The Amazon A10 Update: 3 Things Every Indie Author Needs to Know

Ferol Vernon (00:39)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Written Word Media Pod. I am Ferol here with Ricci and Ricci, you are just kind of getting back into things after some travel last week,

Ricci (00:50)

Yeah, good afternoon, Ferol. I was in Austin last week at the New Media Summit, which was a summit for people who are building audiences. I spent a lot of my time here at Written Word Media building our reader audience so we can help authors sell more books. And so I spent two days with 500 other people who build audiences, not book readers, all kinds of different things. But it was really awesome because it’s just good to step away from the day to day.

humdrum sometimes to get some new ideas, to speak to other people who are really energized about some of the same tactics and technology and strategies that I am. And I learned a lot as well. So yeah, I am back and I’m energized.

Ferol Vernon (01:33)

Yeah, it’s always great to take a break. It’s always great to learn something. It’s always great to connect with other people. So those are like, it’s a trifecta of energy. We hear that a lot when we talk to authors as well. Like when we meet at my conferences, nobody’s ever like, I wish I didn’t come and I kind of just stayed in my room and did what I always do. You everybody’s always like, oh, it’s so great to connect with people. It’s so great to learn. So I think that’s like a good message for everybody. Getting out there helps.

Ricci (02:00)

Yeah, and it’s hard. It’s hard to step away. It’s hard to, you know, make the time to do it. And it always feels a little overwhelming right before you’re about to leave, but then you do it and everything else manages to go on without you and you get a nice break and some inspiration and you come back energized. So yeah, if you have an opportunity to go to a conference to do it.

Ferol Vernon (02:20)

Yeah, and somehow the world keeps spinning, even though you get to go away and recharge and learn a few things, right? So even though it feels like it won’t.

Ricci (02:28)

Yeah, there’s some quotes

that goes, the graveyards are full of indispensable people. We all like to think we’re really important, but somehow, no matter who it is, things manage to go on.

Ferol Vernon (02:34)

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. ⁓ And today, as much as we’d love to do a learning episode, and maybe that’s a good idea for another pod, today we’re here to talk about ⁓ actually an algorithm episode, right? So today we really wanna focus on the Amazon algorithm and specifically the A10 update, which, you know, helping authors navigate some of the new sort of rules and new lay of the land for Amazon.

Ricci (03:11)

Yes, we are here to talk about the new Amazon algorithm. ⁓ Before we get started, let’s all just have our whiny 30 seconds where we complain and whine about how, ⁓ you know, we knew how the old Amazon algorithm used to work. A lot of authors had it down. They had things running really smoothly. And of course now there’s a change to navigate. So I know that can be frustrating, ⁓ you know.

It’s not just you, it’s for everybody has to learn this new thing. But as we talked about in the trends episode earlier this year, these algorithmic changes, I think are here to stay and they’re going to pop up more often. And so we’re going to be flexing our resilience muscle today, accepting the fact that things have changed and talking about what has changed and why we can navigate that. But yes, it is annoying. It is frustrating. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (04:05)

Yeah,

there’s a little guy on my shoulder and saying, we fear change. I don’t like change. And you have to say like, I see you, I recognize you, and I’m gonna put you in a box. Let’s channel positivity and let’s get into the details.

Ricci (04:11)

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, all we can do is control, you know, what we can control and the algorithm change is beyond our control. has happened. So let’s talk about what has happened and what we can do to adapt.

Ferol Vernon (04:33)

So specifically, Ricci mentioned a little bit that like Amazon had an algorithm for a long time, which was sort of nicknamed A9. And authors sort of got, know, authors and also retailers, everybody who was selling on Amazon got used to that. And then some point in the last couple of years, they rolled out Amazon A10 and they don’t actually announce this stuff or if they do, everything’s very vague about when. So Amazon doesn’t tell us. So everything that we’ve sort of learned over the past week of, you know,

months doing research on this ⁓ is mostly from secondhand sources that we’ve read, other people that have done analysis and we’ve sort of consolidated all of that learnings and hopefully that’s what we’ll talk about today. But just as a level set for everybody, Amazon didn’t do a press release that’s like, hey, this is the new algorithm and here’s exactly how it works. It would be nice if we had that playbook, but they don’t do that.

