You’ve written the book— but now you need to help customers, or potential readers, find it. The competition out there is stiff and getting found organically is near impossible for most authors. If you want to sell books as a valid source of income, you need to learn how to market them. That can mean a lot of different things. Social media posts, promos, email blasts, and word of mouth can all lend a hand in promoting your book and attracting buyers to your listing; but a strategic advertising campaign is a great way to zero in on readers and increase sales. Amazon’s Sponsored Ads allow you t ..read more

Before you can even think about scaling your ads, you need to know that the timing is right.  Answer this question first.   Do you have campaigns and targets that are converting? This may seem like a no-brainer, but time after time, authors come to me asking for help in scaling their ads when they are not ready to do so. Why not? Because you can’t think about scaling an ad without first looking at the performance and/or success at the target level. If you have targets that are converting well, it’s time.   There are two ways to scale that you should consid ..read more

Why did my ad do well and die? Do I need to keep creating new ones?   Often when ads flatline, the ads algorithm has caught up to it and determined that it falls below their standards of a good ad. This can happen for a variety of reasons, and the answer is not always to create new ads. A new ad may perform for a while because Amazon may give it an artificial “newbie” boost but it will also eventually fail if it doesn’t pass the algorithm muster. The ad may stop serving at the same pace or worse, completely flatline in favor of a competing ad ..read more

How do I get Amazon to spend my budget?  There are 3 fundamental things to look at: 1) Budget. Do you have a $10 daily budget or a $100 daily budget? You can’t scale infinitely; there will be a cap. So be realistic. 2) Bids. Assuming this is a profitable ad, consider your current bids. Are you bidding too low, excluding some customers where you’re getting outbid? Increase your bid and monitor for a week or two, at minimum. 3) Volume and quality of targets. Be careful of trying to spend across too many targets, or targets of varying quality. Sometimes you’re diluting the focus on what is ..read more

You’re ready to advertise your book on Amazon and you’ve decided to use Sponsored Products. As you create the ad, you’ll be prompted to choose whether you want to use the custom text feature. This seemingly innocuous question has befuddled many an author. If you look at comps (and you always should) you’ll find that some have it and some don’t. What you won’t see is whether the feature “works.” Do authors using it have an advantage? It’s one of the reasons so many people struggle with it. If there was a quantifying benefit to using custom ad text, it would be a no-brainer.&nbs ..read more

Your book will be competing for eyes within a very crowded space.  All successful self-publishers will tell you that one of the most critical decisions that you’ll need to make is defining which categories best suit your book. Popular genres such as Historical Romance have no less than 50,000 listings. While it may be tempting to cast a large net and list in genres where it almost fits, narrowing it down to attract your most likely-to-buy reader is always the better choice. Accurately identifying your book’s category will directly affect how your prospective readers ..read more

Why does the KDP dashboard show different sales than the Ads dashboard?  Always look to the KDP dashboard as the authoritative data source for conversions (sales and/or pages read). It would be highly unusual for the KDP and Ads dashboards to be identical. The Ads dashboard will only display a subset of your conversions, representing what it attributed to the ad during a 14-day time period. It does not include organic conversions that happened during that time. Thus, conversions on the KDP side should always be higher.  Want more? Subscribe to Book Geeks Marketing newsletter to ..read more

We’ve all heard the idiom “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” but people can, and will. We’re human after all, sizing things up is built into our DNA. Having a shrewd fight or flight response has kept us safe for eons.   A more apt phrase would be that you can’t accurately judge a book by its cover  This is where authors can get it wrong. It’s so easy to fall victim to your personal aesthetics. What we like, and what grabs our attention, doesn’t always translate to your target audience. When it comes to cover design its most important function is to info ..read more