How to Build a High-Converting Amazon Product Page for Any Genre (Before Running Ads)

Before we get into the details of running successful Facebook ads on your books, there is one thing that needs to be taken care of first. Your Amazon Product Page.

Ads are good for one thing, and one thing alone. Getting traffic away from a social media site onto a different platform. That, ultimately, is going to be your Amazon Product Page. And it is your Amazon page that is going to need to seal the deal. You could have the best ad campaign in history, but if the destination page is not up to scratch, then people are just going to click away.

So… what makes up a successful Amazon page?

1: Cover Art.

Your cover art is your main selling tool here. And it’s something that authors consistently get wrong. It needs to tell your readers exactly what they are getting. The elements need to be high contrast, stand out and most importantly, work as a thumbnail.

Think about how most people browse social media. It’s on a phone or tablet. You could have the most detailed cover art in the world but if it doesn’t work as the thumbnail image that most people see in their feed then you are wasting your time. One of the earlier books that I released through my press had fantastic cover art. The artist spent a lot of time doing pen and ink line drawings that showed a vast level of subtle detail – tortured faces in tree trunks and the like. And while it was impressive as a high-res image it was completely wasted. You couldn’t see any of it on the product page. It was so detailed that you struggled to see it, even on the finished printed product.

Conversely, if your cover is too dark, it effectively turns into a muddy black square on Amazon. If you write horror or dark fantasy and have a dark cover, try to go by the 70/30 rule. Have 70% of the cover dark, with the remaining 30% giving an aggressive, high contrast pop of colour that draws your buyers’ eyes. Similarly, the font is important. Don’t use stock “spooky” fonts because they look cheap and amateurish. Never place dark text over a dark background unless you are going to have a strong contrasting glowing effect behind it.

If you write in other genres, the rules of visual telegraphing remain the same, but the aesthetics change entirely:

• Romance: Your cover needs to instantly communicate the subgenre and 'heat' level. Rom-coms favour bright, pastel vector illustrations and playful typography. Steamy romance often uses darker backgrounds with skin-focused photography and elegant, flowing script fonts.

  
  

• Thriller: It is all about high tension. Think bold, towering, sans-serif fonts taking up a third of the cover. Imagery usually features isolated settings, running silhouettes, or stark monochromatic palettes punctuated by a single, sharp splash of red or yellow.

Look at your cover art on your product page and if it’s not working, change it. It’s the single most important thing there. Even a $50 premade cover is an improvement on a cover that is too dark, too indistinct or does not immediately tell the reader what to expect from the book. A word of warning though – I’d advise against using AI covers. There are lots of very good, reasonably priced artists out there and an AI cover is just opening you up to accusations of the book text being AI as well. It’s just not worth it.

2: Book Description

Your book description needs to pull your reader in immediately. Different genres have slightly different structures for this, but they all share some similarities: The Hook, The Escalation, and The Final Warning.

As my primary genre is horror, I’ll use my latest book, By Dawn’s Early Light, as the primary example, but let's look at how this adapts across genres.

The Hook You should start with a bolded, single-line hook at the very top of the page. It needs to establish the central conflict in seconds.

• Horror: Jack Carlton thought he’d left his demons behind. He was wrong.

• Thriller: She has the perfect husband, the perfect house, and a secret that will destroy them both.

• Romance: There are three rules to being his fake fiancée: Smile for the cameras, sleep in separate beds, and never, ever fall in love.

The Escalation We need to keep the reader’s attention, and we need to keep them reading. Nothing puts someone off more than a big block of text. Keep paragraphs short, no more than three sentences per paragraph. Outline the protagonist’s world, the disruption or threat, and the stakes if they fail. It needs to be intriguing enough to make the reader want answers.

To continue my horror example, this is what I used for By Dawn’s Early Light:

After crawling out of the bottle, Jack has rebuilt a fragile peace. He’s sober, his private investigator business is ticking over, and he’s working things out with his daughter, Stephanie, in their old family home. But his relentless insomnia and dreamless existence hint that something dark still lingers within him.

When an old police colleague asks for Jack’s help on a chilling case, his carefully reconstructed life begins to unravel. The Witchfinder, the serial killer who drove Jack to leave the force, has returned. This time, the killer’s twisted game feels eerily personal.

As Jack teams up with his former partner to investigate, they uncover disturbing links between the new murders, a missing journalist, and whispers of an ancient, malevolent force operating in the shadows of London. The deeper Jack digs, the more he’s forced to confront the horrors of his past—and the terrifying truth behind his own sleepless nights.

If you write Romance, your escalation will instead introduce the two characters, the obstacle keeping them apart (the trope), and the undeniable spark between them. For a Thriller, you will introduce the protagonist's normal life, the inciting incident (a found body, a missing person), and the ticking clock they face.

The Final Warning End the description section with a question or ominous statement – something that leaves the reader wanting more.

• Horror: Will Jack have the strength to face the darkness, or will it consume everything he’s fought to save?

• Thriller: When the truth finally comes out, who will be left alive?

• Romance: Can they overcome their pasts, or will this fake relationship end in real heartbreak?

