Have you heard of other self-published authors making money on Amazon?
If you want to see how to use ads on Amazon to sell your books, fiction or non-fiction, start this free course on Amazon ads:
Unsure? Then you need to hear my story.
(Warning: I’m not making millions on Kindle. I’m a normal author like you. But I have learned how to use ads on Amazon to sell books.)
I remember hearing authors on podcasts say things like: “I was only selling, like, five books a day…”
I thought: “Five books a day?! I wish.”
Sure, selling five books a day won’t make anybody rich. But, honestly, for the longest time, my goal was to sell one book per day.
I wish I had pictures of my Amazon sales dashboard from back then. It would take a few seconds to load, and then it would be flat.
Zero sales.
Here’s my author ranking from back then. You can’t see it on the graph, but it dips down to almost 400,000.
Ouch. It’s obvious there were very few sales.
And that hurt because, like you, I put a lot of work into the book. I didn’t expect it to be a best-seller. But with kajillions of people coming to Amazon (plus a good cover and a good description), I thought I would get some traction.
I was wrong.
I kept writing, planning to add more books to the series.
But I knew in the back of my head that nine books in a series with awesome covers and killer descriptions wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t sell book 1!
Then, I looked into Amazon ads.
They have major advantages over Facebook ads (or any other ad platform):
· They are simple to make. (No complex images + three boxes of honed copy)
· You only pay if somebody clicks to check out your sales page.
· People are searching on Amazon because they are ready to spend money (not so on Facebook!)
I started small. Tiny.
After experimentation, I was selling a book now and then—profitably. I wasn’t doing anything else to promote the books, so I knew my ads on Amazon were doing the trick.
It seemed to be working, but could I 10x it? Instead of one sale per week, could I reach my “lofty” goal of one sale per day?
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: I only could have done it with a tool that has paid for itself over and over again.
You see, over the years, sponsored keyword ads are the most effective ads to sell books on Amazon.
Overall, these are the ads most likely to work for you, whether you sell fiction or non-fiction.
All you have to do is add a list of keywords and include a few short sentences. Your ad will be up and running, driving sales of your book.
Generally, well-known books and authors in your genre work best. If you still see a “People also bought” row at the bottom of your book’s sales page, use those books and authors. Use Yasiv.com to find related books and authors. Hunt through Goodreads to find similar books and authors in your genre.
But here’s the big trick: the more keywords, the better.
And Amazon allows up to 1,000 keywords on each ad.
After hours of copying and pasting from a variety of sources to create lists of keywords, you will realize that you have an endless mountain of work ahead of you.
Because here’s another secret about advertising your book on Amazon: Amazon ads aren’t evergreen.
They don’t “work” forever, even if they are running. Typically, an ad will run for a few days, and then impressions will drop drastically. Most authors find they have to check their Amazon ads at least one or two times per week to pause stale ads and post new ones.
That’s not too time-consuming because making new ads is fast—as long as you have keywords handy.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that spending hours every week piling up keywords is not a good use of an author’s time.
Thankfully for us authors, there is a product that solves the problem for us.
Welcome to: PublisherRocket.
When I started using PublisherRocket (then KDPRocket), my author sales ranking changed radically.
Looking at this graph, can you tell when I started using PublisherRocket?
Yup, right when my author ranking moved to the top 100,000. And stayed there pretty much ever since.
Now, I laugh at the time I wished I could sell at least one book a day. With PublisherRocket, I blasted past that goal.
You see, I’m not in a hot genre, and I’m not making millions. Some authors would consider it a disaster to only be in the top 100,000 of author rankings.
But for me, it meant I could consistently make some money with my books, even if they weren’t making me millions.
At least I was in the game, and I was slowly gaining sales and reviews (which made future sales easier).
That is why I recommend PublisherRocket. It probably won’t make you millions as an author, but it will save you hours each and every week while producing a more consistent stream of sales.
Maybe it will be what it takes for you to hit it big.
Or maybe it will make enough to pay for something special this month.
Either way, get back to writing and stop wasting time compiling lists of keywords.
You can do that using PublisherRocket.
Or, take the free course on how to use Amazon ads to check it out beforehand.
Full disclosure: I am financially compensated if you use this link and purchase PublisherRocket. And I’m proud to tell you that because it is a product I have used every week since its release, and it has produced a lot of book royalties since then.