Utilizing Amazon’s Buying and Gifting eBooks for Others Feature

I’m the queen of jumping into something, being all gung-ho for a few weeks or months, then forgetting all about it. I’ll sign up for something (usually something that COSTS me), and then forget about it. Months or YEARS later, I realize I’ve been paying for something I never use.

Some examples that I’m not proud of: 

A gym membership: Took me months to get the gym to stop charging my card. :(

eBates: Signed up years ago, got a nice bit of cash back on some purchases, then promptly forgot about it. The good news is that ebates was bought out by Rakuten, and I switched over last year. The good news is that Rakuten doesn’t COST me anything, but if I remember to use it, it SAVES me a few dollars, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you like, check out my Passive Income [https://seekerville.blogspot.com/2020/08/passive-income-with-emphasis-on-writers.html] post from last year that deals with this a bit.

And, most recently, I’m really, REALLY upset with Hootsuite. Their plans jumped over 500% from 2020 to 2021, so a plan that costed $119 a year ago now costs $588 a year. NOT COOL. So if you use Hootsuite and have it on auto renewal, be aware. But anyway, that’s another kettle of fish that’s going to get stinky soon. :)

But I digress….

Today’s post digs deep into Amazon’s Buying and Gifting eBooks for Others option which is an author’s friend.

Now, if you don’t want to read today’s entire post, just click on the link above to see what Amazon says about the process, and you’ll be all set. However, I do have some ideas and tips for you so that you do as I say and not as I DID five years ago. :)

So, let’s get started. Here’s the skinny from Amazon’s Buying and Gifting eBooks for Others page:

You can promote your books buying single units to send to specific people or buying multiple copies to offer to a bigger audience. 

  

• Buy for Others – eBook gift (single copy): You can gift a single eBook. When you gift an eBook, the recipient receives a redemption code and can choose to accept your eBook gift by redeeming the code. You can also exchange it for a gift card (US only).

• Buy for Others – Prepaid eBooks (single and multiple copies): You can purchase one or multiple prepaid eBooks as a gift in a single order. We create a set of redemption links (instead of redemption codes), one for each copy of the book. The purchaser can refund any unredeemed copies within 60 days or can re-gifted at any time. Recipients cannot exchange eBooks for gift cards or other products.

Pam again. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the “Buy for Others - eBook gift (single copy)” option where you gift an ebook to a winner of some giveaway program you’ve participated in, or perhaps you’ve offered to draw a name or two from your newsletter subscribers to gift one of your ebooks to.

All well and good, except then you realize that the book your subscriber chose from your stable of books costs $9.99. What if you had a handful of copies available that you’d purchased when they were put on sale by your publisher that you could slide into that slot for that winner? That’s where the “Buy for Others - Prepaid eBooks (single and multiple copies)” becomes your best friend.

In the first option, you log in to your Amazon account and purchase an ebook and send it to the recipient, usually with a “Congratulations, you won XYZ in the recent Ho-Ho-Ho giveaway!” Yada-yada. Unless all the stars have aligned, you’re going to pay full price (whether that’s $2.99 or $9.99) for that ebook that you just gifted on the fly.

In the second option, you purchase a handful of copies when they’re on sale and have the redemption links send to YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS. Then weeks, months, YEARS (cough-cough), you use those $0.99-$1.99 ebooks for giveaways.

But there’s a CATCH!!! Well, not really a catch, but… Don’t do like PAM did and FORGET about your stash of ebooks just waiting to be gifted. (Face-palm!!!)

So, let’s start with the basics: How DO you purchase in bulk in the first place? Again, Amazon makes this process pretty painless on the page I shared above, but I’ll walk you through the steps here.

To buy Prepaid eBooks (single and multiple copies) to send to others: 

1 Go to the eBook's detail page and find Buy for Others.

2 Choose the quantity. On Amazon.com, choose a quantity greater than 1.

3 Enter recipient email address(es) to have Amazon send to the recipient(s) on your behalf (optional).

4 Complete your purchase.

If you didn't send all copies at checkout, you'll get an email with instructions to retrieve redemption links. You can also go to Your Account › Your Orders › Manage eBooks to copy and send redemption links to your recipients. 