  
  

3: Look Inside Preview

Amazon lets readers use the “Look Inside” feature to check out the first 10% of a book, and a surprising number of people use this feature, especially on an author they are not familiar with. What does this mean? Well, slow gradual build ups are all well and good, but if the start of your book is packed with exposition, then it might put people off.

This is why a lot of people use prologues – it sets the tone, shows the reader your writing style and immediately introduces some level of threat or at least asks questions that the reader wants answers to. If you aren’t using a prologue, then at least make sure that your first couple of pages are enough to grab the reader's attention.

4: Metadata

Amazon’s website is a search engine designed to sell products, so to get your books in front of the correct audience, you need to use a few SEO techniques to get the most out of it. Your book's metadata is split into a few categories.

Keywords These are primarily put in through the KDP dashboard. There are a lot of tools out there to help you identify keywords for your books – Publisher Rocket being the best known – but really the cheapest way to do this is to simply use Amazon’s search function.

In sales, there is a concept known as your “ideal buyer”. Some places even go so far as to say things like “my ideal buyer is a 35-year-old man called Steve. He has a mid-range IT job, lives in London and plays Call of Duty at the weekends. He enjoys fast-paced, creature horror novels and is put off by slow burn or quiet horror. He really hates ambiguous endings to books.”

Once you have the concept of “Steve” defined, you need to start getting inside of his head. Imagine that he’s just finished his current book and wants something for his daily commute the next day. What sort of thing is Steve going to type into the Amazon search bar to find it?

The great thing about the Amazon search bar is that as you type things in, it populates a list of the most popular matches. Typing in horror for example, immediately shows horror books, horror novels, horror books kindle unlimited, horror romance and horror anthology. This is a general example however – try to think about what your ideal buyer wants and the sort of thing he is going to type into search. These should be your keywords. And remember that your book keywords can actually be complete sentences.

There is a common misconception about keywords that you need to be aware of. Amazon’s search algorithm does not look for them in your product description. It looks for them in the Title, Subtitle, Series Title, Author Name and the 7 back-end keyword boxes.

That is not to say that there is no value in including some of them in the product description though. Amazon might not index them, but Google most certainly does.

Categories The second metadata type to consider is your categories. Don’t just use the top-level category. Make sure that you dig down and find an appropriate subcategory for your book. That helps it stand out because you’ll have a far higher comparative ranking on something like “Cosmic and Eldritch Horror” than you would in the top-level Horror category.

5: A+ Content

Your book product page is your biggest tool for selling your book, so once you have someone on it, the last thing you want is their attention being grabbed by someone else’s product. You need to pack as much of that page with your content as you can.

This is where A+ content comes in. And it’s something that the vast majority of indie authors neglect.

It’s not at all obvious how to get to this. It’s actually not in your main product listing at all. You either need to click into your Marketing tab, then scroll down the page, past the Countdown Deal and Amazon Ads section to find your A+ content. Otherwise, you can go into the Bookshelf of your KDP Dashboard and click Promote and Advertise, then scroll down from there.

A+ content is book-specific and it’s also marketplace-specific, so bear that in mind – you will need to duplicate this for every marketplace – amazon.com and amazon.co.uk as a minimum. Don’t worry though – KDP does have a workflow to select multiple markets or copy existing A+ content across regions once the initial layout is approved.

There is a wide variety of A+ content that you can use on your pages. I personally tend to use two types:

Standard Comparison Chart This allows you to show up to six other products with a user-definable comparison metric chart below it. I tend to use the following metrics in mine:

• Number of Pages (text field)

• Kindle (check box)

• KU (check box)

• Paperback (checkbox)

• Hardback (checkbox)

• Audiobook (checkbox)

This ensures that you have the rest of your series and other books that you’ve written front and centre on your product page.

Standard Image and Light Text Overlay Boxes These boxes are 970px x 300px images. I’ve historically taken images or parts of the cover art and used Photoshop to slice them into three distinct images. The easiest way to do this is to set up a 970 x 300-pixel master canvas in Photoshop. I’m going to switch it up shortly though and again create a single image for each part of my series – almost like a banner ad. This is what I currently have, but there is massive room for improvement so that's on my list for this week.

A+ content needs to be reviewed and approved separately so it takes a few days to go live, but it really makes your product page stand out and, most importantly, devotes more of your product page to your own products, rather than someone else’s.

Rip Off and Duplicate

One final word about your product page. Usually, R&D means Research and Development. When it comes to your book product page, what it really means is “Rip Off and Duplicate”.

There are going to be books in your sub-genre that are more successful than your own. Maybe even books that are not as good as yours. Look at their product pages. Really look at them, because they are doing something right and you need to be learning those lessons. Examine their product description, their cover art and their A+ content. Then apply those lessons to your own products. Taking Control of Your Storefront

Get the page right and your ads get cheaper. Get it wrong and no amount of budget fixes it.

The Small Press Operating Manual covers the rest of the sequence around it, from launch timing to knowing your break-even before you start spending.

Free, with a break-even calculator and a launch planner alongside it.

[Download them here.] That’s it for today. Next time I’ll start going through the Facebook Ad Dashboard and explain the different ad types, what you should use and what you should avoid.