Your paperback or e-Book on Amazon has been released on the shelves after much effort, sweat, and tears. But after your book goes online, it becomes silent, and it appears that nobody is buying anything or even looking at your booking ad.
How then can you promote your book on Amazon?
You may advertise your new books on Amazon using a number different methods, including KDP Select, Kindle Countdown Deals, Free Book Promotions, and Kindle Deals. All of the aforementioned call for you to provide your book at a discount or for free.
KDP Advertising, which are Amazon book ads for authors, is a different approach to market without going via the promotion channel. Let’s take a closer look into KDP
What is Amazon KDP ?
KDP, which is particular to Amazon Kindle and is part of the Amazon Advertising Platform, is used. You can use it to place paid advertisements on your independently released book. The book you want to promote will show up in the Amazon search results, on the ebook information pages, and on the Kindle device’s lock screen. Later, we shall delve more into the specifics of the many forms of advertising.
On the Amazon website, the ads are clearly visible. If you type any kind of query for books into the search bar. The top right corner of the search result tiles for the promoted book will feature the label “Sponsored.”
The benefit of using KDP advertising is that you can grow and optimize your campaigns since you can regulate the budget allocation to particular campaigns in real-time and assign the ROI at the most granular level. Later, more on that.
How to promote your KDP book on Amazon
Account for Amazon Advertising
The following marketplaces: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.es, Amazon.fr, and Amazon.it are presently accepting ads for KDP books. If you do not already have an advertising account for any of these markets, create one by first logging in with your KDP login information.
Choose the book you wish to promote from your “bookshelf” by clicking on it, then select “Promote and Advertise” by clicking the three small dots as shown in the screenshot below.
KDP books’ Sponsored Product Campaign
You may now begin creating your campaign by selecting one of the two available options: Sponsored Product or Lockscreen. Since Sponsored Product Ads are the most popular kind of advertising on Amazon and Lockscreens may only be used for e-books, we will restrict our discussion to them in this post.
Sponsored Items KDP book advertisements appear in the same manner as advertisements for other products. They can be targeted at particular keywords or goods and can be found on search result and product detail pages.
Select the Sponsored Products option after clicking “Create campaign.”
The following data can now be entered in the settings:
- A campaign name: This is solely used to help you organize and identify your campaigns; it is not visible to customers.
- A daily budget allows you to specify the highest price you are ready to pay each day for advertising. Never pay more than your daily budget multiplied by the number of days in the month.
- Start and finish dates: You may specify the beginning and ending dates of your advertisement’s display period here. You can also choose to end your adverts at a later time by letting them continue indefinitely.
- Automatic targeting or manual targeting: You have the option of choosing whether you want Amazon’s algorithm to display your adverts automatically or manually by selecting your own keywords or ASINs.
Additionally, you can select a campaign bidding technique. This enables you to decide whether offers can automatically rise or fall in accordance with the likelihood of a sale. You may read more about our suggested Amazon bidding tactics here.
Choose from pre-written or custom text.
You have a choice between basic ads and ads with your own material when running advertising campaigns on Amazon.com. With the latter, you can insert a customized text for your book, as the name implies. Only basic advertising are available for selection on all other marketplaces. These will display the name of the author, the title and cover of your book, and sometimes even the book’s star rating.
They will feature in the advertisement if your book has at least 15 reviews with an average rating of 3.5 or higher.
Establish ad groups
You can select the books you want to promote after naming your ad group under “Create ad group.”
Targeting selection
You now have the option to select between keyword and product targeting if you selected manual targeting: In contrast to Product Targeting, which enables you to direct your adverts to specific products like books from rival publishers, Keyword Targeting allows you to have your advertisement displayed based on keywords of your choosing. The advertising will then show up either on the targeted product’s product detail page or, if the product is shown in the search results, in those pages.
The keywords or ASINs for which your Sponsored Product Ad will appear should be entered in the following step. The degree to which your keywords must match your clients’ search queries can also be defined along with the match kinds.
To achieve the best results, do your study on Amazon keywords before entering any phrase. You will only have a chance to earn clicks and orders if your advertisements show up in pertinent searches that have a strong relationship to your chosen keywords.
You can also set negative keywords at this time. This enables you to choose which keywords your ad shouldn’t appear for. This is especially advised when running a manual campaign with the match type “broad.”
Submit for evaluation
Your advertising is now ready for submission. You can view a preview of your ad to see how it will appear in the finished product. Your book’s title, cover image, and author name will be included. The suggested retail price will be included in select spots in addition to the book title, cover image, and author name.