Ricci (05:25)

Yeah, what we did, what we do have this time though is some of the underlying, I don’t know if tech is the right word that went into the eight 10 update, was, is powered by this thing called cosmos. And there was a paper produced on that. So we actually do have a little more information than we normally would on the Amazon algorithm. ⁓ and so like Ferol said, we have mined every possible nook and cranny. We’re also talking to authors and publishers all the time about what they’re seeing.

Ferol Vernon (05:32)

Yeah.

Ricci (05:54)

And so the episodes today are really like the top three things ⁓ that authors need to know about the new Amazon algorithm.

Ferol Vernon (06:01)

Yeah, okay, great. And so Ricci mentioned this Cosmo essentially just to give you a sense of like the reading we did. There was actually an academic paper that was published in 2024 that sort of outlines this Cosmo knowledge graph AI Voodoo that Amazon’s employing to get you to buy more stuff. And so we read that paper and that’s where some of these learnings come from along with, you know, knitting together some other sources. So we’re pretty excited to share what we’ve learned with you all.

Ricci, let’s get into like the first of the three things we think are really important for people to understand.

Ricci (06:36)

Yeah. So the first one really has to do with the ⁓ product page optimization. So a product page for authors is really your book page. That’s where people go to buy your book. You have a individual page for every single title that you have. And so when it comes to these pages, how to optimize these pages has changed a little bit in the old world. In order to optimize these pages, you really would focus on keywords.

And making sure that as many keywords as possible were in your title and in your description. And also the category that you chose. ⁓ And this was similar to how kind of SEO used to be keyword stuffing. People try to put as many keywords as possible ⁓ in the title. But in this new world, the AI is much smarter and is looking more at context and less at keywords. So that means that, you know, we as an author, as an author, we do need to look at how to update the description.

how to optimize the A plus content, which is becoming more important, and then what to do about reviews. So we’re gonna talk about each one of those individually. ⁓ Let’s start with the description Ferol.

Ferol Vernon (07:50)

Yeah, so the descriptions and some of this stuff does come from that paper that we mentioned, but more generally it’s been confirmed by a few other folks. so one of the things you want to really focus on is Amazon is now trying to be much more sort of context and user driven. And what we mean by this is the reader who’s looking at your page, it’s trying to get into the mind of what they are doing and why they might want to buy. So what this means for you as an author is to focus more on

language that is outcomes related or benefit related. So, hey, your book can relieve stress, Like ⁓ great to decompress while sitting on the beach, right? Or ⁓ some of the nonstop thrill ride stuff that we used to see in a thriller description, you want to give that more context, right? Like, exciting, like when might somebody enjoy this, right? When you’re really looking for something engaging.

excuse me, or something really engaging, that might be the thing to write there. And also like event-driven when you might want to read this, right? We mentioned like sitting on the beach, but like what might be your state of mind as a reader and really making sure that you use language that describes what the book is going to do for you as a

Ricci (09:14)

Yes in some respects it’s actually more natural you know to start describing your book this way ⁓ because you’re hitting on the tropes you’re hitting on the setting you’re hitting on how the book makes you feel so when you’re looking thinking about your description one way to do it is to think about if you were talking to somebody how would you describe it you know you would say it’s an enemies to lovers romance and it’s ⁓ said in a big city.

And it’s great for people who, you know, like the happily ever after. ⁓ but with a little bit more of a urban feel to it, right? Something along those lines, versus before you might have some of those keywords, but they weren’t maybe put in, such a kind of naturally sounding way.

Ferol Vernon (10:02)

It’s really important that you use that word natural because natural language processing is like one of the techniques that Amazon is using to score books and make sure that the book is right for the readers. so it’s, like you said, it’s a really interesting change from the old world, but we’re trying to hack it. And now what you want to do is actually just describe it really well, make sure you hit all your sub genres and all your tropes and all those things. And I think this is not going to be a huge change for a lot of authors, but it is a new technique versus what they used to do.

