What Amazon Doesn’t Tell you About Ads
Before you even consider using Amazon Ads there are a number of things that will make or break your success You need to make certain these things work above all. Otherwise, you will lose money big time. Here is a number of things that MUST work before you really spend money on ads.
1. The Science of a Selling Cover
A book cover isn’t just art; it’s a sales tool. It’s a visual promise to the reader, a signal that tells them: “This is the book you’re looking for.” The most successful covers are those that immediately and clearly communicate three things:
- The Genre: Is it a romance, a thriller, a sci-fi epic, or a memoir? The cover must use the visual language of its genre.
- The Tone: Is it light and funny, dark and gritty, or serious and literary? Colors, fonts, and imagery all contribute to setting the mood.
- The Target Audience: Who is this book for? A cover for a Young Adult fantasy will look very different from one for an Adult High Fantasy, even if the content is similar.
Deconstructing Your Niche
As you astutely pointed out, the first step is to become a student of your genre. But this goes beyond a casual glance. You need to conduct a deep dive into the top sellers in your specific niche.
- Go to the Source: Head to Amazon’s bestseller lists for your genre. Be as specific as possible. If you’ve written a cozy mystery with a culinary theme, search for “cozy culinary mystery,” not just “mystery.”
- The Big Picture (and the Tiny One): Look at the covers both as full-sized images and as thumbnails. A cover might look great on a large screen but become a confusing, cluttered mess when shrunk down to a small thumbnail on a phone. The most effective covers have a strong, legible focal point that works at any size.
- Color Palette Analysis: What colors are dominant? Are they bright and vibrant (e.g., epic fantasy, children’s books), or are they dark and moody (e.g., thrillers, horror)? Notice not just the main colors, but the accent colors used to create contrast and draw the eye. For example, many mysteries and thrillers use a high-contrast palette of blacks, grays, and deep blues with a pop of red to symbolize danger or blood.
- Typography Tells a Story: The fonts you choose are a crucial part of the genre code.
- Serif vs. Sans-Serif: Traditional genres like historical fiction or classic literature often use serif fonts (those with small lines at the ends of letters, like Times New Roman) to evoke a sense of heritage and formality. Modern genres like sci-fi, contemporary fiction, and thrillers often use clean, bold sans-serif fonts (like Arial or Helvetica) to signal modernity and a fast pace.
- Stylized Fonts: Fantasy and horror use highly stylized fonts that can look like dripping blood, ancient runes, or elegant calligraphy. The key is to ensure they are still readable.
- Placement and Size: Where are the title and author’s name placed? Is the title huge and prominent, or is it more subtle? In many thriller and mystery covers, the title is the main event, often in a large, bold font that creates a sense of tension or urgency.
- Imagery and Composition: What’s on the cover? Is it a person, a landscape, a symbolic object, or an abstract pattern?
- Character vs. Concept: Romance and character-driven fantasy often feature a person, but many thrillers and mysteries use a silhouette, an obscured figure, or a symbolic object (like a key, a knife, or a single lantern) to build intrigue and avoid giving away too much.
- Focal Point: Every successful cover has a clear focal point. This could be a dramatic image, the title itself, or a striking splash of color. Avoid clutter and too many competing elements.
The Strategic Use of A/B Testing
Your mention of A/B testing is a game-changer for indie authors. It’s the most reliable way to move beyond personal preference and get objective data on what a broader audience actually responds to.
- Set Up the Test: Create two or three versions of your cover. Change only one major variable between each version. For example, test Cover A (with a person on it) against Cover B (with a symbolic object). Or test two different color palettes.
- Choose a Platform: Facebook and Instagram ads are popular choices for A/B testing. You can run a low-budget ad campaign with each cover version, targeting a very specific audience (e.g., “readers who like X author” or “people interested in the mystery genre”).
- Analyze the Data: Don’t just look at which ad gets more likes. The key metrics are click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA). Which ad prompted more people to click the link to your book’s sales page? That’s your winner.
- Consider Third-Party Services: Websites like PickFu offer an even more streamlined approach, allowing you to get instant feedback from a pre-screened audience on your cover variations.
In conclusion, your cover isn’t just about making something that looks “nice.” It’s about designing a tool that uses visual cues to speak directly to your ideal reader. By researching your niche, understanding the genre conventions, and testing your designs, you can create a cover that not only stands out but also sells.
