Boost Your Book Sales with Amazon Followers and Book Recommendations
Good news for authors! Amazon is now letting us see our follower count. In this article, we’ll explore what this means for authors and how to make the most of this new feature using book recommendations.
Why Are Amazon Followers Important?
Amazon Followers are people who have expressed interest in your writing and clicked the “Follow” button on your Amazon Author page.
Having Amazon Followers is helpful because if they have agreed to receive marketing emails from Amazon, they can get notified about your new book within 60 days of its release or availability for pre-order on the website. This gives you a free opportunity to promote your work to your readers.
For instance, let’s say you have 1000 Amazon followers. When you publish a new book, Amazon will send them an email automatically, notifying them of your latest release.
It’s important to know that the number of followers you have doesn’t affect your Amazon Best Seller Rank. However, having more followers can increase the chances of your book reaching a wider audience and potentially boosting your book sales.
How to Find out How Many Amazon Followers You Have?
Simply go to your Author Central dashboard and navigate to the “Marketing and Reports” section. Scroll down and voila! You will be able to see your follower count.
Note! Amazon Author Central only displays the number of followers if the author has more than 20 followers. Amazon does this to protect the privacy of its customers.
Now that authors can finally see their follower count, it’s time to start growing that number by inviting readers to follow their Amazon profile. To make it easier, it’s a good idea to generate an Amazon follow link.
How to Generate Your Amazon Follow Link?
First, visit your author page on Amazon. You’ll need to locate your unique ASIN number, which is a string of 10 letters and numbers in the URL of your Amazon author page.
Once you have your ASIN number, you can create your follow link using this formula: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/AUTHORASIN/#author-footer-AUTHORASIN
Just replace the “AUTHORASIN” in the link with your own ASIN number, and you’re all set to share it with your readers!
For example, my Amazon follow link is: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B06X3TMB6D/#author-footer-B06X3TMB6D So, if you would like to follow me on Amazon, you can do it here.
In the past, authors couldn’t keep track of how many followers they had, so they didn’t put in much effort to grow them. But now that you can see how many followers you have, it’s a great opportunity to increase your Amazon following. You can promote your follow link by sharing it on social media, on your website, in your books, to your email list, and during book promotions.
How to Recommend Your Books to Your Amazon Followers?
One more new way to utilize your Amazon followers is through book recommendations. This feature allows authors to connect with their Amazon followers and provide recommendations about books in their catalog and books from other authors that they enjoy. These recommendations can be shown on an author’s Amazon Author Page, Amazon website, and can be shared with their followers.
Amazon won’t let you email your Amazon Followers directly. However, once you make three book recommendations, Amazon will send emails to your subscribers showing your suggested books. This is a great way to remind your readers that you exist and promote other authors in your genre.
To utilize the book recommendations feature, follow these steps:
- Go to the “REPORTS + MARKETING” tab on Amazon Author Central.
- Navigate to the “Book Recommendation” section.
- Click “Create Recommendation.”
- Choose the question you’d like to answer and select the book you’d like to recommend.
- Preview your recommendation and submit it.
Note! To recommend a book, it must first be added to the author’s Amazon Author Page. It may take up to a day for the recommendation to appear on the author’s page.
In conclusion, Amazon’s decision to show author follower counts is great news for authors because, if you know your numbers and can directly impact them, you have more control over your book marketing tactics and results. On the other hand, by utilizing the book recommendations feature, authors can connect with their followers and promote their own or other authors’ books to build partnerships and increase sales.