Ricci (10:32)

Yeah, and then also making sure that whatever’s on your product page, including the description, actually matches the feel of your cover. So if you’re doing, say, ⁓ mafia romance, I don’t know why I’m into romance today, but if it’s a mafia romance, but your book cover looks more like sweet and light, ⁓ the new algorithm can actually parse, like can see quote unquote, what your book cover looks like, and it’s looking

to sure that there’s consistency between your description and your content and the reviews and what the book cover actually looks like so that when a reader might pop onto the page, ⁓ the conversion rate’s gonna be higher because everything is jiving together to tell the same story.

Ferol Vernon (11:19)

And that’s really important. And this is advice we’ve been giving authors forever is make sure that your book covers on genre. And we’ve always sort of given that advice as just sort of like a generally good recommendation that keeps what we call like your deal with the reader. ⁓ But now it’s actually algorithmically, technically important as well, because like you mentioned, the Amazon AI, which is what it’s using to go over your book page, can read those images. And that extends to your A plus content as well.

So when you add images to your A plus content and pause there for a minute, A plus content is ⁓ just sort of extra content that you can put on your book page that is a little more structured than plain text with bold. ⁓ You can add images and those images are also sort of scored, right? So you have to make sure that both your book cover and your secondary images that are in A plus content are very much on genre because you’ll get dinged if they’re not.

Ricci (12:14)

Yeah. And so what else goes in the A plus content? We, we want to, it is usually image-based. So it takes up more of the page. makes the page more engaging. Um, and this is a good place to kind of highlight again, the themes and the vibes of your book. It’s also a place to highlight the reviews or editorial reviews that you can kind of blow out in a bigger way. Um, and any other social proof that you might have is good to put on the A plus content.

And part of the reason that the A plus content is becoming more important is because Amazon is wanting their readers or their consumers on the platform ⁓ to dwell on a page longer. So this metric of dwell time, how long does somebody actually spend on a page being engaged by the page? That is more important now. And A plus content.

Is a really great tool for you to be able to do that because if you don’t have it somebody looks at the description they scroll to the reviews you know maybe they’re on the page for five seconds if you got the a plus content there’s more to read you maybe extend that dwell time by two three four times ⁓ as long.

Ferol Vernon (13:24)

Yeah, and so, you know, it’s the dwell time and the scroll time. ⁓ Long is cool again, right? So short and snappy used to be kind of what we would recommend for that description. And that still to some extent applies, but for this A plus content, long, right? Lots of content, lots of images, lots of, you know, things that hit on the different themes and the things about the protagonist and the characters ⁓ to keep the reader or potential reader in this case.

scrolling and dwelling and that’s going to help your book a lot. And we’ve been looking at this ⁓ A plus content really closely. we’re, you know, stay tuned to the pod and, you know, sign up for our mailing list. We’ll be having some more interesting stuff to help authors with A plus content coming out soon.

Ricci (14:09)

Yeah, absolutely. And then the last piece of the product page optimization is really your reviews. So in general, hitting that 50 plus review mark is a more important threshold. So a lot of authors are like, I need thousands of reviews. You don’t need thousands, but know, 10’s probably not quite enough. So you want to be targeting 50 and then growing from there. And the reason that reviews are important because it’s very rich metadata.

the AI. So the AI can now read every single review, whatever your readers are putting in there about how the book made them feel, what kind of book it was, what characters they liked. All of that is being ingested by the algorithm so that it has a much better sense of what your book is about and who it is good for.

Ferol Vernon (14:58)

Yeah, that’s great. you know, if you’re, if you’re new to the pod, go back and listen to of early episodes. So do we touch on ⁓ how to get reviews with free promotions, you know, in quite a few episodes. So you’re go ahead and check that out. ⁓ But, know, keeping us on a 10 Ricci, that’s like the, the Amazon listing page, right? There’s your eight 10 content got to be long, got to be genre. I to be Tropy. ⁓ But there are other things that went into this update that are really important. And the second one, which is really the weight given to external traffic.