Amazon will review the advertisement after it is submitted. It might take this inspection up to 72 hours. When the ad has been accepted or rejected, you will be informed through email.
The advertisement will often be accepted. However, a rejection might also happen in instances of questionable marketing (e.g. due to spelling and grammar mistakes, false claims such as “No. 1 bestseller” or inappropriate pictures).
Tips and advice for Amazon KDP advertising
We have put our suggestions from our KDP customer experiences here to assist you in effectively promoting your books on Amazon and to make sure that your advertising result in a large number of profitable sales.
Monitor the overall effectiveness of your advertisements.
Compared to Amazon advertising for other products, KDP advertising is relatively unique. To gain any visibility at all, some KDP self-publishing writers accept a high ACoS. Regardless matter whether you truly earn from the sales generated by advertising, when organic placements increase, so do sales generated by advertising.
KDP authors also have the option of making their book available through Kindle Unlimited as an e-book (under certain restrictions). Customers receive a special incentive through Kindle Unlimited, which allows them to read these books on their Kindles for free. Authors receive a portion of the KDP Select Global Fund for each page viewed.
Kindle Unlimited purchases of your books will still bring in money even though they won’t improve your advertising sales. The ACoS can quickly surpass 300% if KDP e-book publishers derive the majority of their income from the pages that customers read (typically in the “fiction” category) as opposed to from sales through advertising.
Quick tip :
You should continue to monitor the overall performance of your Sponsored Product Ads in the medium and long terms, even if you knowingly accept an ACoS of 100% to boost your chances of organic placements or concentrate on the number of e-book pages read. The Total ACoS is the appropriate indicator for this; ACoS is not.
In order to do this, you should periodically assess your advertising spending and contrast it with total revenue (organic sales and advertising money from physical books and e-books, plus revenue from e-book pages read) to ascertain the overall success of your advertising:
Total revenue (advertising revenue plus money from e-book pages read plus organic sales) / advertising cost
If your TACoS is greater than 100%, your KDP business is unquestionably losing money. This can be done on purpose after starting a KDP book because you might want to build visibility first. However, you should think about how long you are ready to lose money for this reason.
Bring about positive attention
You should be aware of a few things before you begin promoting with KDP.
Make sure your book has a captivating cover when you produce it because you can only display two images: the front and back covers. You can accomplish this by utilizing the Cover Creator tool on Amazon or by creating and uploading your own original design.
Your title should be carefully crafted to pique readers’ interest. E-books offer the important benefit of allowing the title to be altered if necessary in this situation.
The five bullet points on the product detail page provide you no chance to differentiate yourself from the competition, therefore you should spend even more time crafting an informative description of your book. This should pique attention, but it shouldn’t make any untrue claims to avoid getting bad feedback.
As obvious as it may appear, have a proofreader also look over your description. Spelling and punctuation errors might cause readers to draw inaccurate inferences about your book’s content before they have even started reading it since four eyes perceive more than two.
Utilize your competitors to your advantage
Our experiences with the aforementioned Product Targeting have been excellent. Targeting the ASINs of rivals who have a lot of reviews, in particular, works extremely well in practice.
Investigate your rivals and compile all books that are comparable to yours in terms of content, target audience, etc. and that your target audience would find interesting. Then, when creating your ads, target these ASINs.
In our post, you can read about all the benefits and suggestions for using Amazon Product Targeting to its fullest potential.
Stay realistic
In our experience, advertising helps books that would have sold well on their own. As a result, your chances of having your ads displayed increase the more organic sales you can generate.
You shouldn’t hope for miracles from advertising if your book does poorly organically and gets few to no sales. While we advise using advertising to increase sales following a launch, it is unlikely that advertising would turn your book into a bestseller if it has been available for a while without any orders. This can be because of the intense rivalry in the relevant book industry or because the book’s cover, title, content, etc., are not properly matched to your target audience.
Regular success management and control
To avoid any nasty shocks, regularly assess the performance of your KDP advertising and manage your ads accordingly. Even though you can choose your daily advertising spending cap, this won’t be enough to keep your Sponsored Product Ads under control.
You should analyze the keywords and bids for which your ads are being displayed, for instance, to determine whether keywords have high prices but low revenue, and vice versa. After that, you can conduct a successful bid management to prevent losing money.
Conclusion
The Amazon Market is said to change frequently as new products are introduced. Being successful requires continual monitoring of bids to see what is and is not working. So one must continue to optimize their advertising tactics. Every potential keyword combination should be included, for example, if your work is a murder mystery that also features mystical creatures. Then you should look for books about these subjects and include similar books and titles in your own collection. This can increase your chances of success and make all your hard work pay off in the end.