Pam again: Notice that even with this option of buying multiple ebooks, you CAN go ahead and enter recipient email addresses (see step 3) if you’re ready to do that. But the purpose of this strategy is to have a few copies that you purchased when they were on sale to use for later promotions at your leisure. The sentence that I changed to red is the key. Just don’t enter recipient emails and you’ll receive an email with the dedicated redemption links for each ebook you purchased on this order.

Now, how do you keep UP with this stash of orders? There are two ways, and I recommend both.

1) Create a spreadsheet of your orders. This can be as simple or detailed as you like. The most important part is to include your Amazon Order # and the link to your Digital Orders. That way even if it’s been a year or more, you can easily plug in that order # on your Amazon account and see how many copies you still have left that haven’t been claimed. You can include book title, # of copies ordered, date, etc., but the main thing is the Order # so you don’t have to dig through everything else on your Amazon account to find unclaimed ebooks.

2) If you think you might already have unclaimed ebooks on your Amazon account, follow these steps to check:

                  a) Go to Account > Content and Devices

b) Change “View Books” dropdown to “Gifts”

c) Change “All” to “Unclaimed”

Now you can see if you have unclaimed ebooks languishing on your account. If you’re ready to do something about those unclaimed ebooks, you can follow through on Steps d-g…

d) Either Resend the Gift email OR select change recipient email if it’s been a long time since you sent the gift..

e) Enter your email address as the new recipient

f) Check your email and the ebook is now in your “holding” stash for later

g) OR… you can at that point Request a gift card credit.

#g wasn’t even on my radar, but as I worked through this post, it quickly moved up the chain of importance. If you gifted someone a copy of an ebook at full price like FIVE YEARS AGO (because you were committed to one of those Ho-Ho-Ho!! Promotions when your ebook wasn’t on sale!) and the book was never claimed, AND you also have copies that you purchased at a discount sitting in reserve, then it makes sense to request a gift card on that OLD EXPENSIVE ORDER and get that $7.99-$9.99 back. (I had 2 of these from 2016. 2016??? Seriously? I paid $7.99 (each) for them and they were never claimed. You can bet I’ll try to get that gift card credit, and then buy 4-5 when they go on sale again. 

Update: As I was working on this post, I went ahead and requested a refund for both of these gifts that were never claimed… I paid $7.99 for the books in 2016. They’re listed at $2.99 now. Requesting a refund was a no-brainer. The gift card balance on both were approved immediately. $15.98 applied to my Amazon account! Boom!)

Who benefits the most from this strategy? A traditionally published author or an independently published author? I would say that since you have no control over when your publisher will put your ebooks on sale, then using this strategy on your traditionally published books would be a good plan. Not to say that having a copy or two of independently published ebooks to gift would be a bad idea, but typically you can gift those direct if you’re not concerned with the person pirating the copy in some way. Also, my understanding is that you won’t get royalties on any of these ebooks until they are “claimed” by a reader. Since racking up royalties isn’t the point here, that’s sort of an aside, but I thought I’d mention it, just in case the question came up.

Final Tip #1: If you (or a group of authors you’ve partnered with) ever decide to UNPUBLISH an ebook or a collection, check your “stash” of ebooks available to give as gifts. Give those away before the ebook/collection is unpublished. Otherwise, you’ll lose those few copies forever and have no way of getting your money back OR gifting a (now) unpublished ebook. I only had this happen with a couple of ebooks that someone never claimed. If I had been on top of my game, I could have refitted those before the collection was taken down. Fairly cheap lesson to learn, though.

Final Tip #2: I’m sure that buying a handful of ebooks on sale throughout the year might not be high on the list of things for readers and bloggers to do, but if you do enjoy giving ebooks to family and friends, or even gifting them through your blog, then this strategy will also work so that you have a small stash of .99cent or $1.99 ebooks ready to gift whenever the urge strikes.

So, there you go. I thought I’d have a really short post this week, but I guess as usual, I’ve gone around the world to explain a simple process. Oh, well, sometimes more is better, yes?

Thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea? Pros? Cons? Let's chat!

And... what good would a post about finding long, lost eBooks do without offering them to readers, yes? So, here you go. Here's what you DO with those ebooks. You give them away. I'm on a mission to increase my followers on Bookbub, so that's the focus of today's giveaway.

Kindle eBooks - Two Winners - Winners Choice

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Also, I’m babysitting today since school is still out for the holidays, but I’ll check in as often as I can to hear your feedback.

Happy New Year!

Update: Winners have been notified as of January 7, 2022. Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway. You are a blessing!

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Falling into a Festival

by Pam Hillman

Fall festivals are just around the corner. I don’t know about you, but I love attending a couple of local festivals. I live in a small town…Well, actually, I live out in the country, and the closest small town is five miles away. The next is 10 miles away and is so small that when Andy Ogletree won the US Amateur Golf Championship this past weekend, Fox News said the town was so small that there wasn’t even a population count. Obviously, everyone in our community is proud of our new celebrity!

But back to small town festivals where everybody knows your name. Well, almost everybody!

I remember a festival from last fall. You know that weekend or cluster of days where you’re already booked 24/7 and then you get an additional 30-40 hours thrown in the mix? That weekend was mine. But everything was good… great, in fact. 

Me and Louis, one of my most loyal fans.

I started at 6 am Saturday morning with a booth at our local really small-town festival in Sebastopol, MS. This was my 4-5th year and, hands-down, it’s my best venue. I sold/gifted 49 books, I think. Most of these people are already fans and they stop by every year to get my latest book. And, I always gain a few new fans. Some bring books they bought to get them signed.

Me and my cousin, Geraldine.

I do 2-4 MAX of these a year, mostly clustered in Oct/Nov. It’s for friends at local events because the closest bookstores are 50 miles away. And these people want signed books. One guy, Homer, has all my books on a designated shelf at his house and it sounded like “woe to the person who moves them!”

I’ve had some good days and really bad days at these events over the years. Selling a handful (or NONE!) of books is bad, but we know to expect that at some events. But I’d say the worst is hauling everything out, tent required outside, etc., and it either be raining, so miserably cold you can’t feel your feet, wind blowing tents away, or so hot you literally are on the verge of heat stroke. Yes, I have experienced all of these even here in MS, some on the same day.

Last year, Sebastopolooza was the PERFECT EVENT. The weather was gorgeous, which was great for set-up and take down at the end of the day, plus people came out for the festival due to the great weather. A cool 56 degrees so my Western-style boots and light corduroy jacket were great for the morning crowd. It climbed to 70 during the day, so I switched to a lighter knit pullover.

L-R: Me, my mother, her cousin Jeanette, and two of their friends from school

 At this event, we’re allowed to set up from 4-6 pm the night before. Since Sebastopolooza is 4 miles down the road, my Cowboy and I took my tent, table, old doors and 2 bales of hay and set them up. I was in a different spot than I’d been in years past. Hubby wanted to know where I wanted the table, but I told him just put it under the tent and leave the tent at “half-mast” and I’d figure it out when I got there the next morning. My set-up would depend on how many open sides “entry points” I had.

I arrived before 7 am and unloaded my car. Boxes of books, burlap, camp chairs, money, pens, bookmarks and more. Cars had to be out of the area by 7:30, so I quickly unloaded, moved my car and started setting things up.

This is where it becomes tricky, and I’ve learned that I’d rather NOT have help. Each event is different, and I have to set up my space depending on what I have to work with. Hubby wants to just “do it”, but I can’t be rushed here. Do I have one, two, or three open sides to my tent (ie. are there tents set up next to me and behind me, or not)? What’s the weather like? Where’s the afternoon sun going to be?

This event, I ended up with two open sides, so decided that I would set up my area so that it would be a FLOW-THROUGH allowing people to walk through my tent from one side to the other. I have a burlap “curtain” that my son and I made at my first event (literally AT the event) to block the wind that year. It’s come in handy for wind, rain, and sun. This year, I hung it along the SW corner of my booth, knowing the afternoon sun would be brutal.