I want to dive into.

Ricci (15:30)

Yeah, absolutely, let’s talk about that. This is actually an exciting one, I think.

Ferol Vernon (15:33)

Yeah, so one of the things that we have always done at Rubinware Media is drive external traffic to your retailer page. So a lot of times it’s Amazon, but Apple, Google as well. And this kind of external traffic, whether it’s coming from the author’s mailing list, whether it’s coming from your TikTok ads, whether it’s coming from newsletter sites like ours, is now weighted more heavily. So Amazon is saying, hey, traffic that’s coming from outside of Amazon,

gets more weight that’s more valid than traffic coming from within Amazon, which was historically driven by Amazon ads. So this is a really important change for authors to understand. And I think the, you know, the we fear change piece is this has ⁓ hit the Amazon ads or the authors that were really relying on Amazon ads.

Ricci (16:23)

Yeah, so in the a nine world, you could just run Amazon ads and kind of keep them on autopilot and you would sell a bunch of books and that would be great for your rank. And it was, you know, a great recipe that everybody could use in this new world. The Amazon ads have been devalued, devalued, um, which I think is actually just to do an aside here, very.

Interesting development. ⁓ there is a lot of hypotheses as to why this may be, but I think the, the one that resonates with me is that Amazon potentially is seeing a decline in traffic to amazon.com, right? And there’s a multiple reasons for that. ⁓ authors doing a better job of sending people to direct, and it’s not just authors. If you think about Shopify and how that all retailers, you think about Shopify and how that platform.

Ferol Vernon (16:50)

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. All retailers. Yep.

Ricci (17:17)

Is growing traffic is you know before amazon really had a monopoly on pretty much all e-comm traffic and i think they’re probably losing that edge. Back in the early days when we started written word media how amazon used to get traffic to its platform was through their affiliate programs the affiliate program was super generous and so everyone on the web was sending their traffic to amazon and that’s how they became as big and successful as they are today.

I think they’re probably, they’re probably sitting in internal meetings and they’ve seen that traffic hit a peak and it’s kind of going down and they’re saying, okay, how do we incentivize people to bring traffic back to us? And part of it is they embedded that in this algorithmic change. Now that doesn’t mean as an author, if you have a direct store that you should just send your traffic to Amazon, this is going to be a strategic choice that you make. ⁓ But if you’re thinking about it, trying to optimize for Amazon and you weren’t sending any traffic.

Externally from to the platform and you only running amazon ads you probably are gonna have to tweak that and maybe turn down the amazon add some and then start sending external traffic in. ⁓ In terms of what qualifies as external traffic the good news here is that it’s very broad so traffic from your email newsletter traffic from social media organic if you’re posting to instagram tick tock any of those platforms ⁓ traffic from promo sites like ours.

That all counts as external traffic and then actually pay traffic from external sites counts too. So if you’re running Facebook ads or you’re running Tik Tok ads and you’re sending that traffic to Amazon, that counts as well. So I think there’s some confusion where authors think it’s, you know, pay traffic is devalued. That’s not correct. Amazon ad traffic is devalued, but traffic coming from outside of Amazon, whether it’s paid or organic.

⁓ is good and that’s going to help your ranking on the platform.

Ferol Vernon (19:10)

Yeah. And it’s, really, like you said, interesting to see, you know, Amazon, which is obviously the biggest player in our industry, make a change like this. ⁓ and you mentioned the affiliate sales. It’s really like, you know, what’s old is new again. ⁓ they’re kind of going back to an old playbook, ⁓ from, from, know, 10 years ago. ⁓ so it’s very interesting to see this, but I think, you know, for authors, while it can be very, ⁓ frustrating to have a formula that’s working and then have to shift. ⁓ the good news is there’s lots of other things you can do.

⁓ You know, written word media can help, but also your mailing list is still your best friend in terms of sending external traffic. And I think, you the other thing that’s really important about the traffic going to your page is A10 is really looking at your conversion rate, right? And they’re making sure that when that traffic goes to a page, it converts at a high level. So sending sort of junk traffic to your page, ⁓

Ricci (19:57)

Hmm.