2. Your Sales Pitch Needs to Convert
The blurb is the bridge between the cover’s promise and the reader’s decision to buy. It’s the moment of truth, and if it fails, all the brilliant cover design and advertising in the world are meaningless. A great blurb isn’t a plot summary; it’s a finely-honed sales pitch designed to create an emotional connection and a sense of urgency.
Here’s how to expand on that crucial concept:
The Hook: The Opening Salvo
The first one or two sentences of your blurb are the most important. On many online retailers, this is all a reader sees before they have to click “Read More.” This is where you grab them by the throat (in a good way) and refuse to let go.
- Intrigue over Information: Don’t start with a character name and a setting. Start with a compelling question, a shocking statement, or a provocative dilemma.
- Instead of: “Detective Kylie Storke is called to Danesternne Memory Care to investigate a strange case.”
- Try: “The security footage showed an empty hallway, but Harold Slade’s daughter swears someone was in his room the night his memories were stolen.”
- The Emotional Punch: Right away, hit the reader with the core emotional conflict. What is the fundamental problem or feeling at the heart of your story? Is it loss, fear, betrayal, or a desperate hope?
- Example: “For the patients at Danesternne Memory Care, forgetting is a mercy. But for six families, it’s a nightmare—because someone isn’t just erasing their loved ones’ memories. They’re stealing them.”
The Conflict: The Engine of the Story
After the hook, you need to clearly and concisely establish the central conflict. What is the main character’s goal, and what or who is standing in their way? This is where you set the stakes.
- Introduce the Protagonist and Their Goal: Who is the hero, and what do they want? Keep it simple. “Detective Kylie Storke, a detective haunted by a past case, arrives to find a pattern of impossible crimes.”
- Present the Antagonist and the Obstacle: What is the force pushing against your protagonist? This could be a person, a supernatural threat, or a personal flaw. In the Danesternne story, it’s the unsettling Nurse Farban and the inexplicable memory theft. The blurb should make this clear.
- Elevate the Stakes: Why should the reader care? What happens if the protagonist fails? The stakes must be personal and high. “As the patients lose everything that made them who they were, Kylie must confront a truth more terrifying than she ever imagined. Because the longer she waits, the closer the thief gets to taking what’s left of the one person who truly matters to her.”
The Emotional Keywords: Speaking Their Language
Keywords are not just for search engines; they’re for readers. They are the shorthand that tells a potential reader: “You belong here. This book is for you.” But they must be woven into the blurb naturally.
- Identify Your Niche Keywords: For the Danesternne story, keywords might include “psychological thriller,” “memory loss,” “dementia,” “suspense,” “unnatural crime,” and “haunting mystery.”
- Integrate, Don’t Stuff: Instead of a list of keywords, use them to describe the tone and content. For example, “A haunting mystery unfolds at a care facility…” or “A psychological thriller that explores the terrifying reality of a loved one’s memory loss.”
- Use Emotionally Charged Words: Your words should evoke feeling. Use words like “chilling,” “desperate,” “haunted,” “impossible,” “terrifying,” or “shattered.” These words create an instant emotional connection and promise a gripping reading experience.
The Promise: The Call to Action
The final line of your blurb should leave the reader with a powerful question or a sense of an impending, unavoidable climax. It should make them think, “I have to know what happens next.”
- Leave Them on a Cliffhanger: The blurb should end at the height of the conflict, just before the resolution.
- Example: “But as Kylie digs deeper, she discovers a shocking secret—and a motive so heartbreakingly desperate, it will force her to question everything she thought she knew about memory, madness, and the price of a stolen past.”
- The Ultimate Question: “Can she uncover the truth before the thief takes a memory too close to home?” This final question gives the reader a clear, compelling reason to click “Buy Now.”
In short, your blurb is a carefully crafted micro-story. It has a hook, a conflict, and a promise. By mastering this small but mighty sales tool, you can ensure that the perfect cover leads to the perfect conversion.
3. Your Seven KDP Keywords Need to be Optimized thoroughly
Many authors get the creative part right—the cover and the blurb—but fail to master the underlying mechanics of discoverability. Without a solid keyword strategy, your book is essentially invisible to the very readers who are looking for it.
Here is a deeper dive into optimizing your seven KDP keywords.
