Why Your Book Isn’t Selling: Categories, Covers, And Clear Hooks

You can run ads, post daily, and grind all week—and still watch your book stall. The missing piece isn’t more hustle. It’s positioning. We pull back the curtain on the quiet issues that throttle sales!

We start with the most common and costly mistake: treating categories like identity badges rather than traffic lanes. Amazon’s ecosystem pattern-matches behavior, so a miscategorized book gets shown to the wrong readers, earns letdown reviews, and falls into a negative feedback loop. From cozy mysteries that aren’t actually cozy to memoirs that read like prescriptive nonfiction, we show how small misalignments ripple into poor conversion and expensive clicks.

Then we reframe the hook as the reason to care, not a plot dump. If a reader can’t repeat your promise in one sentence, they won’t buy it and they won’t recommend it. We share practical ways to surface stakes, transformation, and genre signals at the top of your retail page. We also tackle covers: why “unique” can backfire, how milliseconds decide “for me or not for me,” and what it means to fit your shelf without blending into noise. Finally, we rebuild the description around a scannable promise and reader outcomes, and we tighten keywords to match how real readers search.

Walk away with a priority checklist: verify category and subgenre, pressure-test your cover against top sellers, craft a repeatable one-sentence hook, rewrite your description to promise value, and align keywords with market language. We’ve also added a quick alignment test in the show notes to help you spot gaps. If you’re ready to turn attention into sales and let the right readers find you, this conversation gives you the exact steps to get there.

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