The Amazon reviews can have a huge effect on your book sales.  You need to be popular to become popular which can be tricky when you first make a book available.

You need to drive as many reviews to your book as possible so try to get your friends and family to do a review each.  A minimum of 4 or 5 is really good but up to 10 is what you need.

The number of reviews a book has is a good indicator to a possible purchaser as to how serious they should consider it.

As a self publisher you have to take responsibility to make sure this section is populated which means promoting it in wherever you can.  Unfortunately, a genuine review is usually only made when the customer either really loves it or really hates it.

Once you have got going with reviews you should be able to rely on your normal sales to get further reviews.

Creating a stand out front cover is a must to get your book noticed on web sites and in book shop shelves – if you are lucky to get your book that far.

The front cover needs to be smart, professional and not too complicated. Your potential purchaser will see it as an indication of the quality of what is inside if the outside looks good.

As you will probably be selling an eBook version, you need to have a thumbnail image which can be placed on web sites and will be used as the image on sites like Amazon. This has particular display issues as you must use fonts, images and graphics that are clear to read even when the cover is reduced to a thumbnail. Make sure that there is sufficient contrast between the background colours and the text. Don’t forget the back cover where you can add some text to advertise your book.

Web links:

An article from the Book Designer:
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2012/01/book-cover-design-and-the-problem-of-symbolism/

a simple On line cover designer:
https://www.createspace.com/Tools/CoverCreator.jsp

A free free on line graphics program which has many of the functionality of PhotoShop:
http://pixlr.com/