I am happy to announce a really cool update. A Life of Death was selected to potentially be optioned for TV or a movie by TaleFlickDiscovery. And they want your input.
If you would like to see Alex, Paige and Jamie on the big screen, vote for it today. The contest ends in 48 hours, so please help. I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see Alex’s ghostly tale on the big screen. Vote today on TaleFlickDiscovery!
Thank you for your support. Happy reading!
With the new year, something that’s been in the works for months has finally come to fruition. The Priors is getting a fresh new look. Personally, I’m impressed at the graphic designers’ work… (Yes, the apostrophe is in the right place.) It took two great graphic designers to craft these two awesome covers, and each artist had a hand in both. My thanks go out to Adrijus with Rocking Book Covers for the intriguingly ominious creative, and to Simon Critchell for his fantastic work with the layout and full-print covers. These two books turned out incredible, and I’m proud to see my debut series updated.
What do you think?
I am very happy to announce an added convention in my routine, and potentially more to come. This weekend while at WindyCon, I was invited to join the Bard’s Tower authors at GalaxyCon in Louisville, KY. It is this upcoming weekend, November 22-24.
I happily accepted.
There are a ton of great authors in the Bard’s Tower, many you know and quite a few up-and-coming stars. And the added benefit of meeting so many other celebrities might make this a con to remember for life.
If this is closer to your neck of the woods and you would like to find out more, follow the link: https://louisvillesupercon.com.
I’d love to see you there!
Hello and welcome back to my blog. Or if it’s your first visit, welcome! It’s good to have you. I’m Weston Kincade, fiction author. It’s nice to meet you.
Today I’ll be responding to friend and fellow fiction author Scott Rhine about our progress learning Amazon cost-per-click ads. His latest post, found here on his website, is titled Hacks for Amazon Ads. Just a warning, if you don’t like math, stats, ROI, and other assorted business acronyms, this might not be your cup of tea. However, if you want to see behind the curtains and learn about marketing books, read on!
Scott,
What if you died daily, only to live on as speaker for the dead? Read it today.
You are venturing down a rabbit hole I haven’t dealt much with by using Product-based targeting and Rest of Search. I mainly focus on keyword and category ads, but here are my responses based on your questions and observations.
Just based on my initial observations of your stats, I’d suggest lowering your CPC bid max pretty significantly. Consider this, when marketing anything online there is a certain amount of time and clicks it will take before you get a sale. When you know that number, you can figure out your average conversion rate (or CVR). Then you know approximately how many clicks it will take to make a sale and you can price your ads appropriately. If your average CPC is too high, you will almost always spend way too much to get a sale. Books have much less room to advertise because their overall cost is so low. This will slow down your clicks and sales, but that is okay. It’s much more manageable then and will spend slower. You just create more ads and evaluate them the same way for profit. Making more ads will start to add to your ad spend, but if the CPC is lower you will be spending much more wisely and should be making more on every dollar spent if your targeting and book’s sales page are up to par.
1. Product Pages Only… Or Not
Well like I said, you are venturing down a rabbit hole I can’t really weigh in on here. Aside from a few oddball tests I ran some time back, I have only used Product Category ads and Keyword ads, not Individual Product ads. However, your interest motivated me to investigate it. I am running some Individual Product ads right now using what I know. I’ll let you know what I discover. From what I understand currently, Individual Product ads work but can be expensive. It sounds like that 800% bonus you are doing may be supercharging the ad too much.
Before we jump the gun though, look at your actual sales. Amazon is horrible about reporting sales, and it doesn’t track pages read for books in Kindle Unlimited (KU) or KU orders. If you wonder how much you’ve made from KENP reads, try using BookReport. It’s free until you really start bringing in money. Then you have to upgrade. But it’s far more accurate than the Amazon dashboard. Amazon is also unveiling a beta version of a royalties and KENP dashboard. I don’t think it is available to everyone yet, but if you have a link at the top of your KDP Dashboard that says, “NEW! Try the new KDP Reports beta,” then you can click that link and try it out. It’s pretty accurate compared to Book Report, but I’m not sure how much I’d rely on it right now considering Amazon’s track record and that it’s in the beta stage, not when Book Report is available and accurate. I look forward to when Amazon’s dashboard gives everything you need accurately.
If you have already factored in your readthrough from KENP read for any book in KU, then try lowering the 800% supercharge or turning it off completely. The recommendation from other authors who are much more well versed in Amazon ads than me is to leave that for later until you master the other ad types. The same can be said about the new Lock Screen ads. I don’t think most people have figured out how to make them work affordably yet. You could be the one to do it, but I suggest mastering Keyword and Category ads first. What you learn will translate, but if you continue to venture down this rabbit hole, I am very curious about what you find.
