six things today that Amazon is paying attention to and that if you pay attention to, you’re going to sell a lot more books and your book is going to create great momentum and continue that way. Okay. So number one, positioning of your book matters more now than it ever has. Amazon is a search engine. I talk about this a lot, right? People don’t go on Amazon for the most part to do research. They go on there to buy something. And so Amazon wants to make sure that they give the best possible experience to their buyers. So they do that or at least the AI and the algorithm does that by using contextual relevance. That means that your title is more important than ever. Your subtitle is more important than ever. Your description of your book more important than ever. Your keywords for KDP more important than ever. Having Amazon A+ content more important than ever. Even the look inside is really important because Amazon is going to read that. It didn’t used to be able to. It can now. It’s going to read that and it’s going to determine the context so they can show your book to the right people. So, you need to always be asking yourself, this is something that you’re doing on your own or if this is something that you’re thinking about for books in the future or whatever, you need to ask yourself, what other books that are selling really well, that are best sellers, is most like my book? And you need to make sure that you create the context and the relevance for your book for Amazon to see, okay, well, this book is just like all of these other bestsellers, and so we’re going to send that traffic to this book as well. Okay, this perfectly aligns with what I talk about on a regular basis. what we’ve been teaching a long time. Always make your book, always make the chapters, always make the content about your ideal client, their problems, their concerns, their desires. If your book is vague, if it’s too general, if the positioning is vague, then Amazon is going to struggle to categorize it and readers are going to struggle to understand it and they’re not it’s not going to be purchased. So, you need to be narrow. You need to be focused. You need to give Amazon context and be thinking about that. And I just gave you a bunch of different ways to consider that, right? The title, the subtitle, the description, the keywords, the A+ content, even the look inside sample. Really, really important. That’s number one. Number two, external traffic is now massive for Amazon. This is one of the biggest shifts in the whole thing. Amazon is increasingly rewarding books that get traffic from outside Amazon. Okay. Now, what does that mean? That means that promotions that yes, we do at bestseller publishing take a like make a greater impact on your book, but also anything in an ongoing manner that you do is going to be multiplied because Amazon is going to take note of that. So podcasts that lead back to Amazon or social media or email lists or PR that you do or YouTube or blogs or speaking or or a JV promotion or anything else, influencers, there’s so many different ways to send outside traffic to your book, but Amazon is going to reward you for that outside traffic. See, it’s not just that people went to your Amazon page because you talked about it on your blog. It’s that yes, people went there. Amazon notes it and so Amazon raises you up in its search engine and allows more people to find you. This is huge for you. Huge for a best-seller publishing author because this is what we always talk about. We always talk about we don’t want to rely on Amazon. We don’t. What do I have? Well, I have BookFunnels. If I write a book, I create a funnel. You know that. I tell you that all the time. Why? Because I don’t want to rely on that. Well, here’s the beautiful thing. If somebody is buying through Amazon and we’re sending traffic there, Amazon’s going to reward you for it. We’ve never taught or believed upload and pray. Yes, pray and keep on praying. But don’t upload and hope and pray that your book is going to sell. No. Your book leads to visibility, conversations, clients, momentum. That’s still true. And Amazon wants to reward you when you send people to the Amazon page from outside traffic. Okay? So, your marketing really shouldn’t be all about Amazon, but it should be partially about Amazon. You want to send traffic to Amazon. Something that I [snorts] noticed Russell Brunson did years ago, which uh I always thought was uh was interesting, and we’ve started to do more of that and are going to create this within all of our funnels. But I asked uh Russell about this. If if you ever if you ever go to one of Russell’s book funnels like do secrets or expert secrets or traffic secrets and then you go to opt out or you go to you know you know how you can go to click the X and then there’s a a popup that appears. Well, Russell’s exit pop or exit popup is basically sending people to buy the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or through another channel. Now, he always told me that he did that because sometimes people don’t trust funnels and because of that they always trust Amazon or almost always trust Amazon or Barnes & Noble. And so because they don’t trust funnels, he thought if I just send the traffic to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. What he didn’t know was and that that is true, it it does kind of check that box of I don’t trust this off-brand website, but I do trust Amazon. So that’ll get you a sale. But what it also does for any of you who do have BookFunnels or you’re interested in creating one, if you have that as an exit pop, then Amazon’s going to reward you because that’s outside traffic that you’re sending to the Amazon. And if someone’s going to exit your website or exit your funnel, why not give them an opportunity to buy the book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, etc. So really, really, really important. External traffic bigger than ever, more important than ever when it comes to Amazon and its A10 algorithm. All right, number three. Number three, your cover matters more than ever. It matters more than ever. This isn’t new news in one sense. Uh I preach on a regular basis how important your cover is and that books are sold on covers and titles. All true. Here’s what’s more