How to Increase Amazon Followers [4 Easy Steps]

Amazon Followers have long been sought after by authors, because Amazon directly promotes your books (without you having to lift a finger) to those followers.

However, until recently, it was impossible to know how many followers you have, decreasing the motivation many authors have to push people to click that button.

But that has changed.

Now, there are easy ways to see what that number is, and how you can grow it. You can monitor your follower growth, track marketing effectiveness, and even use the number as social proof for a potential publisher.

Note: There’s a tool called ReaderScout that’s an important part of finding an Amazon Follower link that you can share with your audience, as well as to track the number of followers you have. It’s completely free, and will make the entire process I’m about to outline that much easier. 

What Are Amazon Followers and Why Are They Important?

Amazon Followers represents the number of people who have clicked the “Follow” button on your Amazon Author page.

One of the primary benefits of Amazon Followers is that each follower will receive notifications when you release a new book on Amazon. This means that you can leverage your following to promote your work and generate buzz around new releases.

But Amazon Followers are more than just a promotional tool. They are also a key indicator of how popular you are as an author. The more followers you have, the greater your reach and influence within the Amazon community, thereby increasing your credibility as an author.

And while you can't access the contact information of these followers (Amazon owns that information), there are ways you can reach out indirectly, which I'll discuss later on.

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Perhaps most importantly, having a strong following on Amazon can provide social proof to publishers. If a publisher is considering adding your book to their catalog, they will likely take a look at your Amazon Author page to gauge your popularity and potential for success. 

If you have a large number of followers, this can serve as a powerful endorsement for your work and increase the likelihood that your book will be picked up by a publisher.

Amazon recently made it possible to know how many followers you have. However, in order to see that number, you have to constantly check back with your Author Central account, which can get tedious. Thankfully, there’s a much easier way to keep track of your Amazon Followers count.

Let’s see how this can be done.

Step 1: Download ReaderScout

The first step in increasing your Amazon follower count is to download the Chrome plug-in called ReaderScout. 

ReaderScout is a plug-in specifically designed to give you useful information about your Amazon author profile.

ReaderScout can do many things, including:

• Notify you of an unexpected price change
• Notify you of new reviews
• Tell you your author follower count

That last item is especially important. ReaderScout allows you to know exactly how many followers you have at the click of a button, rather than having to repeatedly log in to your Author Central account.

This is absolutely huge! You can now see how many followers you have on Amazon, and have a rough idea of how many people will receive emails when you release a new book.

This alone makes ReaderScout worth integrating with your Chrome browser, not to mention the useful additions of monitoring price changes and reviews (see this article if you want to know more about why that information will protect you from scams).

Step 2: Generate Your Follow Link

There’s a simple formula that you can use to get a link that goes directly to the “Follow” button.

Start by visiting your author page (note: you can just send people to this page, as the Follow button is fairly prominent, but there is a better way of doing this).

Then locate your author ASIN number. You can see this as a string of 10 letters and numbers in the url of your Amazon author page.

From there, the formula for the link is as follows:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/AUTHORASIN/#author-footer-AUTHORASIN

Just select the AUTHORASIN and replace it with the number you found above.

Step 3: Share Your Link

Now that you have a link that takes readers directly to your follow button, it’s time to start sharing it around.

Most authors have not done a ton of promoting because, until recently, it was almost impossible to tell how many followers you have. So by focusing on promoting this number, you can potentially get ahead of the masses!

With that in mind, there are really four areas that are best to promote your follow link:

1. Your Email List
2. Social Media
3. Your Author Website
4. Regular book promotion

Let’s break each of those down.

1. Email Marketing

Email is still one of the most powerful tools (if not the most powerful tool) for authors marketing their books.

And it should be the first place you go when promoting your Author Follow button.

Your email list is already full of people that have taken action to follow you. They’ve already subscribed and picked up what you’re putting down.

That makes your subscribers the most likely to click “Follow” on your author page. So this is definitely where I would start your promotion.

Here are a few places where you could promote your link:

• In an entire email asking your subscribers to follow you
• At the bottom footer of every email
• Anytime you release a book, you should remind readers of your Follow button

2. Social Media

Besides email marketing, social media is probably the most obvious place to share your “Follow” link. 

Now we at Kindlepreneur generally recommend that you find one social media channel and stick to it, rather than try to spread yourself too thin with multiple platforms.

So wherever your audience is, stick to that platform and promote heavily.

Don’t just post once and leave it at that. Likewise, don’t spam your audience with constant requests to hit the Follow button. Instead, take opportunities when you can to mention it and share.

Social media is also a great place to explain why you want more followers. Explain that Amazon helps promote the books, that it can improve your Amazon algorithm, etc.

3. Author Website

Lastly, I recommend you place a link to your Author Follow button prominently on your website.

There are a lot of different places where you could place this link, including the following:

• In your menu header
• In the footer that appears on every page
• Mention it within the content of specific web pages
• Alongside links to your individual books

A website usually does not get the same level of engagement that you would get from an email list, for example, but it’s still a default place to put any important links. 

You could also have a page with a list of important links. This is useful for social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where you can only have one link, so it pays to link to a separate page with links to everything else.

4. General Book Promotion

With what we’ve seen so far, we’ve discovered that simply generating sales of your book leads to more people clicking the follow button.

That means that regular book marketing (which you should be doing anyway) like book promotions, ads, etc. are likely to have an impact on your followers.

So don’t forget about the basics, which I’ve listed in a handy article called Book Marketing 101. Check that out if you’re looking for more ways to promote books.

Step 4: Email Your Amazon Followers

But wait, didn't I say earlier that you can't access the contact information of your Amazon Followers? Yes, and while it's true that you don't have access to the emails of your followers, there is a workaround that Amazon allows.

Side note: this is why it's important to have your own email list. Because you control the data, and you can do what you want with it. Amazon Followers are valuable data that Amazon controls, and while they do allow authors a glimpse into that data, it is incomplete, and it could be taken away at any time.

So while you can't email your Amazon Followers directly, Amazon does allow you to make book recommendations (for yourself and other authors), and they say that with at least three book recommendations, Amazon will send out emails to your subscribers with that information.

It's a great way to not only remind readers that you exist, but also to share the love with other authors in your genre.

But how do you make these book recommendations?

Simple.

• Go to your Amazon Author Central Account
• Click on the “Reports + Marketing” tab
• Under “Book Recommendations” click on the “Create recommendation” button
• Fill out the suggested book recommendations sections

Get ReaderScout Today

If you’re not convinced already, let me put in one last plug for ReaderScout. It’s the key component in this entire process, with two extremely important functions:

1. Providing you with the number of Amazon followers that you have
2. Generating the link you can use to increase those followers

I’m incredibly excited to see how far this goes, and how authors are able to use this data to increase their audiences and book sales.

Be sure to reach out if you uncover any great strategies and tactics for increasing your Follower number.

Happy book writing!