Promote Great Books! Make a List!

My Listmania List

I’ve just recently ‘discovered’ lists on Amazon.  They’ve been there all the time staring me in the face and I’ve even read quite a few of them, so I’ve no idea why I hadn’t thought of making one before myself!  They seem like such a great way to promote other authors' great books (and of course, one’s own work!)  Amazon lists come in two forms, ‘Listmania’ and ‘So you’d like to . . .’


‘Listmania’ seems to be the easier of the two to create.  If you haven’t done this before, you should log onto your Amazon account and then go to this link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/createpipeline/ref=cm_lmt_srch_c

Here, you need to type in a title for your list and your qualifications, e.g. I wrote ‘romance author’. I don’t think it needs to be a detailed resume! After that, in the third box, you can start creating your list.  Just write a brief introduction (there is no minimum number of words, but it has to be less than 2000 characters) and then click on ‘Add Product’ to add books to your list, or any other Amazon products that you’d like to mention.  If you want to, you can write a little bit about each product in the box that comes up after you have selected an item.


‘So you’d like to . . .’ is more of a guide than a list, though the process and results are similar. To create a ‘So you’d like to . . .’ guide you should log onto your Amazon account and then go to this link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/create

This is a very similar page to the ‘Listmania’ page and again you have to create a title and input your qualifications, only this time you need to write a longer description, 100 words minimum and 5,000 maximum. Within this description you can feature the books you want to promote by clicking on ‘Insert product link’ (in the same way that you can feature a book when you write a book review on Amazon).

For both types of lists, when you have finished, you have a chance to preview your work before you publish it.  You can also edit or delete the lists anytime after you have published them.  However, I found that locating the lists that I’d made was a bit tricky.  I finally managed it by clicking on ‘Your Account’ in the top right-hand corner of any Amazon page (once logged in), going to ‘Personalisation’ and within that, ‘Community’ at the bottom of the page and then clicking on ‘Product  Reviews Written By You’.  This took me to a page where I could locate all my reviews and lists in a panel on the left-hand side of the screen. Alternatively, click on ‘Your Lists’ on the top right-hand corner, which takes you not to your lists, but to your wish lists.  However, if you then click on ‘Your Profile‘, which now appears under the ‘Cart’ and ‘Your Lists’ buttons, you end up at ‘Your Profile Page’ which displays your reviews, lists and guides.

So far I’ve written a couple of lists and guides, for example:

Great E-Books Published in 2011

So you’d like to Read a Great Sheikh Romance

So you’d like to Read a Great Indie Romance

If you like them, please share them on Facebook or Twitter by clicking on ‘Share with friends’ in the top right-hand corner of the list page and then clicking on the Facebook or Twitter icons in the pop-up box.  Thank you! 

Have fun creating your own lists and guides and if you have any that you would like to share, mention them in the comments section below.