If you’ve never heard of the X-ray feature on Amazon KDP, prepare to be amazed. This feature allows you to explain a topic, character, setting, and more in better detail for your readers.

This feature is exclusive to Amazon users, and it is a great way to connect with your audience. 

Today we’ll be looking at how you can use X-ray on Amazon KDP to improve your storytelling, cult following, and reviews. What are we waiting for? 

What Exactly Is X-Ray On Amazon KDP?

When reading on a Kindle product, Amazon allows the reader to click on a word or phrase that interests them. This could be a character, name, place, topic, or more. 

Descriptive words can be helpful when a reader is still trying to learn about the book’s content, including linking things back to other characters and memorable events. 

For example, if there was a grand reveal of a character in chapter 54 that was first introduced as an alluring stranger in chapter 13, the X-ray feature could help the reader connect these two points. 

Here are some more examples of how the X-ray feature is used in Kindle books to aid the reader’s experience: 

• “Voldemort” – X-ray content: The villain of the Harry Potter series who is trying to kill Harry Potter. 
• “Social media marketing” – X-ray content: Using social media and websites to promote a service to a broader audience. 
• “Royal Wedding” – X-ray content: The wedding between Prince William and Catherine Middleton, which took place on 29 April 2011.
• “London” – X-ray content: The capital city of England, home to Buckingham Palace, the place that sparked my interest in royalty. 

The X-ray content can be as short or as long as you like, spanning up to 1200 words.

Amazon will use Wikipedia definitions if the author hasn’t added any X-ray content, but we highly recommend you spend some time utilizing this feature. 

What’s So Important About The X-Ray Feature? 

The X-ray feature on Amazon books gives your reader the opportunity to engage deeper in your novel, allowing them to immerse themselves in your world.

Have you ever been reading and kept having to stop to look up a new term or definition, or look back through the pages to find a detail you’d forgotten about?

The X-ray feature can make this easier for the reader so that they can remain focused on the content. 

Amazon research has shown that readers actively seek out books with X-ray enabled, and enjoy it all the more when the snippets are written by the authors rather than Wikipedia. 

X-ray content is most important for non-fiction books who don’t want to keep Googling questions they have.

However, fiction X-ray content can also be extremely helpful for readers to give them a refresher on characters, backstories, terms, and more. 

Tips And Tricks For Writing X-Ray Content

The X-ray tool is extremely thorough in its combing through your novel to find what you should define. While helpful, this can also be rather challenging as you might not know where to begin. 

Here are some tips and tricks to help you get through the X-ray feature. It might be time-consuming, but it’s well worth it for your readers! 

1. Start With The Basics

Okay, so you’ve begun using the X-ray feature and it’s flagged up a thousand terms that it thinks you need to define. No need to panic. Let’s start with the basics. 

First of all, you don’t need to add content for all of the suggested terms. These are just recommendations from Amazon, and you can decide whether they need content or not.

However, Amazon does recommend that you fill in all of the X-ray blanks to ensure the best user experience. 

To begin, start with the content for terms and characters used more often. The X-ray tool will show you the terms used most frequently, so add content for these first. 

We always recommend that you start with characters first, as they’re most likely to be needed in order to understand the book better.

The more times a character or term appears, the more likely it is for an author to want information about it. 

Change the settings to Frequency 3+ so that you can see the terms used repeatedly. This will make it easier for you to flag the most important terms needing X-ray content. 

2. Don’t Be Afraid Of Wikipedia

The X-ray feature is sometimes able to connect a relevant Wikipedia page to your term or character. Check that the page is actually relevant before deleting it to add in your own content. 

If it is relevant, you can publish it and move on to the next term. Simple! 

Some authors turn their noses up at Wikipedia, but it can be useful when you have hundreds of terms to define and not much time to do it. 

3. Act As A Reader

Adding X-ray content can be difficult as an author since you already know everything there is to know about your book and its characters and world.

This can be easy to forget since you wrote the book, but your readers might not have such extensive knowledge. 

Especially if these added details are in your head rather than in your book. 

Consider the extra context or background that would be beneficial for a reader to know.

This can be extra descriptions, interesting tidbits about the characters or worlds, or even inner dialogue from your characters. 

What Do Readers Like To See In X-ray Content? 

Here are a few pointers that Amazon users have stated they enjoy further reading about: 

• Definitions for characters and key terms, such as places, events, and specific terminology. Anything that they might have to stop reading and Google. 
• For non-fiction books, the X-ray content should go beyond footnotes and provide even more information. 
• You can also use it to point readers in the right direction for further reading, should they want to learn more about a topic you’re touching on in your book. 
• Use X-ray content as an alternative perspective to the main narrative you went with so that you can argue two sides of the argument. 
• For fiction books, use X-ray content to take your reader back to the character’s original motivations, backstory, and anything else the reader might have forgotten. 
• This is a great place to add extra information you thought of while writing the book. Think of it as little Easter eggs for your readers. 
• Use X-ray content to explain why you chose the decisions you did for each character – readers love getting as much information as possible! 

Summary

Thanks for reading! We hope that our article has given you some insight into using the X-ray tool for authors on Amazon KDP. It is an incredibly useful tool that not many other publishing sites can offer. 

X-ray content can take a book from hardly read to extremely popular, as many readers seek out books with this added content. 

When adding your X-ray content, make sure that you start at the beginning and don’t get too flustered.

You can come back and finish it another time! Utilize Wikipedia and make sure that you consider what a reader would like to know from your definitions. 

Good luck!