2. Rest of Search
The Rest of Search options you mentioned have me a little confused. I’m not sure what you are referring to. Are you referring to the Campaign Bidding Strategy section? I generally leave that at Down Only just to be safe and to keep my costs low. When I am more confident with AMS ads and my keywords, I’ll venture into that more. You can certainly increase your bid for more action, like you did. It will get you sales, but in my experience they will generally cost more than you make. For Amazon ads, the best way to approach it in my experience is like farming or picking apples. You are trying to harvest as many good keywords as possible and pick the best to use in future ads. It’s a numbers game. You want as many profitable ads running as possible. Keep making new ads and finding new keywords that relate to your target audience.
3. Skipping Days Manually… Don’t
When I first began, I thought that too. There were a couple days a week that seemed not to produce. However, as time went on and I discovered how much about KU income wasn’t being reported, I found that there wasn’t a consistency between the days. I spoke with other authors too and asked them. It’s not certain days of the week, at least not so far as anyone I’ve talked to can tell. Any day can be a bad day of sales for some ads while others do really well. I have hundreds of ads running simultaneously. Bad days happen and there are a ton of variables. This is partly because of all the unreported KU income and the 48-72 hours it sometimes takes Amazon to accurately report sales.
Since I started using Book Report, I’ve found that many of those days that aren’t reporting sales are still showing spikes in KENPs read, more than what it should be from sales. There are KU orders happening all the time, which doesn’t make authors money; however, the pages read from them do. All of that adds up and can tell you whether your ad is really profitable.
Additionally, since I’ve delved deeper into Amazon ads over the last couple of years, I now see no connection to the days of the week. I see much more connection to holidays and specialty days like Black Friday. For instance, right after Christmas there is normally a small surge as people get Amazon gift cards as presents and begin scouring Amazon for their next reads. If you have ads running to the right keywords or products, you can benefit from it and get your books into more readers’ hands.
4. Manually Enabling on Key Days
As I mentioned in part 3, I don’t really see too much benefit to doing this, especially once you are running hundreds of ads. I can’t predict which days of the week will sell more books, and as long as my ads are continuing to be profitable overall, I don’t want to mess with them.
Unfortunately AMS ads can be very finicky. You want to mess with them as little as possible in my experience. For unknown reasons, they can suddenly stop working. If you think this has happened, check the impressions of that ad each day for a few days. If it is still getting impressions, it is still working. If not, when it happens you can sometimes fix it by making another change, like to the budget. Then wait and see if it starts getting impressions again over the next couple days. You have to give it a few days though, because the KDP dashboard doesn’t report impressions on days the campaign doesn’t get clicks. A change to the ad will sometimes get it going again, but generally I have to recreate the ad to get it working again.
If you are curious about learning more, I highly recommend best selling author Bryan Cohen’s AMS Ad School. It has proven really beneficial.
If you missed our earlier discussion about AMS ads, read it here. Also, if anyone has questions, feel free to leave them below.
Fellow author and friend Scott Rhine and I have been discussing Amazon Marketing (AMS) ads of late. Just this week, he posted about his experiences the first week using Amazon’s cost-per-click advertising system, commonly shortened to AMS CPC ads or some variation. I thought I’d continue the conversation, this time with our friends. I’ve been using AMS ads for a few years now and am currently taking Bryan Cohen’s Amazon Ads course, which I highly recommend. All of these experiences have been extremely helpful and I’ve learned a lot, so just to forwarn you, this response post may get a bit technical.
If seeing behind the author’s veil and analyzing data, ROI, percentages and net profits are your cup of tea, read on! (Just beware the acronyms.)
If not, I certainly understand. It isn’t for everyone. Thank you for stopping by though. I appreciate it.
Continuing on… If you haven’t read Scott’s analysis of AMS yet, here is a link to the post again. If you want to chime in or ask a question, feel free below. We welcome the discussion.
Scott,
Much of what you mentioned in your post is accurate from my experience, but sometimes there are other factors to consider. I’ve responded to each of your points in corresponding fashion below.
1. Don’t try this with 99 cent books, unless…
I pretty much agree with everything you said: loss of money advertising a .99 cent book, recommended bid range is too high for a positive return on investment (ROI), and there is logic to valuing your project. There are other things to consider though:
a. Is the book in Kindle Unlimited?
If so, then authors make a small percentage based on pages read. This should be considered when deciding on an ad’s success and ROI.
b. Recommended bid ranges are just that, recommendations. Explore your potential readers by adjusting the bid. Be careful though. The more you raise your cost-per-click (CPC) maximum, the more AMS will spend advertising your product. This can add up… Trust me, been there, done that. Warning: Just raising the CPC likely will not make enough in sales to cover the advertising cost. I have spent far too much money learning this myself.
