As an author, you can position yourself to take advantage of the madness that descends on Amazon on July 15th and 16th. Hopefully, when you got this reminder last year, you took our advice to be ready for this year!
What IS Amazon Prime Day? Some refer to it as Christmas in July. It’s a day or two of incredible deals and sales for Amazon Prime members. And guess what? MOST books are available on Prime (depending on how you’ve published) so people are on Prime and shopping… they’ll be out there looking for great deals.
Speaking of Marketing Opportunities: Have you registered for the book marketing tactics with BUBLISH webinar next Thursday?
Bublish is dedicated to helping authors build their platform, market their books through innovative and inexpensive tools, and sell more books.
Join me as I interview CEO Kathy Meis about what Bublish can do for YOU!
How can you maximize sales using Amazon Prime day?
1. Email your list and let them know about Amazon Prime day. They might be in the dark! Make sure they know your book is out there and also (usually) available on Prime, so be sure to add it to their list. (For an even better result, put your ebooks on SALE on Amazon Prime day! So they may bypass the print copy, but if you can sell a ton of ebooks at a reduced price, you’re still winning!)
2. Get REVIEWS! Reach back out to all of those people who have promised reviews… and get them to go leave a review. Amazon reviews are truly one of the most important and sadly overlooked elements of book marketing. Not only does almost everyone read the reviews on a book before they purchase (or bypass the ones with no reviews or bad reviews), but reviews ALSO bump your book UP in the rankings through Amazon’s super secret algorithm. The higher you are, the more likely your book is to be seen and purchased by the people who are just randomly shopping for books in your category.
3. If your book is almost done, get it published ASAP! Or at least put it on pre-order! How do you get a print book on pre-order? You publish it through IngramSpark. See my tutorial on loading your book to IngramSpark HERE. (Hey, please subscribe to me while you’re there!) Of note, you’ll need a different cover for IngramSpark, but the interior files are the same. It will take about 2 days for approval and for it to show up on Amazon… so, it may be too late to take advantage for this year…
4. Consider running some AMS ads leading into Prime Day. You want your book to be front and center when people are shopping like crazy. Brian Meeks has a great book on how to properly use AMS ads that will be very helpful. You can also check out his interview with me all about AMS ads here.
5. Revisit your Sales Page description, keywords, and other metadata. Make sure you are all squared away and up to date if any changes or tweaks need to be made so that your book is as appealing as possible, and it’s placed properly.
6. If you haven’t set up your Amazon Author Page yet and claimed your book so that people can follow you and learn more about you, do it now.
Do you have any other ideas? Are you ready? If I had to pick one thing from the list above as the MOST important, it would probably be to send out an email to my list or post in my Facebook group about the big day and ask them to go ahead and leave a review if they haven’t… to help you be at the top when Amazon Prime Day arrives.
If you have other great ideas to share, please let us know! We’ll have a special Amazon Prime Day Share thread in the Write|Publish|Sell Facebook Group. You’ll want to head over there anyway, to see how you can win a free year membership to the Writer’s Guild by Jerry Jenkins, author of the Left Behind Series.
