Writing Tips: Amazon Advertisement

Writing Tips: Amazon Advertisement

So, you’ve just published your first novel (or are about to) and are wondering how to get the word out. I’ve been there – and still am there, technically. Here’s a few things I’ve learned along the way.

First and foremost, most adequate forms of advertisement/marketing costs money! That’s right, folks. The age-old words of wisdom is true. You have to spend money to make money!

Advertising comes in many forms. Here’s a few:
1. Internet Advertisement
2. Promotional Products
3. Word of Mouth / Agreements

Let’s start with Internet Advertisement. For Self Publishers, this is really where your widest audience sits. There are a lot of options to choose from, ranging from Amazon and Facebook’s internal Advertising services to finding other third-party services. I can tell you, I’ve done all three of those (though admittedly limited with the other services). In this Writing Tips entry, I’ll be discussing specifically Amazon’s advertising services. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Amazon: Advertising through Amazon is done primarily through Keywords to assist with making sure your book is noticed instead of the hundreds of thousands of those you are competing against. Each Keyword has a specific cost. The more generic and popular the Keyword, the higher the cost. I’ve included an example below.

As you can see, the Suggested Bid is the average value. The next column is what you choose to set as your Maximum Bid for that Keyword (it is rare you actually end up paying that much). The higher your Bid, the more likely it is that your result will show up above others who are bidding on the same Keyword. After all, there’s only 1-2 Sponsored Products at the top of the search results and you want to be there – so do they. These Bids are what YOU pay. More on that below!

Without paid ads, if you search ‘Orc’ in Amazon’s books, you probably would not even find Orcblood Legacy: Honor among the first page. There are hundreds of other orc books out there (mostly erotic homosexual novels, oddly enough). However, now, searching “Orc” returns my novel as the first result.

Now, this is a GREAT way to improve your book’s visibility. So, what’s the catch? Well, there are two.

First, depending on your Keywords (you can choose up to 200, I believe), not everyone will find your book. For example, I did not choose ‘Armor’. As a result, if a prospective reader searches for that word, my novel will not show up as a Sponsored link. This is where you get to try to increase or decrease your reach based on the words you select. You’re paying per click, so you don’t want to include Keywords that aren’t related to your story. If I had chosen ‘Princess’ as a Keyword, how likely is it that someone searching for ‘Princess’ would pick up my novel? It depends on how good Fangdarr looks in a dress, I suppose – but not very.

This leads me to the next catch. The cost. Amazon advertising charges you per click. No matter how many people see your ad, you only get charged when people click on it. This is where you want to filter your audience, as mentioned. Otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of arbitrary clicks that don’t result in sales. Every Keyword’s cost per click is different, as shown in my first image. It may not seem like a lot at $0.31 per click, but if 100 people click your ad, that’s now $3.10 just for them to take a look at the book. Theoretically, depending on your royalties, you may only need to sell 1 book to cover that cost. 1 out of 100 seems like a good chance, right? It can be. But you need to remember that almost all readers are just peeking around. They read your synopsis, check your reviews, the price, and maybe even your bio. And then they leave. Poof.

Now, that’s not to say you won’t have success with it. Success can be measured in different ways. When you’re first starting out, don’t worry too much about income. That’s a quick way to get disappointed. I know I was. Writing a book is a difficult task. Once you’re done, you think you’ll put it up for sale and it’ll start trickling in some nice income. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. You need to build your brand. Write more books, maintain your blog and website, and generate reader interest. Your ad may cost you $200 and you may get $25 in sales from it. Financially, that’s pretty terrible. But, you may have gotten 300 new people to click your link in interest. So, what did you gain if not money?

Visibility, obviously. Many of the world’s most famous (and now wealthy) authors did not get rich off their first novel. Far from it. You NEED your work to be seen. It’s much better if its read and loved, of course, but infinitely more important that your book gets seen compared to not. As you write more books – and promote them – your name will slowly gain recognition. It might be after five books or maybe even thirty before you start to reach the levels of notoriety and income you’re looking for, but that’s the game. Writing for income is a vastly different experience – and subsequently requires different tactics – than writing for enjoyment. I try to reach a happy medium, personally.

All in all, Amazon’s advertisement service can be a great way to get your book noticed. The cost does creep up pretty quickly, so you’ll need to plan for that. It costs as much or as little as you’re willing to spend and you can end it at any time. Right now, I keep up an ad 100% of the time for a few Keywords and then I’ll launch a separate campaign whenever I need to drive as much traffic as possible, such as for a launch or a free eBook event.

To give you some numbers, I spent $300 on ads (between Amazon and Facebook) when I made Orcblood Legacy: Honor free in February. Obviously, I made none of that back since the book was free for that time. However, in those five days, there were 4x as many downloads than I had sold since the book’s launched, drastically increasing my reader count (and therefore my reach). A large portion of those people probably didn’t read the book, or didn’t even like it, but that’s not the point. The purpose was to increase the number of readers and it did just that.

Next time I’ll discuss Facebook’s advertising services and the differences it has compared to Amazon. Subscribe to the website if you haven’t yet to check out these Writing Tips! Also, if you have any questions in particular, feel free to contact me at any time and I’d be glad to discuss it. Until next time!