SFA 053 – New Amazon Ads Data, When to Avoid Pre-Orders, and Listener Questions Answered

We’re fielding some of your questions from our Facebook group for this week’s show. There were quite a few related to pre-orders for ebooks, so if you haven’t already, make sure to check out our big two-part episode on pre-orders (Pre-Orders: How, When, and Why to Use Them to Increase Sales, and Book Advances, White-Listing Requests for Newsletters, and Pre-Orders Pt 2).

Before we jumped into answering questions, we shared a little news. Jo has been having trouble getting Amazon to show the book cover for his new pre-order, Andrea has started working on a new installment to her fantasy series, and Lindsay took a look at some of her Amazon ads to see how things are shaking out now that the reports include the past two weeks of page-read (KENPC) data.

Here’s a list of the questions we covered:

Julie: When doing a launch, do you price low for the pre-order if doing one, or start at your normal price and do a promo later?
Devanie: It seems that everyone advertises (FB, Amazon, seeking Bookbub, etc.) the first book in the series, but what if a different book in the series is stronger/better written and each can stand alone?
Ethan: For those of you with an Amazon Affiliate account, do you know if KU borrows are being counted toward the count in this statement: You have referred <#> Kindle Free E-books and <#$> Kindle Paid E-Books?
Chris: If you put a book up for preorder on KDP very early (for links, etc.) but aren’t running any AMS ads, are you just slowly grinding down your baseline relevance into oblivion or does that only happen when you’re actively running ads? (poorly) (Here’s our promised link from Dave Chesson: Why Not to Do Pre-Orders on Amazon.)
Heather: If you have a series exclusive to Amazon, can you sell it as a boxed set on other stores, or is it considered the same content?
Ethan: When planning for a new series, when should I tell readers about it? When I have the books on pre-order, or earlier? Also, how many should I have on pre-order? Three at least?
Tom: Back matter links to pre-orders: just link to the Amazon book page, or can you use something like Books2Read for pre-orders?
Tom: One for Jo: I might be about to use a series-specific website for my first books, as I have a domain that fits the series well. But I think it’ll be better to use my author site (which means re-jigging it). Is having a bookofdeacon-type-site definitely a thing to avoid, even if it’s good for marketing?

Thanks for listening to the show. Here’s the link to our Facebook group if you want to ask questions or chat with other authors: https://www.facebook.com/groups/504063143655523/