There's a small button on every Amazon author page that quietly emails your readers every time you release a new book. It costs nothing. It takes one click. And according to the dozens of indie authors I've compared notes with, roughly none of them actually tell their readers it's there.
The button says + Follow. It sits near the top of your Amazon Author Page, next to your author photo. It's not flashy. Amazon hasn't bothered to make it feel important. But it's one of the few free tools on the platform that does something genuinely useful — it turns a passing reader into a subscriber without asking them for an email address, a password, or a spare minute of their attention.
What the button actually does
When a reader clicks +Follow on your author page, they're opted in to Amazon's new-release alert emails. The next time you publish a book, Amazon pings them. The email lands in their regular inbox with a subject along the lines of "New from [Your Name]" and a link straight to the book page.
You haven't had to build a mailing list. You haven't had to keep anyone warm with monthly newsletters. Amazon has done the record-keeping, Amazon sends the email, and Amazon has already verified that this person cares about you — they clicked Follow, after all.
It also feeds into Amazon's recommendation engine in ways the company never fully explains. Anecdotally, a book that lands in front of a stack of already-interested readers on day one tends to do better in its early visibility window than one that doesn't. Your mileage will vary, but the maths doesn't punish you for trying.
Where it lives, and why readers miss it
The button shows up in several places on Amazon, with varying levels of subtlety:
- Your Amazon Author Page. This is the main real estate, and the button sits near your photo and bio.
- Beneath your name on the product page of any of your books, usually in small text near the book title — the exact positioning depends on the marketplace and on how Amazon's design team feels that week.
- Inside the Kindle book itself, in the "About the Author" section at the end. That's where readers who've just finished your book are at their absolute peak of enthusiasm.
The issue isn't that the button is hidden. It's that there's no reason for a reader to think about it. Unless you nudge them, they won't click. They'll assume Amazon will magically tell them when you release something new. Amazon will not.
The honest limitations
Before everyone gets excited and renames their dog "Follow", a few things are worth being straight about.
The emails Amazon sends to followers are automated. You don't write them. You don't choose the timing. You don't pick the subject line, the cover image, or whether the email goes out at all. Amazon's algorithm decides whether a given follower gets notified on a given release, and the documentation is deliberately vague on exactly when it does and doesn't fire. Some followers get the email. Some don't. Some get it three days after launch, which is somewhat after the party has ended.
You also can't see who your followers are. You can see the total number, but only once it creeps over 20 — Amazon hides the figure below that, for privacy reasons. There's no export, no segmentation, no way to contact them outside the notification Amazon chooses to send. If you're building a business, a mailing list you actually own still does the heavy lifting. Follows are the lightweight, complementary layer.
And there's a third, quieter limitation: it's Amazon's house. If Amazon closes your account, tweaks its rules, or simply stops sending the notification emails as reliably as it once did, the channel goes with it. Treat +Follow as a useful freebie, not as infrastructure.
How to actually get readers to click it
Nobody — and I do mean nobody — clicks the +Follow button by accident. The job is to get the button in front of people who already want to follow you, at the moment they're most likely to act. The mechanics are boringly simple:
- Put a clear, specific instruction at the back of every book. Not "stay in touch" — tell them exactly what to do. Something like: "To be notified when my next book is out, tap +Follow on my Amazon author page." One sentence. They've just finished the book; they're at maximum goodwill.
- Link directly to your author page. Don't make them search. Your URL is
amazon.com/author/yourname(andamazon.co.uk/author/yourname, and so on for the other markets). Paste it into the end matter. - Mention it in your Amazon book description. You can't edit Amazon's own page layout, but you can add a short closing line pointing readers to the author page and the follow button.
- Say something on social media once in a while. Not daily — nobody wants to be nagged. Quarterly, or when you've done something newsworthy, is plenty.
- Remind your newsletter subscribers. Yes, they already hear from you. But a Follow plus a newsletter is a belt-and-braces approach, and Amazon's notification reaches them in a different inbox mindset.
The common thread is that you're removing friction. A reader who has to go looking for a Follow button won't find it. A reader who's given a clear instruction and a direct link will often click, because the cost to them is near zero.
Tracking what you can't really track
The metric you can see is the total follower count in Author Central. It's a crude measure, but it's directional. If it's climbing steadily over months, your end-matter nudges and your author-page traffic are doing their job. If it's flat, something in your funnel isn't landing. Check on it every couple of months, not daily. Obsessing over the number is how madness starts.
You can't see conversions from follow to sale, because Amazon won't tell you which emails went out or which recipients bought. Unlike Amazon Attribution, there's no dashboard here. All you can do is make the ask, count the follows, and trust that a bigger pool of pre-warmed readers on release day is better than a smaller one.
Where this fits
+Follow isn't a growth strategy on its own. It's a supplement. The main levers still sit where they always have — the cover, the blurb, the categories, the pricing, the quality of the book itself. But this is a free supplement, it takes ten minutes to wire the nudge into your end matter, and it stacks quietly in the background for the rest of your career.
If you want a proper, sequenced plan for stitching all the small-but-compounding tools together into a launch that actually ranks — covers, blurbs, categories, pre-launch timing, the whole lot — WIPsage is built for exactly that job. In the meantime: open the back matter of your next book, write one clear sentence about the +Follow button, and ship it. That's a one-hour task that pays out across every release you'll ever do.