A booth has to be inviting, appropriate to what someone writes and catch people’s eye. I’ve used the same theme year after year, a rustic, Western-style with old doors, burlap, a couple of bales of hay if outdoors. I tone it down considerably for indoor events (churches, libraries, bookstores). There, I only take books, and an easel banner, and tablecloth and/or burlap for my table. 

My list that I keep in the notes on my phone. We’ll start with the obvious essentials and what you need to sell books:

Books: I inventory my books by title on a notecard before the event. When packing up, I inventory them again. When I get home and rested, I figure up the difference and that tells me how many I sold/gifted. I write books sold and money taken in on the card and keep it for my permanent records.

Bank Bag/Cash: I know how much cash I have before leaving home. After arriving back home, I count the cash again and add in any credit card sales. The difference between beginning and end is profit. This figure goes on the permanent card mentioned above. Each event has a card with total sold and $$ taken in. If you’re concerned about messing up your $$ count, take an extra $20-$30 for incidentals like a soft drink, hamburger, chips. If you take money out of the bag for stuff like that, jot a note on a notecard and throw it in the bank bag.

Card Reader: Make sure to update phone/ipad and check that all is working before event. I learned this the hard way when my IOS needed an update. 

More essentials: Pens, bookmarks and/or postcards, notecards or guestbook for newsletter signup, plastic bags (I offer to anyone who buys several books or looks like they might need it!), business cards.

Tent, table, and chairs: This is self-explanatory if you’re outside. Trust me.

Everything else is debatable, but you want your booth to draw readers in, and you have a 10’x10’ space to have some fun. Also, I have a few personal items that I like to take for my own comfort.

~ Tabletop Easels to display books. Also, you can use empty boxes under your tablecloth to give height to your books if needed. You can get these at Walmart, Hobby Lobby, etc.

~ Floor Easel and large poster(s) if you have them.

~ Clothespins, safety pins

~ Twine / string

~ Knife or scissors

~ Large Chalkboard (Hobby Lobby)

~ Small chalkboards (Walmart, Hobby Lobby, etc.)

~ Chalk pens

Miscellaneous comfort. Authors cannot leave their booth for long, and I like to have my own healthy (preferably COLD) snacks on hand. And it needs to be something you can take a bite of, swallow, then shove to the side and smile at a customer. I’ve been blessed to have a family member (husband/mom/niece) come through every few hours or so, giving me a quick necessary break.

~ Cold pack for frozen water bottles, frozen yogurt, iced coffee with protein, etc.

~ Nuts or other healthy snacks

~ Toilet paper

~ Paper towels

~ Extra shoes

~ Dress in layers

~ Comfortable shoes

~ Rechargeable fan and a USB charger

Now, for the fun part. Everything below has to do with making your booth inviting. It’s not necessary, I suppose, but I’ve always gone all out on my booth space from day one. I think it pays off. Just decorate it to fit your genre and you’ll be fine.

My props have evolved from some heavy items the first few years to much lighter fare. My husband is willing (sort of) to haul heavy hinged doors and bales of hay in his truck to trick out my booth, but I’m slowly figuring out ways to have an eye-catching display with stuff I can haul in my SUV in ONE TRIP, especially since one of my festivals only allows set-up the morning of the event. So, the hay bales and large, hinged doors are out.

Extras that I’ve used for display purposes at various times:

~ burlap or genre appropriate curtains, tablecloths

~ mums

~ wooden wagon

~ old doors (two hinged together)

~ old metal suitcase

~ small rustic bookcase

~ square bales of hay

And, last, but not least, a collapsible wagon is a wonderful thing to have. It’s great for hauling stuff to and from your car if needed. It can do double duty as a display by stacking empty boxes inside and draping a tablecloth over it, then topping with books.

So, there you have it. My method to creating an eye-catching, welcoming booth at the small handful of festivals I attend each year. Seriously, if you live in a small town, renting a booth space is about the cheapest and coolest way you can see all your friends and family in one day without exhausting yourself.

And you might even sell a few books in the process!