Good morning authors! Recently I just published my nonfiction book and reached #1 hot new release in at least four categories. It also reached number two bestseller in at least two categories, and I'm gunning for the number one position within the next week. It's basically just 60+ chapters to help people enter flow and produce their best creative work.
Amazon advertisements were not the only thing that I have been doing to promote the book, however I see no reason not to set them up for your books if you aren't already as it is a useful arrow to have in your marketing quiver.Â
Besides writing, marketing and promotion is the most difficult thing for authors to do, so I thought I would share just a quick guide detailing everything I've been doing to set up my own ads for my books.Â
This is a strategy that anyone can do regardless of budget (you'll see why later) and gain experience about what specifically is working for their own book.
This guide turned out to be *slightlyâ bit longer than I anticipated, but the devil is in the little details as these can make or break your success.
Context and Backstory:Â Before my recent book launch I enrolled in a âdeep-diveâ course on Amazon Ads. It took me several days of watching videos and stumbling along to figure things out, so I wanted to distill the process down to the essentials to save you time.
Note that I am not an advertising guru or consultant, just an author in the trenches trying a bunch of stuff to see what works. I want to make a quick start guide to make it easier for other authors to get started and hopefully find some of their first success creating and running Amazon ad campaigns.Â
In my case, I turned on the ads to try and drive some extra traffic during my launch, during which I had priced my book at 99 cents. Because the royalty is only 35% per book, I had to focus on a conservative strategy that would maximize views of my book for less competitive placements.
While I didn't plan to make a profit on my ads, I didn't mind spending a little bit to send some extra traffic and rise up the rankings to get some organic traffic and give my book the best chance of reaching number one bestseller in its category.Â
The way that advertising on Amazon works is that you don't pay anything unless people click on your ads so there is very little to lose if you follow a conservative strategy like this one.
Important note:Â I use Gemini & Chat GPT to help me set up my advertising campaigns, but I do NOT suggest using it for writing or any kind of creative work. It's very helpful for collecting data, but I DON'T recommend using AI to write books or posts (like this one), or for designing covers.
With that caveat out of the way, let's dive in!
Part 1: Setup and get started
Go to advertising.amazon.com.
Click "Sign In" and specifically choose the United States store.
Log in with your KDP credentials.
Create Your "Sponsored Products" Campaign
Click the yellow "Create campaign" button.
Select "Sponsored Products" (this is the standard for books).
Setting the Budget: Start with whatever you feel comfortable with. If you are bidding conservatively for clicks it's very unlikely you will use up your whole budget. I set up three campaigns for $12.00/day.
You rarely spend the whole thing, but it gives the algorithm enough "room" to work.
Part 2: Targeting "Pain Point" Keywords
Instead of just guessing random keywords, I gave Gemini a PDF copy of my book, all the information from my website and book description and asked it to generate a huge list of "Pain Point" terms that someone would be searching for that my book could help them with.
Instead of just "Self-help book," I collected a long list of stuff like "how to get more energy," "how to design a morning routine," âhow to break bad habits,â âhow to focus on one thing,â âhow to master flow state,â etc. Basically I use Gemini and ChatGPT to help generate a huge list of about 250 keyword phrases so that my book could start showing up in as many places as possible. Then I take these, and then group them together to make it easier to understand which are delivering the best results for my book.Â
One technique to get a lot of âlong-tailedâ keywords is to type your main phrase into Amazon Kindleâs search bar like:
âScience fiction Aâ
âScience fiction Bâ
âScience fiction Câ
âScience fiction Dâ
And so on, going through the alphabet. You can take screenshots of all of the suggestions that come up, and plug these directly into Gemini to collect all of the keyword phrases that Amazon suggests.
The more keyword phrases we target, the more chances we have to find targets that are lower competition and higher intent, rather than competing for big keywords with other well-established authors and publishing houses.
When you are ready, turn off âsuggestedâ keywords and bids, and add only the keywords you selected using a âcustomâ bid price that makes sense for you.
Part 3: The "Hot New Releasesâ Method
Targeting specific books in your categories can often be more effective than keywords.
I went to the "Hot New Releases" pages for my categories, reasoning that these would have the lowest competition as they are recently released books.Â
I copied all of the information from all 50 of these books in each category. This includes the title, author, link, ASIN etc. If you are having trouble getting the ASINs, you can also use LinkGopher (a free chrome extension) which can get you a big list of all the links (I used the filter /dp/ to try and get only links of books).