The Fundamental Rule: Think Like a Reader, Not an Author
This is the golden rule of keyword research. As an author, you think in terms of themes, characters, and plot points. Your readers, however, think in terms of problems they want to solve or genres they love to read. They might search for “cozy mystery series,” “psychological thriller with a twist,” or “books about unsolved crimes.” Your job is to find the exact words they type into the search bar.
The Three Pillars of Keyword Research
Effective keyword research is a balance of three factors: relevancy, search volume, and competition.
- High Relevancy: The keyword must accurately describe your book. This is non-negotiable. Using keywords from a different genre to get clicks is a surefire way to get bad reviews and hurt your book’s long-term ranking.
- High Search Volume: People must actually be searching for this keyword. A perfectly relevant keyword that no one is searching for is useless.
- Low Competition: The keyword should not be dominated by best-selling authors with thousands of reviews. You need to find the “sweet spot” where a keyword has enough search volume to be worthwhile, but not so much competition that you can’t rank for it. This is where you can find your “hidden gem” books and niches.
A Step-by-Step Research Process
- Brainstorm Seed Keywords: Start with a list of broad, relevant terms.
- Genre/Subgenre: mystery, thriller, psychological thriller, crime fiction
- Themes: memory loss, dementia, elder care, investigation, family secrets
- Character Archetypes: female detective, unreliable narrator, grieving daughter
- Setting: memory care facility, sanatorium, suburban noir
- Use Amazon’s Auto-Suggest Functionality: This is the most powerful free tool at your disposal. Go to the Amazon Kindle Store and start typing your seed keywords into the search bar. Amazon’s drop-down menu will show you what real readers are actually searching for.
- If you type “psychological thril,” you might see suggestions like “psychological thriller series,” “psychological thriller books,” and “psychological thriller female protagonist.”
- Add an “A,” “B,” “C,” etc. after your search term to see even more long-tail keywords. For example, “memory loss a,” might suggest “memory loss books,” “memory loss suspense,” or “Alzheimer’s mystery.”
- Analyze Your Competitors: Look at the top-performing books in your niche. What keywords do their titles and subtitles use? What categories have they chosen? While you can’t see their backend keywords, a lot can be inferred from their metadata. Pay special attention to books that have a high bestseller rank but a relatively low number of reviews; these authors have likely found a profitable keyword niche.
- Leverage Keyword Research Tools: While a manual approach is good, dedicated tools like Publisher Rocket or KDP Spy can save you countless hours. These tools can:
- Show you the search volume and competition for specific keywords on Amazon.
- Provide a list of keywords that your competitors are using.
- Help you find new, high-volume, low-competition keywords you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
How to Maximize Your Seven Slots
Remember that each of the seven keyword fields can hold up to 50 characters. The general consensus among successful indie authors is to use as much of this space as possible to include as many relevant keyword phrases as you can.
- No Repeating Words: Amazon’s algorithm is smart. It will automatically combine the words from all your keyword slots to create new phrases. You don’t need to repeat words. For example, if you have “psychological thriller female detective” in one slot and “grieving daughter family secrets” in another, Amazon understands that a reader searching for “female detective family secrets” should see your book.
- Use All Seven Slots: Don’t leave any of them blank. Each one is a chance to get your book in front of a new set of eyes.
- Avoid Quotation Marks and “Filler Words”: Don’t use quotation marks, as this will limit your keyword to that exact phrase. Also, avoid generic words like “book,” “novel,” or “bestselling” unless they are part of a very specific, high-ranking phrase.
- Target Specific Categories: You can even use your keywords to help Amazon put your book in a specific sub-category. For example, “conspiracy thriller” or “murder mystery amateur sleuth.”
By doing your homework and using these strategies, you can transform your book’s keywords from a forgotten checkbox on KDP to a powerful, sales-driving engine that works for you 24/7. Do a check on the seven keywords every 3-4 month. Peoples search habits change and you want to follow.
4. The Content of Your Book Needs to Match a Market
This is called Write to market. You can have a great cover, a killer blurb, and a targeted ad campaign, but if the content of your book doesn’t align with what a specific group of readers wants, your efforts will fail.
Why Market Fit Matters
Market fit is the alignment between the product you’ve created (your book) and the people who are looking for it (your readers). A good story alone isn’t enough; it must be a story that fills a specific need or desire within a defined reading community.
