Selected work

Performance & market position review

Introduction

This report is my assessment of how The Balcony Harvest Plan presents itself to readers on Amazon and Goodreads. I prepared it for you, Ellis, so that you can see plainly what is holding the book back from the readers who would want it. It asks one question: when a reader arrives at your Amazon page, does the page give that reader every reason to buy?

Sales run through the whole report. A book is bought only if it is found by the right readers and chosen on the page where the sale happens. Each gap I describe is a point where a reader who might have bought the book is lost.

1. Executive summary

I reviewed the Amazon and Goodreads pages for The Balcony Harvest Plan. My assessment is that the book has real strengths and a page that does not yet use them. Readers who have finished it respond warmly: 4.7 stars on Amazon, 4.6 on Goodreads, and no rating below four. Your author biography is a real one. But a stranger who arrives on the page meets a description that lists topics instead of results, 14 ratings beside competing titles with hundreds or thousands, a book filed under landscape design and home improvement rather than container gardening, and a page with no video and no images.

However readers reach a page, they see only what the page shows. The purpose of this report is to get the page ready, so that every reader who arrives meets a page that converts.

Is the page ready to convert readers? Not yet. Four fixes come first, so that every reader who reaches the page finds it ready to receive them.

Key findings

1. The description lists topics, not results. It opens on a quote, then gives five bare topic labels with no promise of what the reader will be able to do afterwards. It does not say who the book is for or what level it assumes; one Goodreads reviewer found some of the planting terms over their head.
2. The description has slips and few search words. It contains spelling slips ("tomatos" for "tomatoes", "Begginers" for "Beginners") and, beyond the title, omits the words readers search with: container gardening, raised planters, balcony vegetables and herbs for beginners. The book details also give a reading age of "3 years and up", which does not fit.
3. The book sits on the wrong shelves. The page shows #2,310 in Landscape Design and #3,085 in Home Improvement, an overall rank of #1,204,566, and no container gardening, vegetable gardening or small-space gardening shelf.

4. Amazon shows the book beside the wrong books. Related and sponsored titles include a patio furniture guide, a home-brewing manual, a woodworking handbook and a mindfulness journal, and the frequently-bought-together pair are both landscape design titles.
5. The proof is thin beside competitors. The book has 14 Amazon ratings and 5 on Goodreads, while competing container gardening titles on the same page show from 80 to 2,400 ratings.
6. The praise is not working hard enough. The one endorsement is the opening line of the description, and the strong reader reviews on Goodreads are not brought to the page where buyers decide.
7. The author's website cannot be clicked. The biography is strong, but the website address and email appear as plain text, so a buyer has nowhere to go.
8. There is no visual presence. The Videos section is empty, and the From the Author section holds no images, so nothing shows a buyer what the book is about.
9. The Goodreads author page is bare. It shows no biography, no followers and no videos, and is not marked as your own page. The book's description there is cut off mid-sentence. In its favour, both editions sit under one work.

2. Book snapshot and sales signals

The Balcony Harvest Plan was published in March 2023, and the numbers look like a book that has not yet found its readers: a sales rank of #1,204,566 in Books, 14 Amazon ratings averaging 4.7, and 5 Goodreads ratings averaging 4.6. Readers who finish the book like it. The problem is not the book. It is how little a stranger can see before deciding.

That matters because a reader who reaches the page for the first time lands on it cold. With a description that lists topics, a handful of ratings beside much larger competitors and nothing to look at beyond the cover, that reader leaves without buying. The visit happens, but the page does not turn it into a sale.

3. Conversion review

This section follows a reader from the moment they arrive at the Amazon page to the decision to buy, and marks where the page loses them.

4. Positioning and discoverability

Search words. Readers find books by typing the words that describe them. Your title does this well, but the description adds little to it, so Amazon has less to go on when it decides where to show the book. Container gardening, raised planters, balcony vegetables and herbs for beginners are the words missing from the page.

The shelf. The book sits on Landscape Design and Home Improvement, with ranks of #2,310 and #3,085. Its real pitch is vegetable growing in small spaces, and on a container gardening or small-space gardening shelf a smaller number of sales is enough to be seen.

Who Amazon shows beside the book. With so few ratings, Amazon places the book by the words on the page and by what other buyers look at. Real competitors do appear, but so do furniture, home-brewing, woodworking and journaling titles, and the frequently-bought-together pair is not about growing food at all.

Visual presence. A buyer decides in seconds, and a page with nothing to look at beyond the cover gives them little to go on. Visual presence shows a buyer something of what the book is about, and convinces them faster than words alone.

5. Sales readiness check

Three checks fail today and two more need work. That is the case for fixing the page first.

6. Report scorecard

Scored out of 10 on what a reader sees: 1 to 3 Weak, 4 to 5 Limited, 6 to 7 Fair, 8 to 10 Strong.

7. Priority action plan (in order)

The strength of this book is its usefulness, and readers who finish it say so. The page does not yet show that to a stranger. I would fix the first four items first, so that every reader who reaches the page finds it ready to convince them.

Support is available for each of the problems in this report. If you would like me to take these on, reply to this message and I will send you my plan next.