Amazon Ads for Traditionally Published Authors

Back when I first started experimenting with running online ads for my book, Amazon did not allow traditionally published authors to run ads on their platform.

This made running digital ads very ill-advised for traditionally published authors (you can read more about why I thought so here). TLDR on why: you shouldn’t run ads unless you can see dollar for dollar what you’re earning from what you’re spending. Because Facebook/Instagram/Google don’t have purchase information, you’re stuck with sending people towards a purchase page and hoping for the best, totally in the dark as to whether you’ve made an impact or are just throwing money down a hole (unless you set up your own e-shop, which is a whole other thing). You are paying for people to click on the ad, but those people might or might not buy your book.

Well now, Amazon has opened up ads to traditionally published authors. And it… changes things…

First let’s talk about advertising strategy

(I recommend you read my previous article on digital ads for a more thorough breakdown of how online advertising works.)

I’ve been in digital marketing for 10 years. And the thing that is important to understand about how companies run ads is understanding the idea of Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). You spend $100 so that you get $100. You do not spend $100 to get $50. You aim to tweak and improve your ads so that your ROAS is 100%: you are earning back every dollar you spend.

Before, a traditionally published author couldn’t see revenue resulting from ad spend, making calculating this ROAS impossible. With Amazon, you can now see that revenue data. And this is very powerful.

Let’s look at a campaign I ran

My book A Wolf for a Spell has wolves and witches in it. Since it’s October, I decided to run some campaigns. I made an author account and claimed my book, and then navigated to the Ads Console from the Marketing section.

• I selected a Sponsored Product campaign type
• I chose both my hardcover and my paperback as the sponsored products. (If you only have hardcover because you’re wanting to run ads for your publication day, this is actually fine. Because hardcovers have a higher price, they’re actually better for running ads because you earn more revenue)
• I chose Automatic Targeting (I have done Manual Targeting as well in past experiments, and to be honest I don’t recommend it because it’s inefficient, requires skill to perfect, and gets expensive)
• I set a default bid of somewhere between $0.30-$0.55 (I messed around with this a bit as I went along). The general rule of thumb is the higher the bid, the more likely your ad will be seen in prominent places, but with the obvious repercussion of having spent more money. You’re looking for a balance of keeping the bid low enough to keep campaigns profitable, but high enough to actually be seen. The range above seems to hit that balance for me.
• The only negative keyword I put is the name of my own book. Basically negative keywords are a chance to list types of searches where your ad might show but you don’t want it to. One reason you do this is to avoid having to pay for clicks made by a person who is unlikely to purchase your book. Maybe they’ve searched for graphic novels, see my book listed so they think my book is a graphic novel, so they click on the product page, explore further, realize it’s not a graphic novel, and leave. Now I’ve paid for a click from a person who was looking for a book that is totally different from my book. The reason I include my book name as a negative keyword is related, but different: I want to avoid paying for a click for someone who was specifically looking for my book and was likely to purchase anyway. There are ways in the dashboard to find out what searches are leading to clicks but not purchases, so ideally you start your campaign with limited Negative Keywords and then add them over time as your campaigns gather data. I also left negative product targeting blank.
• I left it on Dynamic Bids for simplicity.
• Here’s the text I used:

Results:

What does it all mean?

• For spending $200, I sold $460 worth of books, or 44 books in total. I actually consider this a good result, when I think of all the ways I might spend $200 (on a social media or blog tour, on a Goodreads giveaway, printing bookmarks, or traveling to a conference) and would probably sell fewer books.
• 0.83% CTR (the number of people who saw my ad and then clicked on it) is quite good. Advice I can find online says anything below 0.3% is poor, anything above 0.5% is good. Some of the CTR is going to be outside my control (it’ll be hugely affected by my cover and my title), but I can play with the text to try to improve it. I had other text that had lower CTRs, so this text was effective for me.
• This result does not warrant me spending money to run ads all the time. I haven’t earned out my advance, so any money I spend is money that will take years (if ever) to show up in my bank account as money earned. If I were earning royalties, this is still running unprofitably, because I’m only earning 10% of that revenue from my publisher, so I’m actually spending $200 to earn $46 (not good enough).
• My conclusion is that, if there’s a period of time where I’d like to give my book an extra push and have some money to do it, then this is an effective option. Since my book is autumnal/wintery and has witches and snow, I’ll likely do a yearly cadence of running ads in October or November and that’s it.

Your results may vary! As always, do not ever spend money on ads that you aren’t prepared to lose entirely. Your book’s cover, title, topic, genre will all affect how many people click on your ads or purchase your book. It won’t be a great option for every book type.

Update November 2022:

I ran another month’s worth of campaigns, using different text. Have a look and see what an immense difference an identical campaign set-up but with different text can have!

[Note that I played around with increasing and decreasing the daily budget, which is why there’s that spike in spending on Nov 20, and why there’s no spend on 23–24 Nov.]

My observations on the above:

• You’ll notice the impressions are much lower for virtually the same spend. This is because the click-through rate (the percentage of people who saw the ad and clicked on it) was so much higher. I capped my daily budget at $8, so if I dug further into the data you would see the same number of clicks per day.
• The CTR in this set-up was actually so high that I was burning through my daily budget in a matter of hours. If I had more funds that I could spend on ads (and if the revenue were in my favor), I could have increased the budget to probably $50 a day and the ads would still be earning much more than that spend.

This brings me to . . .

My plea to traditional publishers:

I am sending this into the void in the hopes that someone might see it. I know that you have too few marketing people for a backlist of hundreds of thousands of books, and that you need to prioritise. And prioritising means running ads for only your frontlist. New releases, big name authors. I’ve looked at your Facebook ads library; I’ve seen which books you’re running ads for. And I get it. There just isn’t enough time in the day. And also Amazon isn’t your favorite company to work with.

But my experiment above shows that running ads for backlist books is not a silly idea. I don’t know all your costs, so I can’t say whether the campaign above would be profitable for you. But with improvements, it could be cost neutral, or even marginally profitable. And when you factor in word-of-mouth… I don’t know. Maybe. It’s certainly more profitable for you than it is for me, since it’s money in your pocket, and marketing is a big part of what you do.

There are millions of e-commerce companies running billions of ads. And traditional publishing seems to run remarkably few digital ads for the size of the industry. This feels like something that could benefit from more investment, and who knows, it might result in some of those midlist titles breaking through.

The next article in this series on marketing for authors is on social media. You can read that here.

If you find any of this useful, please consider sharing, or check out my book A Wolf for a Spell.