This blog post is going to be about AMS ads for authors. I was chatting with a fellow writer earlier who admitted to me he had not dived into AMS ads yet and his sales, while respectable, could be better. AMS ads are make or break when it comes to selling fiction. Sure, there are other outlets to advertise your book. Sites like BookBub.com are great for boosting revenue, but it costs and arm and a leg, and they are picky about which books they advertise. Some of the smaller sites will give you a boost in rank, but rarely offer a return on investment.
Enter AMS ads for authors. For those who don’t know, Amazon offers an advertising channel exclusively for Amazon sellers. If you have published a book, this means you. AMS ads are pretty easy to learn (no need to go paying for a course) and they usually offer a positive ROI after some tweaking.
So let’s jump right in. Go to your KDP dashboard and click on reports. On the far right you’ll see a tab labelled Ad Campaigns. Click on that and then click the button which says; View your Ads Dashboard page. If you did that successfully, a new page will pop up. If you didn’t do it successfully, then this is probably not the career path for you because, honestly, that was the easiest part of the whole operation.
Onwards and upwards. You are at your ads dashboard. If you have any ads running, you’ll see those displayed on this page. If you don’t have ads running, or you are just getting started with AMS ads for authors, then you’ll likely have to put in your bank info. Do that now. Go ahead. I’ll just be here waiting on you. I got nothing better to do than sit around waiting on you.
Oh, you’re back. Okay. Great.
Next, click on the big orange button that says Create New Campaign. Here you will be able to choose between Sponsored Products and Product Display Ads. The easiest, and probably most profitable, are Sponsored Products. So click Sponsored Products.
You’ll see a list of your book(s). Click on the one you want to advertise. Note: always advertise the ebook. Paperback ads won’t result in positive ROI. So select the book you want to advertise.
First thing you’ll want to do is give your campaign a name. I say to do this first because otherwise you’ll forget. That’s not the end of the world, but when you’ve got twenty or thirty ads running and they all have the same name then things get a little confusing. I usually name mine with the book initials and the target audience. For Noble Man that might look like this:
NM – action adventure
For the sake of this article, label your first ad (book initials) – Auto
Pretty simple. No need to complicate things. You’ll see clearly in your ads dashboard when the ad was created and how much you are spending a day, so don’t bother cluttering up the name with those details.
The next field will ask how much you want to spend per day. Put in $10.00. I can already feel some of you reeling This is where I get a lot of pushback from authors who are just getting started with AMS. They cry, Ten dollars a day! I’m barely making ends meet. I can’t waste ten dollars a day on ads.
Find the nearest brown paper bag. Put is over your mouth and take deep breaths. I rarely get AMS ads to spend more than a dollar or two a day no matter what I put in the budget. And believe me, I’ve tried. I put $100.00 a day and Amazon spent less than a dollar. I put in $1000.00 and got the same results. So don’t panic and think Amazon is going to spend up all your money.
You can pause or cancel AMS ads at any time. If one of your ads starts spending like crazy, it’s a cinch to turn it off. Take Douglas Adams advice; Don’t panic.
And besides, ten bucks is not a lot of money. If you are a Starbucks drinker, cut out that swill and you’ve got the money to spend on ads. Voila! You’re welcome.
Next is duration. You want to select; Run Ad Continuously. It will probably be checked already. But make sure.
Now for targeting type. There are two options. Automatic and Manual. For your first ad click Automatic. Somewhere marketing gurus are screeching, dousing themselves in gasoline and striking matches.
When AMS ads for authors first came out, the automatic targeting was bad. I’m talking all female remake of Ocean’s 11 bad. They stunk. But Amazon is constantly working to improve their systems. After all, they wantto sell books. Auto targeting has gotten a lot better in recent months. How much better? Two of my most profitable ads are auto target ads.
Next you’ll need to decide how much you want to spend per click. Don’t go higher than 0.30c. If this is your first book, and your first ad, you don’t want to spend a bunch of dough on an ad that might not translate into sales. You could jack the price per bid up to $1.00 but if you’re book is only 0.99c then you’re losing money. Also, I price my bids at 0.31c and I want my ads to show up before yours! Haha! Only kidding. I price my ads around 0.34c but I’ve got enough experience to know my ads will convert. For right now, put your post per click bid at 0.30c.
