In spite of all the complaints you hear out there, Amazon’s KDP select may still be worth it. And as the title suggests, that’s for one reason – advertising.
I’ve played with ads for my books on Goodreads and Facebook, but the success has been unimpressive. Amazon, however, makes sense. Only KDP books can be part of it, so you know right there who your competition is.
So how does it work?
Amazon has set up our ads to be fairly simple. Just go to your KDP page and, in the upper-left corner, select “Ad Campaigns.” Then it’s as simple as selecting your book, hitting “By Interest” (I find this works better than by product), and choosing how much you want to spend on clicks. You can certainly spend more, but I find somewhere in the $0.20 to $0.30 range does well.
What makes it great is that Amazon recently updated their advertising so that your adds show up on the screensavers on people’s Nooks. That’s where my ads are showing up, and after that change is when I saw the biggest number of sales.
The best so far has been on my book, Creative Writing Career – I targeted people with an interest in movies, and have seen the book ranging around the top 7 to 25 in the last two weeks (Bestsellers in the Screenwriting category).
But does it work for all books?
Not for me. I’ve found that fiction books are much harder to target than non-fiction. That said, I had a cool experience where someone I knew from my MA program at Johns Hopkins saw one of my books advertised on her Kindle, took a picture of it, and shared it on Facebook and Twitter.
So it can certainly get the word out there, but I’ve found the actual direct sales on fiction books to be much less than non-fiction.
Of course, I share this with the understanding that your books may compete with mine. To make it fair, if you make some sales off of Amazon’s ads, be sure to help spread the word about my books!
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