Does Amazon Advertising Work for Books?
Dear Evergreen Authors:
Does Amazon Advertising work for books?
We get this question all the time from authors, and our answer is usually always the same.
Before we get into our answer, let us explain how Amazon Advertising works first so you have a solid foundation of understanding.
What is Amazon Advertising?
Amazon Advertising was launched in 2012 and enables sellers all over the world to advertise their products—from books, to clothes, to beauty products, and more.
Separate from Amazon.com, you can find the Amazon Advertising program for authors by logging into your KDP dashboard and going into to your Bookshelf and clicking on the Promote and Advertise link (see photos below.)
How to Access Amazon Advertising for Your Book:
From here, you’ll be able to setup ad campaigns for your book.
Up until recently, you needed a Kindle edition or KDP Paperback edition of your book to run ad campaigns, but Amazon has now opened advertising up to other formats not published through KDP.
This is great news for traditionally published authors — and indie authors distributing their books to Amazon via another service than KDP.
To create ad campaigns outside of KDP, log in to Author Central go to the Reports + Marketing tab, and look for the Amazon Ads yellow box and click on "Go to ads console" and you can set them up (see photo below).
There are certain genres that are excluded from running ad campaigns, click here to see what genres are prohibited from using Amazon Advertising to make sure your book meets the guidelines before you start creating ads.
How does Amazon Advertising work for books?
When you start running Amazon ad campaigns for your book, there are two main places where your ads may show up:
1) In search results for specific genres and keywords
*Notice all the circled books are ads, and prominently displayed at the top of the search page.
Here’s the other main place you’ll see book ads running:
2) On a product page, next to the Also Bought section
There are many other spots Amazon will place ads for books, but these are the two most popular, and the placements that will typically drive the most traffic to your book sales page.
As you can probably gather from looking at these screenshots, Amazon has become a pay-to-play system where the way to get your book to the #1 position of search is to run ad campaigns.
So, should you run ads on your book? Yes.
But, you should take the time to learn how to create Amazon ad campaigns before you start running a single ad for your book.
Don’t be this guy.
Here’s the #unfiltered truth about Amazon Advertising for authors
We want to be 100% honest with you now—getting familiar with Amazon Advertising will take time and practice, and authors get mixed results.
In general, authors who get the best results with Amazon Advertising are the ones who invest the time and energy in learning how to create + launch ads properly.
There are many places to learn how to run effective Amazon ads for your book, and Amazon offers a free tutorial right here. We also like the free courses available on Reedsy and Kindlepreneur.
We highly recommend spending time learning about the Amazon Advertising system before you go in blindly because it can be an extremely expensive learning curve.
But, if you do know what you’re doing—Amazon Advertising can be EXTREMELY profitable, and bring in a huge audience of readers quickly, while selling your book and boosting your income completely on autopilot.
Real-life author case studies with Amazon Advertising
Now, let’s get to some real-life stories of authors who used Amazon Advertising for their books, because I think this will help answer the question of whether or not it will work for your book.
We’ll first going to share a case study from a fiction author that comes from the Reedsy Blog, then we’ll share our own personal experience using Amazon Advertising as a non-fiction author.
AUTHOR CASE STUDY #1: FICTION AUTHOR
Annelie Wendeberg is an award-winning author of historical and climate fiction, and has been using Amazon ads on three of her books in the past few months:
The Devil’s Grin (Victorian mystery/thriller), Keeper of Pleas (Victorian mystery / police procedural), and 1/2986 (Climate Fiction / Hard Science Fiction). All three are the first books in their respective series.
The results of her Amazon ad campaigns? Pretty good. Here’s what she had to say:
“I just started the ad for the science fiction, so I can’t say anything about performance yet. The mysteries are doing pretty well, with an ROI (return on investment) of around 500% (includes paperback sales and sales of all books in the series).”
— Annelie
Here’s a first pointer for you series authors: advertising the first book in the series means that the readers you’ll acquire through the ads can then purchase and make their way through the rest of their series.
Another good pointer is the type of ads Annelie went for:
“All my ads are sponsored product ads running with manual keywords. I didn’t try Display ads yet, because I find the placement odd — kind of far away from where I would look when I’m interested in purchasing a book.”
— Annelie
You’ll probably find that you need to test a lot of keywords before you find some that really work for you. A good way to find more keywords is to go through your book’s “also boughts," and then those books' “also boughts," and so on.
Annelie also says:
“There are 4 key elements to successful advertisement: (1) Copy, (2) Image, (3) Target audience, and (4) Data. Number crunching is immensely important, otherwise you’ll have no clue what’s working and what isn’t. How often is the ad shown? How many people find it interesting enough to click? And how many of those people purchase the product? Why is one keyword working and another isn’t? Spend time on analyzing your data, and do it daily when starting a new ad.”
— Annelie
CASE STUDY #2: NON-FICTION AUTHOR
This next author case-study is for myself, Josie Robinson, a non-fiction author who writes in the self-help genre, and one of the cofounders here at Evergreen Authors.
I’ve got three books published currently, and have been running Amazon ads on my most popular book for several years now. You can see the book I run ads on right here.
I’ve personally experienced huge success from using Amazon ads for my books—I went from selling 150 Kindle books a year online, to over 250+ a month on Amazon alone.
What I really like about Amazon Advertising is that I feel like you don't have to do much to maintain your ad campaigns and they're pretty inexpensive to run—especially compared to how expensive BookBub ads and Facebook ads.
But my favorite thing about using Amazon ads to sell books is that you don't need a huge online following, or need to be on social media all the time—the trick really is to use the right keywords to target readers who are already searching for books like yours.
Like Annelie mentions in the author case study from above, running successful Amazon Advertising campaigns for your book really is about targeting the right readers by using keywords related to your book.
Here’s a screenshot from the inside of one of my ad campaigns so you can see what I mean:
Since my book is called The Gratitude Jar, I use a lot of keywords with the word “gratitude” in them so when people are on Amazon searching for books about “gratitude,” chances are good an ad for my book will pop up on their search pages.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the keywords “gratitude jar” and “gratitude journal” are getting the most action—with the keyword “gratitude jar” accounting for almost $2500 in book sales alone!
THIS is the power of using Amazon Advertising to target your ideal readers. If you can get your book in front of the RIGHT readers, people who are actually looking for books just like yours, the sales take care of themselves.
So our answer is usually an enthusiastic “heck yes!” to authors who ask us the question of whether or not they should run Amazon ads for their book…but always with the caveat to make sure to target the right readers with your ads.
