Hydra author of For We Are Many, and the upcoming fantasy novel, Shadowlith, book one of the Umbral Blade, Stuart Thaman, shares his thoughts on the use of Amazon Giveaways. A teacher by day, a philosopher in spirit and a quick learner when it comes to book marketing, Stu has become a Reddit.com sage on the topics of how to sell your small press or indy books. Without further ado, here is his experience on a recent testing of the Amazon promotional tool to increase the eyeballs on your Twitter account. Check back later in the week for the cover reveal and details on, Shadowlith.
Growing a Twitter Following
Everyone struggles with social media in some aspect. I probably struggle more than most. I don’t tweet often, I rarely ever follow anyone other than metal bands, and I pretty much never use any of the popular hashtags other than #amwriting.
But today I have taken my measly 220 Twitter followers and turned that into 508 and counting.
How did I do it? Easy. Amazon giveaways. A little while back Amazon introduced a feature whereby anyone (author or otherwise, and you don’t even have to be selling anything yourself either) can host a giveaway of just about any product. When they expanded the giveaways to eBooks, indie authors like myself got pretty excited.
The best part about the giveaways is that they are dirt cheap (no cost beyond the eBooks themselves) and they are directly linked to your social media accounts. I ran 3 different eBook giveaways today. For each of them, the requirement to enter was a follow on my Twitter page. So in total I spent about $15 buying books from myself, which does earn me royalties, and buying books from other authors I like and respect. That $15 investment has netted roughly 300 new Twitter followers in a single afternoon. That’s a huge return.
Before you get too excited, yes, about 25% or more of the accounts entering the giveaways seem to be fake accounts. Their Twitter profiles have no pictures or activity other than entering contests. Ugh. That sucks, but it is unavoidable. But the other 75% or so, those followers probably like books. And they probably like my kinds of books. So that’s pretty awesome.
The best part of the whole deal? Amazon advertises the giveaway for you. I pretty much did nothing to promote the link.