- Reader Expectations: Readers within a specific genre or niche have certain expectations. A reader of cozy mysteries expects a low-violence murder solved by an amateur sleuth, a clear resolution, and often a focus on community. A reader of a legal thriller, in contrast, expects a fast-paced plot with high stakes and complex legal maneuvering. When your book delivers on these expectations, the reader feels satisfied. When it doesn’t, they feel betrayed, which can lead to negative reviews.
- Targeting Your Audience: Your cover, blurb, and keywords are all designed to signal your book’s market to potential readers. If the book itself doesn’t deliver on that promise, all your marketing efforts will be wasted. You might attract readers with a “psychological thriller” cover and blurb, but if the book turns out to be a slow-burn literary drama, those readers will quickly lose interest, abandon the book, and leave a poor review.
Finding and Honoring Your Niche
- Read Widely in Your Genre: Before you even write the book, you should be a dedicated reader within the genre you plan to write for.
- What are the tropes and conventions? What are the common character archetypes, settings, and plot devices?
- What are the subgenres? Are you writing a space opera, military sci-fi, or cyberpunk? The readers for each are different, and your book’s content needs to cater to one of them.
- What are the reader expectations? Do they want a happy ending, or are they okay with a bittersweet one? Do they expect romance, or will they be disappointed if it’s included?
- Use Your Research: Once you have a deep understanding of your niche, you can use that knowledge to refine your book’s content.
- Character Archetypes: If you’re writing a hardboiled detective story, your protagonist should have the cynicism and moral ambiguity that readers of that genre expect.
- Pacing and Plot: A fast-paced thriller needs to get to the action quickly and maintain a sense of urgency. A cozy mystery can take its time establishing the setting and characters.
- Themes and Language: A high-fantasy novel will use specific terminology and a tone that is different from a contemporary urban fantasy. The language and world-building must match what readers are looking for.
- Find a Unique Angle within the Niche: You don’t want to just copy what everyone else is doing. The goal is to find your own voice and unique twist on the genre while still honoring its core conventions. This is how you stand out.
- Example: In the provided story, the “mystery” genre is combined with a unique “sci-fi” or “medical thriller” element of memory theft, which provides an original take on a well-established genre.
Your content is the product, and the market is the consumer. Your goal is to build a product that a specific group of people not only wants but will actively seek out.
5. Get Reviews
Reviews are the social proof that a book is worth a reader’s time and money. Without them, your book is a ghost in the marketplace, no matter how perfect the cover, blurb, and keywords are.
Here is a more comprehensive look at the critical role of reviews and how to get them ethically and effectively.
The Psychology of the Review
Reviews are not just numbers; they are a form of trust. They function as a collective recommendation from strangers. A potential buyer’s thought process often goes like this:
- Initial Interest: The cover catches their eye.
- Intrigue: The blurb piques their curiosity.
- Validation: They scan the star rating and read a few reviews to see what others thought.
- Final Decision: The reviews either confirm their interest and lead to a purchase or raise doubts and cause them to move on.
A book with zero reviews is a risk. A book with a low star rating is a clear warning. A book with dozens or hundreds of positive reviews is a green light, a signal that this is a safe, worthwhile investment of their time.
The Problem: The Vicious Cycle
Getting reviews is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. You need reviews to sell, but you need sales to get reviews. Breaking this cycle is the first and most difficult hurdle for every indie author.
Ethical Strategies for Generating Reviews
While you cannot and should not pay for reviews or coerce readers, there are many ethical and effective ways to encourage them.
- Direct Request in the Book: The most basic and essential step. Include a polite, personal request for a review at the end of your book.
- Place the request on a dedicated page after “The End.”
- Keep it simple and direct. “If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Your feedback is incredibly helpful and helps other readers find the story.”
- Include a direct link to your book’s review page to make the process as easy as possible for the reader.
- Launch Team / Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) Team: This is the single most effective strategy for getting reviews right out of the gate.
- Recruit Your Team: Weeks or even months before your book launches, recruit a team of volunteers (your friends, family, and most loyal fans) who are willing to read an advanced digital copy of your book.
- Provide the ARC: Send them a free, final-draft digital version of your book (an ePub or Mobi file).
- Set the Timeline: Remind them of your launch date and politely ask them to post their honest review on Amazon on or near that date. This initial burst of reviews can be the difference between your book languishing in obscurity and hitting the Amazon bestseller charts.