true. Amazon is paying more attention to it now than they ever have before. Why? Well, they care about things like your click-through rate, your conversion rate, your reader engagement. And if they care about those kinds of things and they’re tracking them, and trust me, they are, then oftentimes the difference between someone clicking through or not, somebody converting or not, is your cover is the very first thing that they’re seeing, the thumbnail. So your cover really important. The question is not do you like the cover, [laughter] right? The question isn’t even does Rob like the cover, right? The question is does this cover properly and professionally position me position my book in this category? And something we always talk about is when you’re creating a book and you want that book to do well in a category, you need to know that category. And the best thing you can do is research that category to look at what other best sellers in that category look like. Look at what their cover looks like. Look at what their title is. Look at the rules, if you will. Look at their description. Look at their keywords, etc. When you learn those things, then your book contextually for Amazon will be positioned correctly. And more than likely, if your cover, at least from the standpoint of aesthetically, mirrors some of those rules for that particular genre, then probably you’re going to get good clickthroughs on it. So, do some research. Review books in your category. Review books in your genre. Look at the ones that are successfully selling. Look at the ones that are best sellers. Your cover is not art, right? Yes, there’s an artistic element to it, but it’s not about art. It’s not about making a statement of the beautiful imagery. It’s about positioning and it’s about context and it’s about clickthroughs with Amazon because Amazon is a search engine. That’s number three. Number four, the rule of momentum. This is a a really important shift and this is something that well, you’ll you’ll see as we talk about our model for launching books, but a lot of people Well, let me put it this way. I I have been invited to conferences where everybody purchased each other’s books for 99 cents so they could have a big pop in the sales where there’s a conference of a hundred people and everybody’s buying each other’s books and so it pops up and it hits besteller for an hour or two hours or best case scenario for one big day. Let me tell you something that never worked. That was never a real besteller. wasn’t a bestseller then and it’s most certainly not a bestseller now. Now, Amazon’s not dumb. They know that there have been conferences and individuals and people that have done that for a really long time where there’s one big thrust, one big day, and they hope that because of that one big day, it creates momentum. It does not. Okay? Momentum is created over time. And what Amazon has done is they’ve stretched out that time even more. They want to see 30 days of like sustained and even increasing momentum. Now, just so you understand, when we launch a book, and for those of you that we’ve launched a book for, or those of you that we’re going to launch a book for, understand we always, and this has been something we’ve done for more than a dozen years now, is we have a two-step launch. The first step we call is the soft launch or the review phase. This is the part of the launch, and we’ll talk more about reviews in a minute, but this is the part of the launch where sales are coming in. People are buying the book. We’ve discounted it so that people will buy it and will offer us a review. And reviews are more important than ever. Only after that do we launch the book with what we call our hard launch, which is all external traffic. It’s paid advertising using the Amazon link, external traffic. It’s press releases, external links using the Amazon link and traffic. Same with social media, Facebook, etc. All of this is to do two things. One is to make the launch itself a momentum building experience, a momentum building process. That’s part one. Part two is to actually get reviews, but I’ll talk about that more in a moment. Okay. So, it’s really important that you show Amazon some sustained and even growing momentum. Now, outside of what we do, outside of what bestseller publishing does, there’s lots of things that you can do. You can create content on a regular basis on your your socials. If you have an email list, you should have like email campaigns or a super signature. My book sells every single day simply because in the signature of my emails I am recommending people buy my book and they do. You should have evergreen funnels which I talked about that a moment ago. You can obviously do media podcast appearances etc. There’s lots of things you can do and and by the way Amazon ads is not one of them that I would recommend. Now, that doesn’t mean Amazon ads are bad, but Amazon ads, the way Amazon looks at that is they still consider that traffic from Amazon even though you’re paying for it. So, they want external traffic. They want traffic from your podcast, from your email list, from your social media, from your platforms, etc. Okay? This is why we always have and now more important than ever recommend a soft launch focused on selling books and getting reviews. And it usually takes three or four weeks to do that. And then followed by a hard launch which for us is a full week of external traffic, ads, social media, press releases, etc. This is all about creating momentum. And momentum matters more now to the A10 algorithm update than ever before. That was number four. Really, really important. Number five, and I touched on this, reviews and authority signals, right? Social proof. That’s what reviews are. Amazon more than ever is looking at reviews and they want to see a velocity of reviews. Now, I’ve talked about this and those of you who have been around and have been a client of BSP or been around BSP for a long time, you know, we always talked about, you know, out of the gate, we want to get five reviews, 10 reviews, 15 reviews. And you’ve heard me in the last 6 months to a year say, “Now, you really need like 50 reviews now.” and you need to get those in the first 30 to 60 days. That is because of Amazon’s algorithm update. Okay, Amazon