Ferol Vernon (20:09)

is a lot less effective than it used to be and it can actually penalize you a little.

Ricci (20:14)

Yeah that’s a really good point so it’s not just traffic it’s what we call qualified traffic or high intent traffic. Amazon is looking at of the people who coming in from that. You know those sources how many of them are actually purchasing at the end of the day this all does come back to sales right ⁓ so. That brings us to number three which is you know the third change here is that. ⁓ Consistent traffic and sales.

count more than one-off ⁓ spikes. So let me say that again. So consistent traffic and sales count more than one-off spikes. ⁓ authors have seen this ⁓ with the change in the ranking updates. So the ranking used to update every hour and now it only updates every day. So when we talk about like a one-off, know, literally that could be used to be a short as like if you sold a bunch of books in like an hour, right? ⁓

Ferol Vernon (21:10)

Yeah.

Ricci (21:12)

So I also don’t want authors to panic about this and be like, well, what if I sell a lot of books in a day? If you sell a lot of books in a day, that is still going to be beneficial, but it’s going to be more beneficial if you sell a lot of books in one day and then you continue to sell books, even if it’s at the not not at the same peak over the next week, two weeks, 30 days time. ⁓ And again, traffic is important, but at end of the day, it all really does come down to the sales and having more consistent sales across the timeframe.

And so interestingly, what we’re seeing is that authors who write into series are actually being hit less hard by this change because by definition, when you have a series and someone finishes book one or book two, that reader then comes back to Amazon and purchases the next book. And you have higher consistency of readers purchasing your catalog across all of your titles ⁓ because they’re already hooked into the series that they’re reading.

And so one way to think about it is if you do have a series, how are you optimizing? So people continue to read through that series. If you don’t have a series, then you just got to think about when you’re putting your marketing strategy together. Am I creating a strategy over one day? Or am I creating a strategy over several days or several weeks? And so what that might look like is you can do, you know, promo sites across multiple days. If you want that.

pre-built, we already have those, you could buy a three day stack, a five day stack, we’re rolling out 10 day and 15 day stacks. So you can have promo sites, each sending traffic on different days. You can send an email, you can have Facebook ads running, you can have your organic TikTok pushing traffic in. So you just want to think about on any given day, do I have one source out there sending traffic to Amazon that’s likely to convert into book sales?

Ferol Vernon (23:06)

Yeah, I think that’s really important for people to understand that you still want to do marketing, right? And you still want to have a marketing push because it’s more effective to centralize that around a shorter period of time. But you definitely want to consider metering out your activities over three days, five days instead of just one day. And we’re seeing authors already do this. We’re seeing a lot.

Ricci (23:11)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (23:29)

stacks that we sell over the one days because think savvy authors have figured this out and they’re starting to buy those packages. so, one of the ways as an author you can do this is if you want a really simple recipe, let’s say you want to do a five day stack, which is a few promo sites and a few ads spread out over five days. And at the beginning of that, you can email your mailing list, your internal mailing list.

And then at the end of that, maybe you have some other organic activity that you’re doing on your socials. But basically just thinking about sort of a two to five day ⁓ push instead of a one day push can be really helpful with the new algorithm update.

Ricci (24:11)

Yeah. And I think if you can extend that even better, right? So you could buy an off the shelf for a five day and then you can send your email newsletter two days after that. So now on day seven, there’s activity and then you want to maybe do, you know, more tech talk activity on day nine and 10. And maybe before the stack starts, ⁓ you do, you know, is a newsletter swap with another author. ⁓ so just looking at like, how can you create more of this consistency? Now, if you have a series.