- Newsletter and Social Media Campaigns:
- Build Your List: Start building an email list of your readers from day one. This is your most valuable asset.
- Engage Your List: When your book launches, send a personalized email to your list, announcing the book’s release and including a call to action for reviews.
- Use Social Media: Post on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, celebrating the launch and asking your followers to leave a review if they enjoy the book.
- Reader Magnets and Perma-Free:
- Offer a Freebie: Offer a related novella, short story, or prequel for free in exchange for signing up for your newsletter. This not only builds your email list but also allows you to get your work in the hands of a broader audience.
- In-Book Funnel: The free book should have a strong call to action at the end, promoting your full-length novel and asking for a review. This creates a funnel where you can acquire new readers for free and encourage them to move on to your paid work.
- Engage with Reviewers: When someone leaves a positive review, especially if they are a prominent reviewer or book blogger, thank them. This builds a relationship and can lead to more reviews in the future.
The Star Rating Matters More Than Quantity
While getting a high volume of reviews is good, the average star rating is even more critical. A book with 20 reviews and a 4.5-star average will almost always outperform a book with 50 reviews and a 3.2-star average. Focus on putting out the best possible product to begin with, so the reviews you do get are positive.
In summary, reviews are the lifeblood of your book’s marketing. They are a sign of life, a testament to the fact that your book is being read and enjoyed. By building a launch team and engaging directly with your readership, you can proactively get the reviews you need to create the trust and momentum required for long-term sales success.
6. You Need a Mailing List
Relying solely on Amazon’s algorithm is a dangerous game. They can change their rules or raise ad costs at any time, leaving your sales to wither. Building a mailing list is about taking control of your own destiny as an author.
Why Your Mailing List is Your Most Valuable Asset
A mailing list is a direct line of communication to your readers. It bypasses the gatekeepers—Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the ever-changing algorithms. When you have a new book, a special promotion, or a sale, you don’t have to hope the algorithm notices; you can just tell your people.
Here’s why it’s so powerful:
- You Own the Relationship: Unlike followers on social media, you own your mailing list. If a social media platform goes down or changes its rules, your followers can vanish overnight. An email list is yours forever.
- A Direct Impact on the Algorithm: You’re absolutely right about fooling the algorithm. When you send an email to your list on launch day and a hundred people buy your book in a single hour, Amazon’s algorithm takes notice. It sees a sudden spike in sales and thinks, “This book is a hot seller!” This tells the algorithm that your book is worth promoting, which can lead to higher organic rankings and a significant increase in the visibility of your paid ads. This creates a powerful flywheel effect: you bring the initial traffic, Amazon amplifies it.
- Higher Conversion Rates: Email marketing has a much higher conversion rate than social media. People who sign up for your list are already interested in your work. They’re your biggest fans, and they are much more likely to buy your next book than a random person who sees a Facebook ad.
How to Build and Nurture Your List
Building an email list is about creating a community around your work, not just collecting addresses. This community becomes your most valuable asset, providing a direct line of communication with your readers that bypasses ever-changing algorithms.
How to Build a List
You need to offer an incentive for people to join your list. This is often called a reader magnet or lead magnet. The content should be something your target audience will find valuable, such as:
- A free short story or prequel novella set in the same world as your books.
- A bonus chapter or deleted scenes from your most popular title.
- An exclusive character guide, map, or glossary for a complex fantasy series.
- Behind-the-scenes content on your writing process or world-building.
Make it easy for readers to get this free content by placing a sign-up form on your author website, in the back of all your books, and on your social media profiles.
How to Nurture Your List
Once you have subscribers, you must provide value to keep them engaged. Don’t just email them when you have a new book to sell.
- Create a Welcome Sequence: Set up an automated series of emails for new subscribers. This is your chance to introduce yourself, share your author bio and a personal story, and provide the promised reader magnet. This builds a personal connection from the start.
- Share Exclusive Content: Give your subscribers a reason to stay. Send them behind-the-scenes glimpses, a sneak peek at your next book’s cover, or an exclusive chapter. This makes them feel like part of an inner circle.
- Ask for Their Input: Engage your community by asking for their opinions. This could be anything from voting on a cover design to choosing a character’s name. This two-way communication builds loyalty and makes them feel invested in your work.
