How To Create A Listmania & Why

A segment of Amazon that can draw some good attention to you and your book(s) is the listmania feature. This allows you to build a themed list of various items. After you tag it and save it, the list will begin popping up in the margins on various pages and searches throughout the site. Over time, especially as it gets “helpful” votes, it will pop up more and more. So why do this?

1. Remember your author signature? This will be on the listmania. As it begins to pop up randomly throughout Amazon, more people will not only see it, they’ll see that you are the author of a book. If they are enticed, you will have more draw to your book. You can at least get another click-through on your book’s page out of it, which is also helpful.
2. The media scours Amazon. One of our authors was approached by a reporter because she really liked the listmania that the author created. She subsequently published an article that gave credit to the author.
3. It is another way to have a presence on Amazon. Build up enough of a presence, you draw more people to your book.

So how do you do this? Here you go:

1. Go into “My Account” on the upper right corner.
2. Go to the heading “Personalization”. Click on the link “Product Reviews Written By You”.
3. Click on the link “Listmania! Lists”.
4. Click on the link for “Create Another List”
5. Fill in the fields indicated. For introduction, make sure you describe the purpose of the list.
6. Add products and save!

Listmanias can be short or long. They can contain anything. I would recommend creating listmanias that are geared toward your book’s target audience. That means, if you write Science Fiction, you should create listmanias that would entice Science Fiction fans. This way, they see your book and are more likely to search for it.

Speaking of your book, it’s time for a little note about including it in your lists. You can get away with it once. In that case, simply note that you are the author and few if any will take an issue. If you start banging out list after list with your book in it, people, including Amazon, will view it as spam. At minimum, Amazon may remove your lists.

 What is very likely is that people will vote your lists as not helpful and could even find other ways to retaliate (negative reviews, voting your reviews as not helpful, voting down your tags, etc). For some reason, there are a lot of sensitive people out there and there is a fine balance between marketing and entering into the realm of unethical behavior. Play it safe. Let people discover you, don’t rub their faces in your work.