It has been an educational experience, so I thought I’d share the good, the bad, and the ugly with you.
The benefits: Data, mailing list integration, discountsAmazon provides its suppliers, whether self-publishers or traditional publishers, with no more than basic sales data. This makes it very difficult to explicitly tie marketing activities to sales, which in turn makes it hard to know whether a specific campaign has been successful.
My ebook shop is hosted on DPD, which allows me to hook it into third party analytics services such as Statcounter or Google Analytics. This means I can find out where my buyers come from, which helps with marketing. For example, I know that 46 percent of my fiction buyers come from the USA and only 32 percent from the UK, whereas 67 percent of my science anthology buyers come from the UK, and only 21 percent from the US.
That’s useful data because it means that I need to craft different marketing strategies for the different types of book. I should, for example, consider how to better reach American readers, perhaps by scheduling some tweets later in the British day and overnight to reach more of my American followers.
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