- Provide Consistent Value: Send regular newsletters with updates on your writing, book recommendations, or interesting articles related to your genre. The goal is to be a source of entertainment and information, not just a sales funnel. This way, when you do have a new book to launch, your readers will be excited to hear from you.
The Reader Magnet: The Irresistible Offer
You need to give readers a reason to give you their email address. This is called a reader magnet or lead magnet.
- What to Offer: This should be something of value to your ideal reader. A short story, a prequel novella, or an exclusive sneak peek at your next book works perfectly.
- Where to Put It: Place the offer on your author website, in the back of your books (both free and paid), and on your social media profiles.
The Tech Stack: Making it Easy
Don’t overthink the technology. You need two simple things:
- Email Service Provider (ESP): Use a service like MailerLite, Mailchimp, or ConvertKit. Many of them are free for your first few hundred or even thousand subscribers. They handle everything from managing your list to sending out professional-looking emails.
- Signup Form: Your ESP will give you a simple form to embed on your website or link to in your books. Make it as easy as possible for people to sign up.
- Personally I use Maian Responder. This is self hosted and it takes a lot of technical knowledge to set it up, but it is only a small one time fee and free for life. Don’t do this unless you have someone tech savy in your staff.
The Communication: Providing Value
Once you have a subscriber, the work isn’t done. You need to keep them engaged. Don’t just email them when you have a book for sale.
- Start with a Welcome Sequence: Send a series of automated emails to new subscribers to introduce yourself, share some exclusive content, and make them feel like part of your community.
- Share Updates: Tell them about your writing process, share behind-the-scenes stories, and ask for their opinions on things like cover design or character names.
- Don’t Be a Sales Robot: The goal is to build a relationship. If you’re always selling, they’ll stop opening your emails. Focus on providing value and entertainment.
By building a mailing list, you’re not just creating a marketing tool; you’re building a sustainable author career. It is the single best investment you can make in your long-term success.
7. Amazon Ads
If you really want to make it as an author on Amazon you need to do series. Ads on standalone books are very hard to make profitable – unless your name is Steven King. So go for a series and ONLY use ads on the first book in the series. Then ads has the biggest chance og being profitable. Your move would be to make people hooked on the first book so they go on and buy the next in the series. The chances you will make any profit on the first book in the series are small.
Understanding the Core Metrics
Before you even launch your first campaign, you need to understand the key performance indicators (KPIs) that dictate success.
- Cost Per Click (CPC): The amount you pay for each click on your ad. Your starting bid of 34 cents is a good, conservative baseline for a series starter. Use 39 cents for a stand alone book.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it. Your target of 1 click per 1,000 impressions (0.1%) is a reasonable starting point for many categories. A higher CTR indicates that your cover and headline are effectively grabbing a reader’s attention and are relevant to the search query.
- Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS): The most important metric for profitability. It’s the ratio of your ad spend to your sales revenue. For example, an ACoS of 50% means you spent $5 to make $10 in sales. You want this number to be as low as possible.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who click on your ad and then buy your book. Your estimate of one sale for every 30 clicks is a good rule of thumb for many genres.
The Profitability Formula
Your formula for determining profitability is spot-on. Let’s break it down further with a tangible example.
- Profit per Sale: This is your book’s price minus Amazon’s share and any printing costs (for paperbacks). For a $3.99 Kindle book on a 70% royalty plan, your profit is approximately $2.79.
- Maximum Breakeven CPC: This is the highest you can bid and still break even. The formula is: (Royalty per sale) x (Conversion Rate).
- Using your numbers: $2.79 (royalty) x (1 sale / 30 clicks) = $0.093.
- This means your maximum breakeven CPC is just over 9 cents.
- The Problem: As you noted, the average CPC in many competitive genres is far higher than 9 cents. Your suggested starting bid of 34 cents is already well above the break-even point in this example. This highlights the core challenge: in a competitive market, making a profit is incredibly difficult.
A Strategic Approach to Ad Management
Given the tight margins, you can’t just set and forget your campaigns. You should NOT consider Amazon Ads a salestool just yet. You need to make sure your ads are profitable first and this is hard. At this stage ads are only a test tool to help you get everything in place before scaling up. Starting bid of 34 cents is a good, conservative baseline for a series starter. Use 39 cents for a stand alone book.
