The process of selling books doesn’t change a lot whether you are selling them online or at brick-and-mortar stores. The things you need to do to succeed in selling books offline are pretty much the same. In order to drive online book sales, there are some things you should do to get the ball rolling.

1. Encourage book reviews: It is very important for your product page to have positive customer reviews. In order to get these reviews, you should ask your peers, colleagues, and other important people in the writing industry to review your book. You should keep in mind that users usually don’t have to buy the book to be allowed to post reviews. The only thing they must do first is to sign up for accounts. Your focus should be on key retailers and when you are done with them you can concentrate on less important ones. Goodreads is another great place to have your book reviewed and there you will find plenty of people who can do the reviews. The main advantage of book reviews is that they help you to turn casual browsers into buying customers.

2. Review the product page: One of the factors that affects your book sales is the content of the product page. You should look for any inaccurate or missing content. For instance, if the product page is missing a cover image or the book price, publication date, or description is wrong, you should tell your editor immediately in order to correct it. Your editor does a lot of the work to make sure that you sell as many books as possible; however, he/she can miss some things. When an editor misses something, it is an author’s job to notify him and possibly help to come up with solutions for the problem.

3. Provide bonus content: In order to increase book sales, you could introduce bonus content on the product page. The bonus content can be provided to online booksellers in the form of text. Bonus content should be easy to produce and can include articles, tips or checklists, an author Q&A, and any other interesting content that might be useful for buyers. Your main focus should be on giving viewers some new information they wouldn’t find in the book. The point is to make viewers feel that they are getting something extra. Your editor can help you with posting the bonus content.

4. You should use a custom product page when possible: Some retailers do not allow you to customize your product page but some do. You should work with your editor to customize your page if the retailer allows it. In some cases, retailers allow you to customize your product page if you have been a loyal customer. For instance, you can customize your product page with some retailers if you have sold other books with them before.

You should expect retailers to have different conditions for selling books on their websites depending on the retailers and the geographical area you want to sell the book. For example, Amazon is a global retailer but it might have some differences from one indigenous site to another.