But who knows? I have had sales at a CPC of .02 cents. That one click wound up selling a $4.99 e-book copy of A Life of Death. Amazon took its normal 30% off the top, leaving $3.40. Subtracting the .02 cents for advertising cost, that one click earned me $3.38. You could too. The question is, is that click and sale repeatable? And that’s the hardest part. The point of Amazon’s keyword ads is to find the right keywords that target your book’s audience.
c. What’s your point of advertising?
A lot of publishers and authors spend a great deal of money advertising books leading up to their releases and beyond. If you aren’t in it for initial profit and are trying to build your readership for that book or series, then AMS ads are a great tool to use, as are Facebook and BookBub ads.
2. Kindle Select for the Win!
Yes, Kindle Select (also used interchangeably with Kindle Unlimited, KU, KDP, or more simply Prime) is great. Honestly, you can make money advertising your books if they aren’t in KU, but there is more potential to be made from each ad if you are advertising a book that is. While KU does limit you to only selling your digital books on Amazon, I have found the difference it made to be worthwhile. It provides a very small return based on how many pages of your books are read – like tenths of a cent per page, but it adds up. KU pages read won’t repay you in the lost retail sales from free KU purchases of the book, but it should be considered when deciding whether an ad is successful, especially if it’s the first book in a series.
3. Manual Targeting
Manual targeting is where you need to make a home if you are going to settle in and learn AMS ads. Books have such small profit margins that the name of the game is finding the right keywords to reach your target audience at the lowest CPC. It’s a numbers game with keywords. That means you need to find and test them.
Automated campaigns have their place. Like I mentioned before, if it is more about long-term gain and building your audience or if the book is in a series, then they serve that purpose well. However, sometimes you can luck upon one that makes more than it spends. I have only ever encountered one of those, and eventually it died – just stopped making sales. They are kind of a phenomenon, but they do occur. You can spend a lot of money trying to find one though. I wouldn’t advise it. I periodically make an automated ad just to see though.
4. Be Patient
I agree. However, it’s worse than 24 hours of reporting inconsistencies. The KDP dashboard is reliably unreliable for the most recent 48 hours, so don’t be disheartened initially. Everyone experienced with AMS ads has dealt with this to one extent or another. Clicks and sales often appear and disappear in that time. On rare occasions, changes can occur up to a week later. That’s the longest change I’ve seen at least. As a result, you can’t rely on any numbers the KDP dashboard gives you until 48 hours later, and even then only with about a 90-95% certainty for that initial week. There are programs that can help with monitoring, like Prestozon, but at a substantial cost and they don’t fully automate the process.
In a broader sense though, you are exactly right about the initial time spent using AMS ads being an investment in knowledge. You have to learn the process… and it is a process, a long one. However, it’s worth it. Unfortunately, it won’t likely be just one week. It will probably take months before your ads are making a profit, and that’s okay. Just be aware of it going in. I view it as gambling, simply because when I gamble I automatically assume any money spent is lost – the cost of knowledge and a chance to play the game. No hope for recovery. That prevents me from spending more than I can afford. Then if I make a profit, it’s a successful ad with an added bonus. That approach may not work for others though. But with the knowledge gained from ad testing, you can refine your ads, find more keywords, and improve your sales over time.
5. Preconceptions are the First Casualty
I wouldn’t worry about updating the 7 keywords allowed on your book’s KDP page just yet. You need a lot more data.
You are right. There are many preconceptions that will be lost. Then new ones will overwrite those as you refine your process. As you mentioned, there are oddball times when a click can occur or a regrettable purchase is made for whatever reason, be it related or unrelated to the product. You need consistency. Give it one to two months. Let the ads run. You want to know not just which keywords are getting clicks, but ultimately which clicks are getting sales and which of those are reliably getting additional sales. This means it will cost more, yes, but you have to have reliable data to build new ads on. You have to start with a solid, reliable foundation. Then pick from the best keywords, most appropriate for your target audience and use those to help target your advertising. It is like farming, as you pointed out. You need to harvest the best keywords, so wait till they are ripe.
I agree wholeheartedly about applying what you learn from the ad testing to your book’s sales page. This works great for trying different opening lines in your book’s copy/description. Test different ad copies (using an opening line or hook as your ad’s text) and see which works better. Then apply the more successful one in the book’s copy/description.
6. If Amazon Won’t Spend Your Money, Change Your Ad
While slow to start, AMS will most certainly spend your money and it can spend it quickly, but it takes a bit more effort on your part. I have spent over $500 on ads in a given month. There are many authors and publishers who spend tens of thousands on AMS advertising monthly. Simply put, the major component fueling that rocket is your CPC maximum. You don’t have to spend what Amazon tells you, for better or worse. Raise that CPC to $1+ and you’ll see a lot more clicks. Now, multiply that by 100+ ads, all with similar high CPCs and lots of keywords. Amazon will spend your money much more quickly, but starting out you will likely spend far more than you make in sales or royalties, so I wouldn’t advise it.