is really looking at this and they’re also really strict on reviews. By the way, if you get a bunch of reviews and some of those reviews are taken down by Amazon. Obviously, you can complain to Amazon. Obviously, you can try to explain to them, hey, those are legitimate reviews. But if they choose to take them down, it’s their platform. What I tell people is move on and get your next review. There’s nothing you can do if Amazon chooses to take a review down. I’ve had many reviews taken down. They were legitimate. They were honest. They were good reviews. Now, I wouldn’t mind if they took the bad ones down, but that’s okay, too. Even the bad reviews can uh can, you know, lead to good conversations. Just a side note, it’s going to happen. You’re also going to get your first one-star review if you haven’t yet. Good for you. Mother Teresa on her books has over a thousand one-star reviews. And if Mother Teresa is going to get hate, guess what? Me and you are probably going to get some hate, too. So, don’t worry about the bad reviews. Just focus on getting good reviews, getting as many as you can out of the gate. Shoot for 50 in the first 30 days, for sure. It builds up social proof. It increases your Amazon page authority. It’s really, really important. It’s why we focus so much and why I’ve been talking about more recently and for those of you who’ve been around a while, you know this to be true. In the past, we focused on getting 10 15 reviews. Now, we want to get 25 to 50. And really, we want to lean towards getting 50. And then that gives Amazon the trust signal that it needs to kind of blow things up for you. Okay, that’s number five. Number six, and finally, and then I’ll give you guys some action steps as well, is I want you to have a holistic approach for Amazon and for your book. Okay? In one sense, this is maybe the most important thing that I’ll say today. Amazon now more than ever is favoring authors who think holistically. What do I mean by that? I mean, you think beyond the book. You think the book is about your brand. The book is about creating credibility for you. The book is about consistency and conversion and traffic, right? What we’ve talked about forever is the you want to use the book to attract what you want from the book. Now, if you say, “Well, all I want to do is sell books.” Well, everything that I’ve said up until now is important. And I understand if you just want to sell books and and you don’t want to have an author profile at all and you don’t want to have any personal credibility. Let me just tell you, it’s going to be hard for you to sell books. You can sell books with a pen name. You can. But that pen name needs to have some authority and a brand. And I have a client that is one of the top five bestselling authors in the fiction space here in the United States that makes between 1.2 and 1.5 million a year in royalties alone. But guess what? And she writes with a pen name. But her pen name has a brand. It has authority. It has credibility. You have to think much beyond much more beyond just I want to sell copies of the book. You have to think of it holistically. We are using the book to build a brand. We’re using the book to build credibility. We’re using uh the book to build your platform. Amazon wants that. They do. Now, we’ve always taught the importance of authority and audience building and and all of that. Just understand Amazon also now more than ever sees the importance of that. It’s not just about selling books. You’re building a platform and they understand that because when you come out with book number two, then they’re going to get a flood of more sales and they understand the importance of that. That’s what they want. Okay, so that’s number six. And that that kind of is the bigger idea which we talk about on a regular basis, right? Think of it holistically. Think about what the book is doing, not just that the fact that the book is selling. Okay, let me give you some practical action steps. whether we’re doing the launch for you or whether you’re doing this all on your own. So ask yourself or even if your book has been launched and maybe it’s floundering a little, does your title and subtitle clearly attract the right audience? Ask yourself that does it. Does the person that looks at your cover see like context? They see professionalism. They see something positioned correctly for your genre. Do they see that? Ask yourself, are you building like visibility outside of Amazon? Do you have a way to send people to Amazon to buy your book, speaking engagements, podcast, media? You’re creating content on your own social platforms, whatever it is. Do you have something or are you building something that will send traffic to them? Number four, do I have a like 30-day strategy? Do I have a soft launch and hard launch strategy like I just outlined for you? If you’re doing this on your own, you need to have that. You have to think in those terms. Think in terms of am I do I have enough reviews on my book and am I really treating my bu my my book like a business or like an asset, not just like a product. It is not a product. It’s not a very good product by itself, but it’s a tremendous asset if you use it like one. Okay. In some ways, this might not be like new news to you, but in other ways, I hope it is because I’m trying to put the pieces together. If you’ve heard the message change, like with the number of reviews that you need, just understand this is part Amazon and part their algorithm. And it will change again. I don’t know all of what it will look like in the future, but it does seem to me that it’s changing in the right direction. They are a search engine. They are a massive search engine. We have to give Amazon what it wants. so that we can get what we want. And it’s not about gaming the system. We’re not trying to game the system. We’re trying to determine what is it that Amazon is looking for. Contextual cover, contextual book description, contextual Amazon A+ content, right? Matching other books in its genre that are successful. All of those things, they are you signaling to Amazon, hey, this is a book that those other people will want. Those buyers that made that book successful are going to want this book as well because I’ve checked all of these boxes for you.