Love them or hate them Amazon is the giant in the room when it comes to book selling, both in the United States and internationally
What I like about them is that I can order any book from here even if my local book store doesn’t sell it.
I also like the fact that I’ve earned good money from Amazon over the last twelve years.
This year, as part of the International Dublin Writers’ Festival, Amazon have agreed to put forward a representative to talk about the future of story and answer any questions we have.
My question is going to be: when are they going to let us know when readers stop reading our books? The percentage, on average, that people finish for each book when read on Kindle?
I think it’d be really useful information for authors.
What question would you like me to ask Amazon when I interview them for a recorded video session?
The video will be made available here in Substack so you don’t have to sign up for anything or pay for anything to get access to it.
The big question is how is this so predictable? We’ve had a series of bestsellers this year.
The answer is we stack ads and promotions. That means multiple Facebook ads, multiple Amazon ads, and email promotion, and related site promotions, all targeting Amazon in a short span of time to make sure the book rises fast up the charts.
When a book becomes a bestseller and gets into the charts then it starts selling organically. More people see it because a lot of people check out best seller lists. It isn’t a guarantee of organic long-term sales but some books do really well and continue to do well for a long period of time once they hit the bestseller list.
So what is the book for this week, for Thursday? Here it is.
To give you a little bit of the inside story of what we add to the stack, we also get partners to promote the book too. In this case SciFiction.com will be promoting it.
Other sites promote other books.
We have slots on SciFiction.com coming up for September/October if you’re interested in being a best seller and you have a science fiction book which would look good on one of the prominent science fiction sites in the United States.
Yes, we will give away a $500 ads campaign or credit towards services.
The competition is about first lines.
Please use the comments below to post a first line. You can like anyone else’s first line that you think is good but not your own, please. The first line with the most positive comments/Likes, which also meets a general criteria for a great first line, will win.
There will be multiple opportunities to post your first line so please get it ready or comment now
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