7. Not All Clicks are Good
What you call “false clicks” I attribute to not reaching my ideal reader or not having a convincing enough book copy or cover. They tell me there is room for improvement.
8. All Hat, Lost Cattle
That happens. There will be some great keywords and ads that get tons of clicks but don’t convert to sales, or at least not enough. As part of that improvement I mentioned, I recommend trying negative exact keywords to prune high cost keywords that aren’t quite achieving profitability but are getting a lot of clicks. See if that’s enough of a snip to make the keyword profitable. Sometimes it is, but not often. As I mentioned before, this type of ad is also an indication that your book’s sales page could be improved.
9. The Long View
I agree all around. It is a marathon, not a sprint. The only problem I have is that targeted writing you mentioned when determining which book to start next. You’re right, but I can only write the stories that grip me and many times they won’t budge without a fight. If it’s a short story, that’s one thing. However, writing a book takes months if not years. That’s a lot of time spent working on an idea so it has to be something I’m passionate about. But if the best blend of both worlds comes my way, I’ll know because I’ve done the testing.
Hello there!
I am happy to announce my first “official” public speaking engagement here in Cleveland this winter. Although I’ve been participating in Cleveland ConCoction as a panelist for years, along with other conventions in Chicagoland and Columbus, this is the first time I will be leading a speaking engagement specifically for writers, all on my own.
A big thanks goes out to Laurie at the Cuyahoga Public Library’s South Euclid-Lyndhurst branch for setting it up.
If you want to learn how to write copy that sells, you need to attend.
Believe it or not, it’s an art in itself. It took me years to hone my skills and learn the craft, including training from USA Today bestselling authors like Bryan Cohen. With multiple bestselling novels of my own, I am now sharing what I’ve learned with you.
There is limited seating. Only 55 spots available as of now, so book yours today at the following site: http://attend.cuyahogalibrary.org/event/1096844.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Weston
I am happy to report that a new review was recently posted by book blogger Jolie at Read With Me, this time on Strange Circumstances.
You may recognize her name. She previously read and reviewed my other books (A Life of Death review and The Priors) and was excited to hear about the short story collection I co-wrote with Marshall J. Stephens and David Chrisley.
“This was a great book,” she starts, then goes on to explain her experience. To discover her thoughts and potentially your next great read, visit her blog at Read With Me!
Thanks for joining me on this wonderful writing adventure. I hope your next read is a horrifyingly entertaining one.
Weston Kincade ~ Author of the A Life of Death collection, The Priors, and Strange Circumstances
Amy at The Genre Minx Book Reviews just notified me of her review of A Life of Death. It’s always nice to see how my books are received by readers. Give it a look.
Weston Kincade ~ Author of the A Life of Death collection, The Priors, and Strange Circumstances
Well, May is almost over. Happy Memorial Day! So much is happening. The school year just ended, so now I get to spend more time writing. Woohoo! That’s always wonderful. I hope you look forward to the summer as much as I do.
A couple days ago I had the pleasure of hearing from Roxie Prince, multi-genre indie author and extreme survivor. She was born HIV+ and has had to deal with it all her life. And no, I’m not outting her here. She talks about it on her site in addition to reading and reviewing books. You can see what she had to say about book 1 in the A Life of Death trilogy on her book review site, Survival Stories.
Look around and see what she’s about. I’m certain there will be plenty to pique your interest, so send her some love and support!
Weston Kincade ~ Author of the A Life of Death collection, The Priors, and Strange Circumstances
Hey there, wonderful people!
And yes, I just called you wonderful.This writing adventure wouldn’t be nearly as fun without you… and the zombies of course.
Yes, I said it… the zombies.
I have never written a zombie novel myself… at least not yet. However, as a member of the Horror Writers Association, it makes sense that I’m a big fan of The Walking Dead, Steve Kuhn’s Dext of the Dead series, and the more traditional classics.
There’s something new coming out though… something tempting, vivid, and scary I thought I would share. Today, May 21st, a great fellow author, hat lover and friend by the name of M.A. Robbins just released book one in his Zombie Uprising trilogy. (Yes, hat lover. He has great tastes. Just sayin’!)
Yeah… that’s what I’m talking about. Awesome! No year-long wait for the next book in the series.And Mike gave me a great opportunity to pass along to my fans… a free look at an exciting excerpt so you can see if it’s for you. Like test driving a car before anyone else, you get an early peek.
Just follow this link to The Awakening and see for yourself. Best of all, you don’t have to wait if you want to read more.
It was released today.