advertising your own book on amazon – Read First Chapter.com

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Should You Advertise Your New Book on Amazon

What I Learned in my First Week of Publication:

sherlock-holmes-graphicOnce I finished my first Novel, Groomed for Marriage, I launched it on BookFunell to give it away in order to build a reader list.  My expectations were low; I would have been happy to have given away 50 copies.  Well, to my astonishment, I wound up giving away over 600 copies of the book.  These are people who chose to sign up to down the full book for free.

So when I published Groomed for Marriage for $2.99, I thought it was so cheap that maybe I would have at least a few sales.  Crickets!

So my first lesson was:  BookFunnel is great for giveaways and building a list of readers, but FREE it's own animal.

Switching to Plan B:

So then my plan was to let the two weeks of my paid book promotion on BookFunnel run its course, which would have given me the cleanest feedback.  I would have known how many copies I was able to sell from BookFunnel at $2.99 with no PPC marketing at Amazon.  But even if I waited, let's say I sold 5, that wouldn't have been enough for me to stick with BookFunnel for a paid book as I already learned about Free being it's own animal.

So I decided that as a new author, I wanted to explore Pay Per Click advertisements to see what was entailed.  I did the research and the purpose of these next few posts will be to share my findings and save you the research time.

Pay Per Click as an Investment:

I watched lots of videos on YouTube regarding Amazon ads.  Many people have been doing it for a long time and had great tips.  Although all of these experts stressed the importance of profit vs. return on investment, which of course is crucial in any business, I am choosing to see my first two months of advertising as an investment.



An Overview of your PPC Goals:

The best video I saw, geared for beginners, was the one below by Nomad Millionaire.  It is from 2018, but Nomad explains PPC from a bird's eye view  and this is important for beginnings to understand the strategy right from the beginning.

So you will need a credit card, your book information, a computer, and you will need to be logged into your kdp.amazon.com account.  You will be ready to launch your first broad campaign.

Crash Course in NomadMillionaire's video:

Pay Per Click is an advertising program offered by Amazon that allows users to bid for ad placements.  Amazon searches are all based on keywords and other secret algorithms.  By choosing to start with a broad campaign, you get to ferret out all of the keywords that Amazon already knows about your product.

Once you have 7 days of running this broad campaign, you can begin to look at the broad campaign and figure out what keywords and initiating click throughs and which ones are leading to actual purchases.  Those keywords you then will add to a manual campaign. 

Nomad goes a little bit into his 'pricing strategies' that you may want to listen to, but it will all come down to how much you are willing to spend.

Next post we'll pick up with actually starting my first broad campaign and see where it takes up in the 7 day watch period.