Amazon is Now Showing Your Amazon Follows Count
Amazon is Now Showing Your Amazon Follows Count
What this means for the Amazon algorithms moving forward
Good news! You can now see how many Amazon Follows you have right in your Author Central dashboard.
Go to: https://author.amazon.com/marketingAndReports (you must be logged in)
Here, you will be able to see how many followers you have.
How Do Amazon Follows Help Your Catalog’s Visibility on Amazon?
There are three main ways which Amazon uses Follows:
Personalized Emails - They send out marketing emails based on who you follow
Push Notifications - They send out push notifications in the Kindle app based on who you follow
Carousels - There are a handful of carousels that use your Follows, though they are minimal on Amazon’s website
There are also three periods of time that you’ll see Amazon Follows:
Preorders - Leading up to your launch date, Amazon might push your preorder to followers. I’ve seen that the longer the preorder, the better chance of this because they can space out the emails among other competing priorities
Launches - When your book launches, you are highly likely to see personalized marketing emails and push notifications driving your book sales. These usually go out within a few weeks of launch, and you cannot control them
Other - There are a few other times that you get publicity for your books or author profile based on Follows, but there aren’t as many clear and discernible patterns around how those work. They are most likely based on user activity and/or Amazon’s “visibility” inventory, so we won’t go into detail about them.
For a full write-up and understanding of Amazon Follows, check out my recent article on it:
Are Amazon Follows Vanity Metrics?
“What gets measured gets managed.” ~ Peter Drucker
“If you give someone a metric, they'll try to improve it.” ~ Monica Leonelle
Amazon’s recent move to show Amazon Follows counts is in line with their recent push of refreshed Author Pages, which place the Follow button prominently at the top and includes a row of Author “Also Boughts” at the bottom of each Author Page.
Amazon might be giving authors their Follow count for the first time largely because they want people to start building their followings. If you give someone a metric, they'll try to improve it…But be cautious of how you improve this new-to-us metric.
While Amazon doesn’t disclose how they distribute visibility, there are a few things that are likely to matter as to whether your Follower actually receives notifications of your book:
#1 - Notifications Settings
A Follower has to be opted in to receive marketing emails from Amazon and has to be opted in to receive push notifications from the Kindle app.
There is currently no data on how many Amazon users opt into to push notifications but general benchmarks across all apps are 50-95% on Android and 30-75% of iOS. This makes push notifications a really good way to reach readers.
#2 - Relevance
Relevance is important on any platform that is showing your product to its customers. When these notifications go out, do your Followers actually click on and buy your books? While this may vary some from user to user, in general Amazon sends about one marketing email per day and the Kindle app sends about one push notification per day. Not all of these communications are dedicated to who and what you follow, though, so there is even less space available. Furthermore, when it comes to carousels on the website, there is significantly limited space, especially in the first row, which would get the best conversion.
Amazon has a limited inventory of “visibility” per person, if you will, and is going to give that inventory to the books that are converting to clicks and then sales—as it always has.
The downside for Follows is that you can’t see who is following you, nor can you sort through your following so that you can increase your relevancy like you might be able to do with an email list through pruning. This is not as much of a problem if you write in a popular genre, like contemporary romance or thriller, but could be a problem if you have a more niche audience.
#3 - Personalization
Much of the visibility Amazon gives books is done through personalization, which makes it much harder to track. In other words, Amazon shows personalized marketing for books that it thinks each individual user will click on and buy.
If a Follower is following one author, they are likely to see all of that author’s release emails and push notifications. Whereas if they are following 500 authors, they are likely to see any given author based more on timing (e.g. low volume launch periods) plus their other actions (e.g. clicking on their books or buying their books).
As you build your following, keep in mind that quality over quantity may be more useful to you from an algorithmic perspective. I don’t think followings are vanity metrics only—but if you build it one way, you won’t be able to go back and fix it later (similarly to your Bookbub following).
The Larger Moves Amazon is Making
On the one hand, Amazon could be sharing the Follower count simply because they are redoing many elements of Author Central right now.
I also have noticed, however, that the personalized marketing emails Amazon sends out have drifted more and more toward daily deals (similar to Bookbub) and books from authors you follow (similar to Bookbub).
Of course, the only data I see is my own personalized emails, and other users may be experiencing Amazon’s marketing differently.
Previously, my personalized emails were still driven largely by Also Boughts, despite its carousel removal from most product pages. I would guess that for many readers, this is still the case, and Also Boughts are driving some of the visibility on Amazon still. With algorithms, it’s less likely that things change or are taken away, and more likely that things are crowded out (much like the advice to crowd out bad foods from your diet by increasing your vegetable intake).
I believe, however, that Amazon Follows and Author Also Boughts are crowding out the Book Also Boughts that have been driving Amazon’s algorithms for a decade or more.
It makes sense—Also Boughts were built in a world where every book was a miniature brand in traditional publishing, with its own separate launch and marketing push. Indie have changed the landscape, however, placing a greater emphasis on series brands and even author brands. There are too many individual books to treat every book as a single unit when it comes to marketing. Amazon’s algorithms are adapting to that.
What fascinates me is that it is largely a response to the independent side of the publishing industry…We are more influential that we think.