Why Authors Choose Amazon To Promote Their Work
When you fish, you want to place your baited hook where the fish are… because that way you’ll catch more fish.
As an author, there are two avenues to promoting and selling your work: bookstores and online sales. To plug that into our “fishing for book buyers” analogy… as an author you can choose to fish in salt water or fresh water… but your efforts need to be concentrated on large bodies of water.
Think of book store sales as “salt water fishing”. Bookstore distribution like salt water fishing while online sales are more like fishing in fresh water. If you’ve chosen to promote your book “online” then you have a LOT of options. However, just like fresh water fishing… there are countless bodies of fresh water in the United States alone where you could choose to fish. Of course there are fish in the small pond behind a farmer’s house on a dirt road… but there are more fish in a huge lake like Lake Okeechobee in central Florida or in the Great Lakes.
Amazon is the big lake on the internet for book promotion. Sure, Barnes and Nobles also has an online presence, but take a look at this graph to see the difference between these two sites when it comes to traffic:
The figures are staggering. During the month of March 2008 alone Amazon had 160,930,576 visitors. That “M” in the graphic above stands not for thousands, but for MILLIONS of visitors.
In comparison, Barnes and Nobles had a mere 7,440,278 visitors during the same time period… according to Compete.com.
In the recent post, “Amazon isn’t backing down” I pointed out that Amazon provides a lot of “social networking” tools to promote online sales. I personally have ADORED Amazon’s business model from the beginning. Amazon truly offers a “better way to buy books” thanks to the social networking tools that they helped pioneered.
Allowing book buyers to write reviews on the site is, I believe, the foundation of Amazon’s success. It was the online “solution” to a book buyer’s dilemma: You can’t judge a book buy it’s cover. While Barnes and Nobles offers comfy couches which potential book buyers can “plop down” and get a “feel” for a book… the online book buyer did not have that option. (Amazon has recently begun offering readers the opportunity to “preview” a book’s content.) How do you make a purchasing decision when you can’t pick up and thumb through the pages? You can start by reading the reviews of what other readers have to say about the book.
Over the years, Amazon has increased it’s tools offered to authors, even including the ability for an author to blog on Amazon’s site. This is a win/win for both the author and Amazon. Amazon gets GREAT content to attract book buyers thanks to blogging authors. Authors get a place to harness the power of blogging in a place which makes it easy for readers to buy a copy of their book.
The problem occurs when authors depend too heavily on the kindness of Amazon. Don’t get me wrong, an author who maintains a blog on Amazon is utilizing a POWERFUL marketing tool. Bravo to each and every author doing so on Amazon. However, if that’s the ONLY online home you have… you’re putting an AWFUL lot of your eggs into a basket you don’t have ANY control over.
Case in point… the recent uproar over Amazon’s strong armed tactics with POD publishers.
[...] teaming with fish - in this case, customers. Since Amazon is the biggest, it makes sense that authors would choose Amazon to promote their [...]
September 11th, 2008 at 11:31 am