And you’re doing like book one free doing you know one day promo giving away the book for free which might give you a spike but then over the next month is going to give you the consistent sales that should still work you just want to see those results within twenty four hours you’ll see them three weeks later when those readers finish book one and start going to buy book two and three and four so it’s like a short term investment into the long term results that are gonna come down the

Ferol Vernon (25:07)

Yeah, I think one of the things that I want to make sure authors understand is like, just because these ads or your promotion is running over a longer time horizon, it doesn’t mean it’s harder to set up or more takes more time to set up. Right? So you can take still take one afternoon and say, Hey, I’m going to go buy my five day stack. I’m going to schedule my internal email to go out the day before. I’m going to schedule my Facebook post to go out the day after I’m going to schedule my Facebook ads to start here. Like you can do all of that still in one sitting.

but you just are like having the run dates for these things be a little bit more spread out than you used to.

Ricci (25:42)

And that’s always been best practice, right? So successful authors do that. They really do look at their month and they have these kind of ⁓ more consistent marketing plans that span multiple days or multiple weeks. ⁓ But in the past, you could kind of get away with being a little lazy. Now with the new algorithm, ⁓ you’ll still be okay if you continue doing your old tactics, but you’re really not going to see the same bump and lift that you are hoping for unless you do have some of this.

elongation strategy that you’ve put in place when you’re marketing.

Ferol Vernon (26:15)

So I think those are really the three big activities that we wanted to dive in. And let’s just summarize them so everybody knows kind what we talked about and what you can take forward with you as you go ⁓ planning your own marketing activity as an author. So one, the first thing we talked about, the Amazon page, your book page, that optimization is now more important than it used to be. So don’t keyword stuff, use natural language, and hit all the right notes, genre tropes, subgenres, all that stuff.

Focus on your A plus content and make it sort of long and make your images thematic. Okay, so that’s sort of 10 out one. On two, external traffic, right? External traffic is now more important than it used to be. ⁓ This is your ads, your socials, your newsletter ads, things you buy with us, things you buy with others, all that traffic driving to your page from places that are not Amazon. Essentially all the sources that are not Amazon ads, right? And then finally,

this consistent traffic, right? Spreading out your marketing activity over a few days instead of consolidating it just on one day. And I think if authors can really grok those three things and start changing what they’re doing, ⁓ it can really tangibly increase their success with a new algorithm

Ricci (27:31)

Yeah. mean, hearing you say it all back, it is simple, but it’s also a lot. so now I’m, you know, I’m a checklist person. So this is what we’re to do. We will create a little checklist, ⁓ that will be on our blog, ⁓ where we list these three things and we list the sub tactics underneath that we just talked about. So, okay, product page. Did I do a plus? Did I look at my description? Did I, how am I reviews doing? ⁓ so if you’re listening to this and you’re like, okay, I think I got some of it, but not all of it head over to the blog.

We’ll put a checklist in place. and as Ferol alluded to, we’re also trying to think about how we can help, ⁓ authors with some of this, ⁓ especially the, the, you know, the product page stuff. When it comes to extending your marketing over many days, we already have this set up. You just go to promo stacks. And like I said, we already have three and five days and we, have 10 days in some genres. We’ll be rolling out more of those across all the different genres so that.

that easy button will still be there for you if you want to go farther out than three or five days.

Ferol Vernon (28:36)

Yeah, that’s great. And I think, you know, we’re, a big checklist person too. So I love, I love hearing that. Like I’m going to go grab the checklist, right? So stay tuned to the email. We’ll have, we’ll have a checklist, maybe some tools and some stuff to help you, you know, actually get through this yourself instead of just listening to us. Ricci, that’s really the change. And, you know, we’re excited about being able to help authors with this. But like we said, you know, the, the first step is take a piece of paper, right? I fear change.

Ricci (28:43)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (29:05)

crumple it up, throw it away, and then move on and get to selling books.

Ricci (29:11)

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. Ferol, hopefully today we illuminated some of the changes. And this isn’t as scary as it seems. These algorithmic changes, have happened before, they will happen again. And so just being a little bit adaptive and flexible with them. And as always, reach out to us if we can help answer any questions, tell us your experiences.

Ferol Vernon (29:35)

All right, great. Well, that brings us to wrap. So that’s the pod for today. Thanks for listening. Keep writing and we’ll talk to you next time.

Ricci (29:42)

See you later.