Amazon.com is CONSTANTLY coming up with some of the coolest and innovative ways to bring authors and readers together. This is probably why they are the dominating online book retailer, but I still wouldn’t necessarily call them “Author’s Best Friend”.

The newest thing they have came out with is #AmazonCart which ties Amazon to Twitter. A reader can add a book to their cart from Twitter without leaving Twitter. Just because it’s in the cart doesn’t mean the reader has bought your book yet, but it simply means they might later or they put it there to check out and buy later. Probably one of the biggest disconnects about promo is that it takes people from Twitter when they really don’t want to go. This can help bridge the gap a tad, but I wouldn’t abuse it. Still doesn’t give the license to tweet link, link, link…

A reader simply has to reply to a tweet with any Amazon product link (can be shortened) with the hashtag #AmazonCart and voila! It’s in the cart. Of course there is a setup process, but all that information can be found here.

Per Amazon AuthorCentral, people can leverage this on a book launch. Pretty cool huh? Contact them for details. When you login, information will be on the homepage. Not on AuthorCentral? Sign up today, it’s free. Need help? Ask me :).

Authors can leverage a bit more when they do their occasional promo tweet. And I did say and do mean occasional. Have a catchy blurb or a line to catch the reader’s attention, but you still have to have room for a shortened link and a call to action pointing to Amazon or that it is an Amazon link in 120 characters or less. Challenging, but not impossible. Get creative! That’s about all there is in regards to tips about how to tweet it to hopefully catch a reader as they are scanning the feed and at least get them to reply or retweet with that hashtag. The rest is up to them :).

 

Like all good things in life, do it in moderation. Spam rules for Twitter TOS still apply and do does the “cool kid” rules of Twitter etiquette.

People aren’t on social media looking to buy, so keep that in mind. They want to be educated, entertained, or looking to socialize.

Then after all the coolness and newness wore off, then begs the question about how this can probably contribute to the author spam problem we have on Twitter already. *headdesk*

Probably a lot.

It’s already a toxic wasteland of not just author spam but spam in general. There are a lot of sellers on Amazon.com. When there are new tools, there are those people who will abuse them, so not big surprise there. Don’t be that author.

For goodness sake, don’t put it in an automated DM, but from the looks of things I don’t think you can, since DMs are private (and for #AmazonCart to work it needs to be public, so that snake’s head is cut off at the get-go (thank goodness!). Don’t @ someone or a bunch of people on Twitter and tell them to add your book to their cart. It’s just another flavor of spam. Spam with jalapenos is still spam. Just a regular ol’ general promo tweet is all you need. If someone is interested, they’ll act. Just like how they do when they visit your profile ;).

When using this tool try not to spam! You’ll just irritate people. Aggravated people won’t share or purchase from you.

So keep up the conundrum of the more content over promo,  you don’t want to annoy your potential or existing readers :).

Again, this is just one tool out of many to use at your disposal. It is free in the terms of cold, hard cash, but not in the sense of that Twitter brownie point bank! Save those delicious brownies when you really need them. or they’ll be gone and then you’ll have to wait to “bake” some more!