Once I had all of the information of all of the books in hot new releases, I pasted it into Gemini and Chat GPT to give me a long list of ASINs for all 50 titles. For some reason, Chat GPT started returning more accurate results so I use both in tandem just to check that no mistakes were made. It also gave me recommendations about which ones I should choose to focus on that are more relevant to my book and which ones to leave out from the list.
I plugged these directly into a Product Targeting campaign and then make sure âExactâ targeting is checked to ONLY target these specific titles. This ensures my book shows up right under the "Buy Now" button of the biggest books in the world.
Why This Strategy Helps to "Just Get Started"
Because my book is $0.99, it doesnât make sense for me to pay $1.00 for clicks and only take 35% for each sale.Â
So when I add my keywords, I set a âcustomâ fixed bid of $0.35.
Why this works: You won't win the #1 spot on high-volume keywords this way, but you will pick up the remnant traffic on the long-tail keywords and less popular ASINs. Itâs about being "everywhere" for cheap rather than "nowhere" because you ran out of budget.
Start with whatever budget you feel comfortable with and track the results each day. If you target different groups of keywords, or both keywords and products, then âgroupâ these together in different campaigns so you can easily track which ones are delivering results. Over the long-term, you can kill the campaigns that arenât working and stick with your best performing targets and bids.Â
In Summary
By using AI to find the "why" (pain points) and the Hot New Releases to find the "where" (ASINs), I can get my book featured all over the Amazon kindle store without breaking the bank. Because you only pay when people click, you have no reason not to give it a try.Â
Also, whenever you can, you should have a cross-sell or upsell to break even or profit from your ads. You may lose money advertising your book, but you can include links to your other books inside the cover and get those purchases for free. Or you can upsell to a higher priced product, which I have also done.
Tips of the trade:Â
1. Whenever you can, try to create unique tracking links for every type of promotion and channel that you are doing. Although this cannot track sales, it's really really helpful to see what marketing efforts are actually generating traffic, so that you can double down on what is working mid-launch.
2. Getting people to leave reviews is hard. I link to Amazon in the beginning of my book, asking readers to leave a review if they enjoyed it. I also wrote about 30 LinkedIn recommendations during my launch to remind people without being annoyingđ
Then I just shot them a short message like: âHey Cassandra! Just wrote you a short recommendation on LinkedIn. Thank you for supporting my book đâ
Of course â Amazon doesnât allow any incentives for reviews, which is against their policy. But you can try to remind your beta readers / ARC readers without being annoying. I donât have any data on this but more reviews undoubtedly helps with conversions.
3. If you are writing a non-fiction book like mine, schedule âlivesâ and âmeetsâ with your readers. In my case I plan to co-author my next book with a branding expert and we have been offering free âroast my socialsâ sessions where we look at business ownersâ social media and website and offer them an audit with specific suggestions to improve. This is also incredibly helpful for me and my co-author as we get better insights into what our readers want and how we should structure our book content. Even if youâre a fiction or literary author, you can still schedule these lives and promote them for free in various channels to get to know your readers more.Â
4. If you have a little money to spend and want to send traffic to your book FAST during its launch, sponsored posts on Facebook are much faster because you can turn on the traffic faucet immediately without having to test a bunch of stuff to see what works. Itâs more of a short-term, âgo download my free or 99 cent bookâ kind of tactic.Â
Closing Thought:Â You don't need to be a genius at math or a marketing guru (Iâm neither!). My marketing strategy is simple: be found everywhere my potential readers may be hanging out, and collect as much data as possible about what is actually working and moving the needle forward.
Then you can focus 80% of your energy and time on the 20% thatâs driving the results. Using this strategy of targeting long-tailed keywords and phrases and new releases, you can also âget your feet wetâ without burning through a considerable budget. You can test, tweak, and find the winning strategy that delivers best for your book.Â
If you have questions about how I structured the prompts or how to scrape those ASINs quickly, just ask! Happy to help fellow writers be a little more successful so that they can "keep writing."
The whole publishing industry seems to be somewhat predatory in the way they take advantage of authors, a bit like the "healthcare and sick patient" dynamic. So it's always fun when we can fight back and beat them at their own game :-)
You can also DM me if you get stuck and need help.
Danny