Now for the most important part. The ad text. Come up with something awesome, awe inspiring, and riveting! Come up with something that capture’s the reader’s imagination and forces them to click on the book. Once you’ve figured out what that is, email it to me. ‘Cause seriously, that would be nice of you to share.
If you are like me, this is probably the hardest part. It’s darn hard enough coming up with a sales blurb for your book. Now you have to come up with an ad in 150 characters that piques the reader’s interest. No easy task. You don’t have room to spell out the plot. So focus on something that will give shoppers and idea of the genre and other comparable authors.
For instance, if I were John D. Patten, I might write an ad like thus:
If you like Travis Mcgee and Philip Marlowe, you’re going to love Miami Burn. Pick up the first book in the Titus series today!
AMS Ads for Authors
That’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing and should sell a few books. If you are stuck for ideas, go to amazon.com. Browse through books in your genre and take a look at the Sponsored ads section which pops up when you go to any sales page. See what other authors are doing and borrow. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Once you have your text, take a minute to make sure you spelled everything correctly (beacuse wrieters are teh worst splelers in teh world) and then click submit your campaign for review.
Finished! That wasn’t too hard. You’ve got your first ad up and running. Amazon will review it to make sure you didn’t do anything boneheaded stupid and then your ad will start running.
But before you go, lets create a second ad.
Follow all the same steps we did before but this time we are going Manual Targeting. Amazon should come up with a list of keyword relevant to your book. If it doesn’t, you haven’t gotten many sales yet, or Amazon is confused about where your book fits. That’s not a good thing so we need to help the system out a little.
AMS Ads for Authors
Note: If Amazon does populate a list of suggested keywords, label your campaign (book initials) – suggested keywords. Use $10.00 a day and the same text you used for the first ad. Submit. Now you’ve got two ads.
I’ve had a lot of good results from Amazon’s suggested keywords. Remember, Amazon wants to sell books.
If there are no suggestions, or you just want to go pro, then keep following along.
We need to tell Amazon which books to put yours next to. For that you need to know which authors are comparable to you. Don’t give me any of that crap about how you have no equals and no one has ever written a book like yours. Someone, somewhere, is selling books like yours. At least I hope. If not, then you probably won’t sell any either. That’s a whole other blog.
On the Add Keywords section, click Add your own keywords. You’ll see a blank space to add keywords, plus a box where you can decide how much you want to spend on each. I would start around 0.27c. You can always change the cost per click latter.
For John D. Patten, I would suggest John MacDonald, Mikey Spillane, Dashiell Hammet, Ross MacDonald, JB Turner, and basically any other authors writing in the hard-boiled detective genre. Those are the books you want to appear next to. Don’t forget the names of lead characters and specific novels.
AMS Ads for Authors
You want to put as many relevant keywords in as you can think of. You can enter, I believe a 1000 keywords and the more the merrier.
There are programs which will come up with relevant keywords for you. Some of them cost money while others are free. Some of them are pretty good and save a lot of time, but few are worth actually paying for. I’ll go over a few of these in a latter blog post. For right now, use your common sense. This ain’t rocket science, folks. If you write horror, put in Stephen King, plus the titles of all his books, and then Richard Laymon and the titles of his books. So on and so forth.
Note: target as many indie authors in your genre as possible. The big publishing houses will be targeting traditionally published authors and they’ve got lots of money to spend so your ads won’t show up as often. If you are writing thrillers, targeting Michael Connelly and Robert Ludlum is a waste of time. Target Mark Dawson and Tim Tigner instead.
Once you’ve added as many keywords in your genre as your brain will come up with, ad your text and click submit.
If you followed this article completely, you should have three ads up and running. Congratulations. See how easy that was?
I’ll do another blog soon on how to monitor your ads and tweak them so that you get better clicks for less money and maximize your ROI. It’s pretty simple. Until then, let those ads run and remember, DON’T PANIC.
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Tweaking Your Ads for Positive ROI
The ads takes several days before they start properly reporting earnings. At first it might look like you are spending money and not getting sales. That’s not the case. Don’t turn them off. Let them play out. Besides, you’re likely only spending five or seven dollars a day. That’s not going to break the bank. Be patient. Relax. Check out the next blog in this series and I’ll help you maximize.