- Start with Low Bids: Your strategy of starting low is essential. This allows you to gather data without losing a lot of money. You can gradually increase bids for keywords or categories that show a high CTR and a low ACoS. Start your bids
- Manual vs. Automatic Campaigns: Start with ONE Automatic Campaign to discover new, relevant keywords that you may not have thought of. After a few weeks, analyze the customer search terms from your automatic campaign and move the top-performing ones into a Manual Campaign with a higher, more targeted bid.
- Category ads. Also create a number of category ads. Ads based on the categories that match your genre. But not more than seven category ads.
- Keyword ads. Create one hundred keyword ads and put 100 relevant but broad keywords in each of them. This means you need to find 10000 keywords. In ads you can use other book titles and author names so your ads will pop up next to other famous authors’ books.
- Negative Keywords: This is a crucial step. Add irrelevant search terms to your negative keyword list so your ads stop showing up for searches that will not convert. This reduces wasted ad spend. For example, if you wrote a mystery but your ad shows up for “children’s mystery books,” you should add “children’s” as a negative keyword.
- Iterate and Optimize: Your ads will not be profitable from day one. You must constantly monitor them and be willing to kill underperforming campaigns. Your ad data will also provide valuable insights into what needs to be fixed. Is your ACoS too high? The problem is either your bids are too high or your conversion rate is too low.
- Address Conversion Issues: If your ads are getting clicks but not sales, it’s not an ad problem; it’s a product page problem. The fix is not to increase your bid, but to go back and improve your:
- Cover: Is it speaking to your target audience?
- Blurb: Is it selling the emotional core of your story?
- Keywords: Are they truly targeting the right readers?
- Reviews: Do you have enough social proof to build trust?
Amazon Ads are a powerful tool, but they are a multiplier, not a miracle worker. They will amplify whatever you give them—good or bad. If your book isn’t ready, ads will only accelerate your losses. By methodically optimizing every aspect of your book’s presence on Amazon, you give your ads the best possible chance to succeed.
8. A Large Backlist Helps
The Power of Read-Through
When a new reader discovers your latest book and loves it, their immediate next step is to see if you’ve written anything else. If they find a catalog of five, ten, or even twenty other books, they are likely to buy them all. This “read-through” effect multiplies the value of every new reader you acquire. Instead of making a single sale, your one-time marketing effort (e.g., an ad click) can lead to multiple sales, dramatically improving your return on investment.
Algorithmic Favoritism
Amazon’s algorithm is designed to promote products that sell and keep customers on the platform. A large backlist does both. When a reader buys multiple books from you, the algorithm learns that you are a reliable author who satisfies readers. It will then start to recommend your other titles to that reader and will also push your books more heavily in search results and “also bought” sections to new potential readers. This creates a powerful flywheel effect: more books lead to more sales, which leads to more algorithmic visibility, which in turn leads to even more sales.
Reduced Marketing Risk
A large backlist allows you to take risks with your marketing. For example, you can offer your first book in a series for free or at a deep discount. While you might not make a profit on that first book, the goal is to get it in front of as many readers as possible. The profit comes from the subsequent sales of the rest of the series. This strategy is much more effective when you have a long series or a large catalog for readers to buy into.
Audience Trust and Loyalty
A backlist signals to readers that you are a serious, professional author. It shows that you are a reliable source of content within your genre. This builds trust and encourages readers to become loyal fans who eagerly await your next release. They are more likely to join your mailing list, follow you on social media, and talk about your books with their friends—all of which are invaluable for your long-term success.
In summary, a single book can be a lottery ticket, but a huge backlist is a business plan. It’s the foundation upon which you can build a stable and profitable career, turning one-off readers into lifelong fans.
Remember:
Navigating the world of Amazon KDP is a constant learning process. Their algorithms and policies are always evolving, but the core business motive remains the same: to maximize their own profit. They do this by placing themselves as the necessary middleman between you and the customer, and by constantly raising ad costs and fees to squeeze more from every transaction. The system is designed to benefit Amazon’s shareholders first and foremost, which means that while you can certainly find success, you must do so by understanding and working within their motives. By mastering the fundamentals of a compelling cover, a persuasive sales pitch, strategic keywords, strong reviews, and a dedicated mailing list, you’re not just playing their game; you’re building a sustainable author business. Good luck on your publishing journey.
