Amazon Ads: FOR AUTHORS

I promised an article on Amazon ads for authors once I’d gathered experience selling my first self-published novel, The Cleaner, the Cat and the Space Station.

So what did I learn?

My ebook is sold in 13 Amazon stores, but ads are only available in 8 of them: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Outside those countries I have zero sales. 0. Nothing. Nichts. Nada. Despite all my efforts on social media. Advertising is the main driver for sales.?

If you don’t advertise the book, it won’t sell.

Here’s my UK sales rank for the last 2 years.

When do you think I started regular advertising?

Yup, you’ve guessed it. After running a promotion in December 2021, I started up my Amazon ads in January 2022.

Marketing is less about selling and more about finding people who’d enjoy your book if they only knew it existed. There are currently around 12 million ebooks on Amazon – potential readers can’t buy a book they never see.

So how do Amazon ads work? I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty of setting them up, other people do that better than me. My go-to gurus are:

Deb Potter, Amazon Ads for Authors https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/107916720X

And more generally, David Gaughran https://davidgaughran.com/

Amazon Decoded https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08F7ZXZ78

All David’s books are great, plus he offers a free course for newbie self-publishers called Starting from Zero, which I absolutely recommend.

The first step is market analysis. Find out what other books your readers enjoy and who writes them. These are your “comparable authors”.

Look at the “also boughts” for your book – and the “also boughts” for those books, too. For example, my comp authors include:

Becky Chambers, Ryka Aoki, Douglas Adams, Andy Weir, Cixin Liu, Ursula le Guin, Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Neil Gaiman, Ben Aaronovitch, Martha Wells and T.J. Klune.

You can advertise on keywords, or on Amazon part numbers, known as ASINs. Every Amazon product has one. For example, The Cleaner, the Cat and the Space Station ebook is B0995L9L1T.

I have an Excel file with thousands(!) of ASINs for my comp authors’ books as well as keywords – author names and book titles work best.

So I have some large-scale “discovery” ads to help me find which keywords/ASINs work for my book and smaller, focused ads with higher bids on keywords I can rely on to get clicks and sales.

These need regular monitoring and tweaking: switching off the ones that don’t work and raising bids on the ones that do until you find the sweet spot – maximum clicks for minimum spend. It’s a matter of feeling your way to the optimum set-up over time.

Keep your eye on market developments and evaluate potential new keywords as you find them – what are the hot new books in your genre? Bookstagram is a good source of inspiration here, and a lot more fun that trawling through Amazon also-boughts!

Best practice according to Deb Potter:

• Set a portfolio budget so you don’t spend money you don’t have.
• Have a large daily budget but keep your actual bids small and increase them slowly while monitoring the response.
• Avoid auto ads until you have plentiful sales data to feed the system with.

Category ads aren’t recommended by the experts. But I’ve found they work a treat for English books on Amazon.de. Why? Because when you’re looking for English books, you filter by language category first, then you narrow it down by genre.

I also suspect that, post Brexit, many people in Ireland have switched from Amazon.co.uk to Amazon.de to avoid customs complications. That’s potentially another 5 million English speakers shopping on the site, which is available in English.

I’ve not had much luck with this approach in France, Italy or Spain, however.

I need roughly 10 clicks to make a sale, and my profit per ebook is 2.56 €. So to break even, I can’t spend more than 25 ct a click. Less, to turn a profit.

The US market is so brutally competitive, to get even a single click I usually pay more than a dollar. I’ve capped my US ads to spend $15 a month, financed by my successes in the German market. It splurges that in the first few days of the month, but I get a few sales and then my book appears in the also-boughts for the genre. This is free advertising! I get a few extra sales and Kindle Unlimited reads this way without further spending, which stops the book from sinking completely into obscurity before the next month starts.

The experts (e.g. Mark Dawson, David Gaughran) say you won’t make a profit from self-publishing until you have at least three books out, all in the same series.

This is due to the read-through effect: someone buying the first book is likely to read the others in the series without further ad spend. Not everyone will, but the longer the series, the bigger your marketing budget.

With my planned 5-book Shantivira series, I have my eye on long-term profitability. This month I released my second novel, Learning to Fly Alien Spacecraft, so I still have a way to go!

Selling books is hard work!

Amazon ads are a long-term investment to build an audience. They also offer real-time insight into what readers are searching for and help get the “right sort” of also-boughts attached to your book, which also boosts sales.

By taking the time to master them now, I’ll be able to get the most out of them as my budget grows. Without them, I wouldn’t sell any books at all.

The bookkeeping for ads in 8 countries can be time-consuming and annoying when the ads in some countries generate less than a dollar of income per month. But it’s early days.

My next book marketing objective is to get to grips with Facebook ads, which are apparently easier to scale than Amazon ads. I’ll let you know how it goes…

I’m also intending to publish my print books via an additional distributor: IngramSpark. Then my (paper) books can be ordered from any bookshop in the world, instead of only via Amazon!

By the way, to celebrate the launch of Learning to Fly Alien Spacecraft, I’m currently running a Kindle Countdown deal on The Cleaner, the Cat and the Space Station.

If you’re in the US or the UK, you can download the ebook from Amazon for just 99 cents / 99 pence. Offer ends July 26.

Here’s the universal link: https://getbook.at/cleanercat

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Photo & KDP sales rank graph ? Fay Abernethy

Cat illustration: ? Patrick Knowles??www.patrickknowlesdesign.com