I Never Knew How Many Followers I Had on Amazon

For nine days, my new thriller can be pre-ordered on Amazon Germany. It will still take a little more than a week until the official sales start.

That's why I don't advertise the book much at the moment. I only have one Amazon ad online.

Now it's like this that I usually only have brief pre-order periods. Actually, I never do more than a fortnight. That's why there are always massive advertising campaigns running at this time of pre-ordering.

Amazon advertisements and Facebook Ads disguise the number of followers.

So far, I have not been able to say exactly where the sales came from during this phase. Amazon ads actually show precisely how many sales (or in my case pre-orders) they generate, but it is impossible to determine this already with Facebook ads.

Facebook ads, on the other hand, are the advertising measure that I usually use most at this stage of the launch process. I typically work with daily budgets between 30 and 50 Euros. But the dashboard of the Facebook ad application only shows how many people have clicked on the ad. How many of them subsequently bought the book remains unknown.

If you want to know more, you have to lead the customers to your own website and get them to purchase from Amazon from there. By including a so-called Facebook pixel on your page, you can see how many sales the ad generated.

But I always link from the ad directly to the Amazon product page of my book. The fewer clicks a customer has to make before buying, the better. The certainty of how many people who clicked on the ad will then also buy the book will, therefore, lead to fewer sales from the outset.

I do not take that risk. That's why I still don't know how successful my Facebook Ads are.

But even more unfathomable than the results of Facebook Ads is the number of followers I have on Amazon.

Amazon Follower - a short introduction

If you have never heard of how to follow an author on Amazon, I will explain it briefly:

If you are on the product page of a book or ebook on Amazon, the cover of the book appears in the upper left corner. Just below it, there is a link "Follow the author." If you click on this link, you will be notified by Amazon as soon as there is a new book by this author.

The whole thing looks like this:

Many readers want to know a bit more about an author before they follow him or her, so they first click on the author's name, which can be found directly below the title. This click leads to the author's page, where you can find all his or her works, the biography, and some more information.

You can also follow the author from this page. On the top left of the page, below the author's photo, is the button.

So now you know how a writer on Amazon gets his followers. But the author knows nothing more than that. Amazon just doesn't tell the authors. Everyone who follows an author on Amazon remains a customer of Amazon. For this reason, Amazon keeps the data to itself.

Why it is difficult to estimate the number of followers

As I said before, my launches always involve several advertising measures running in parallel. I run Facebook ads, Amazon ads, and promote pre-ordering in certain Facebook groups. As the days go by, I increase these measures, and besides, the first organic sales are coming in.

Organic sales are the sales that occur because the advertising measures have made the book so well visible in the rankings that customers find them on their own.

Since no one knows when Amazon will notify the followers, it is impossible to say how many sales on which day can be attributed to which measure. Amazon advertisements are the only exception, but usually, these figures are negligible.

Why this time I can see how significant the influence of my followers really is

Today, on the ninth day of the pre-order period, I suddenly noticed a significant increase in sales. By yesterday, pre-orders had gradually increased to fourteen a day. But today I looked, and suddenly at lunchtime, I had over fifty pre-orders.

A glance at my Amazon Ads dashboard told me that I had only sold three books on it today. So it couldn't have been that.

The organic visibility over the ranking was no greater today than it was yesterday. So this explanation is out of the question.

But then I received a message from a member of my Facebook fan page. He told me with delight that Amazon had just informed him about my new release.

Now some things became clear to me. Amazon had informed the followers who follow me directly via Amazon.

In Germany, it is now four in the afternoon. Up to now, 106 pre-orders have been received just today. Yesterday there were, as I said, until midnight a total of fourteen. My reader reported receiving the message from Amazon three hours ago.

If I assume that I would have generated another fourteen sales today, I can assign ninety-two pre-orders to my followers so far — all in a three-hour period since Amazon notified my followers.

That would be 30.66 orders per hour.

Of course, I can't extrapolate this to the end of the day, because most newsletters have the highest opening rate shortly after sending. So it will probably be less rapid later on.

But let's go further: The average click rate for newsletters is somewhere between 1.5% and 5%. Let's assume that it is at least twice as high at Amazon because Amazon merely is unbeatable when it comes to targeting.

With an estimated click rate of 10%, I was able to verify 920 followers within three hours (92 pre-orders are 10% of 920 possible).

Conclusion

Because this time, I had pure data when my followers were notified, and I also knew exactly when the messages were sent, this time, I can see how much power my Amazon followers have.

I expect to get well over 100 pre-orders later in the day just because of my Amazon followers.

My speculations about the exact number of followers further up should be treated with caution as I am not a statistician. Nevertheless, I have taken the liberty of including this speculation in the article to create a basis for discussion.

Up until this launch, I always assumed that my advertisements were the most significant contributor to how well the pre-order period for my books was going. To be honest, I never really had Amazon followers on the radar.

Since today I know that this was a big mistake. Amazon followers are a real power.

So I will definitely adapt my author biography and add a CTA at the end to use the follow button.

Book 31, and I am still learning something new.