by Simon Denman

After the amazing response to my previous post announcing our new book promo submission tool, I decided to contact RITK author and Amazon promo guru, Wayne Stinnett for his thoughts and feedback.

"It's a great tool," he said, "but do you know what what would make it even better? - Timing!"

He then went on to explain how he had recently been attempting to time his promos, not just on a day-to-day basis, but also by the hour.

The logic behind this is simply an extension of our previous deductions about the working of Amazon's algorithms taking into consideration that the sales rank is updated hourly rather than daily. So it makes sense, if you can manage it, to aim for an increased rate of sales not just day upon day, but hour upon hour.

With this goal in mind, Wayne had already started to record the approximate time of day when various promo sites send out their email blasts and so he generously agreed to share these with me for inclusion in the tool.

So, I quickly added a new column to the table to show the approximate hour at which email blasts are sent out, and then added a few more lines of code to allow you to select the time zone (since by default, the times shown are GMT).

Luckily, it all seemed to work like a charm and so the update went live this morning.

I don't yet have all the email timings for all sites that do an email blast, but I hope to be able to fill in the gaps over the coming days / weeks, so if you already have any of this missing info, please let me know.

For a more complete explanation of how to use this new data in the planning of your promos, I refer you to Wayne's post in the Kboards Writer's Cafe, What would a perfect five day discount promo look like?