The art of being patient… with Amazon Ads.

Another week has flown by and here I am drinking green tea (part of my new intermittent fasting regime), staring at the screen, still trying to fathom Amazon Ads.

I told myself to be patient and not expect fast results but then I did get a fast result, however, I am always suspicious when things happen too quickly. Experience has shown me that if you get a quick sale, it’s likely to be the only sale for quite a while. It’s some kind of weird law of the universe.

I am still very much in the experimental phase of Amazon Ads. Every day I read my book by Deb Potter – Amazon Ads for Authors 2021 and I watch YouTube tutorials. I have a creative brain rather than an analytical one so I am training myself to understand logistics, statistics etc… From what I can gather the experimental side of it never truly changes. Even the most experienced Amazon advertisers are constantly monitoring and devising strategies.

When I got a sale via one of my ads I felt very smug. It only cost 10p out of my £2 daily budget. Instant success! I have to assume my keywords for that book are good. Having said that, it sold a few days ago and no sales since. So it could just be a fluke. This is the most likely scenario in my sometimes pessimistic mind. So I’ve raised the daily budget to see if that makes a difference. So far, no, but I am trying to be patient. We are only talking a few days.

It seems you have to have your eye on the ball all the time, working out what does and what doesn’t work. It feels fairly daunting at this point but I am determined to succeed. I have worked hard and created around a hundred books already, so I have plenty to experiment with. It’s one thing to create, but another to sell. I concentrate on quality over quantity and I’m devoting equal time to creating and marketing at the moment.

The important thing is to keep an eye on profit. This is tricky when you are experimenting and speculating to accumulate. I made a profit with my sale which is great but I will have lost money by not getting the formula right with other books. So it has to be balanced off.

The good thing is, while I am intensely focused on the mysteries of Amazon Ads, I don’t think about food. The intermittent fasting is working extremely well, far better than I imagined it would. I know this is off topic but in a way it isn’t. As I feel lighter and sharper, the more able I feel to work effectively and absorb information. Intermittent fasting isn’t for everyone but it seems to be working for me, which is great.

One of the YouTubers suggested you need to wait a week to see how your ads do. I’m not finding this easy so I prefer Dale’s suggestion of checking every day. What I don’t want to do, is become too obsessed but it is fascinating to check in to see how many impressions each book gets and try to work out what I am doing right, or wrong. What I don’t want to do is lose too much money in the experimental phase so I think checking every day (not every hour) is a good thing to do.

If you’d like to see some of the books I have created, you can check them out here or at Amazon via MyriadLifeBooks and MyriadLifePhotoArt. Any money raised helps me keep this site going, so please support this indie author by buying one of my lovely notebooks or cards if you can.

If you’d like to share your experiences of Amazon Ads I’d love to hear them.

I will give an update of my progress (at least I hope it will be progress…) next week.

Please hit the subscribe button if you’d like to be updated with my blog posts. Sometimes I even give notebooks away to my subscribers… worth keeping an eye out for!

I write as PetraKidd.com so please check out my short stories there:

The Isolation Sex Stories

The Eight of Swords

The Putsi

Author: Petra Kidd

Norfolk UK is my home, I live in Norwich by the River Wensum where everyday there is something different to see and learn. I feel a big affinity with the river as I grew up in Cambridge, another great river city. My childhood and teens involved many walks along the Cam where we would watch 'The Bumps,' raft races and as we grew older we enjoyed adventures on our punting pub crawls. Growing up in a multi cultural university city definitely influenced my reading choices, I am a big fan of Japanese fiction, love French literature and enjoy Shakespeare. As a young teen I entertained myself with Jilly Cooper and Dick Francis and then became quite obsessed with Henri Charriere's Papillon. At school all I cared about was English, Art and French, in that exact order. When I finished with school I went to live and work in Greece for a wonderful year before returning to study English Literature and Sociology. At this point I read more classics like the Wyf of Bath, Wuthering Heights and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man plus poets such as Wilfred Owen. My first UK full time job was with Heffer's Paperbacks where I devoured several books at a time, excited by the fact I could borrow what I liked. Bizarrely for me I remember reading The Zurich Axioms, I have no interest in the stock markets but it had me gripped. I can't remember why I picked it up but I have never forgotten it. Heffers introduced me to so many authors, via their books and sometimes in person. It was here I learned about all the genres, it fascinated me that science fiction and horror were so popular, I tried reading it all. Aside from writing letters, it didn't really ever occur to me to write anything myself for many years as I worked my way through a variety of interesting and varied jobs. Then on a visit to the London Aquarium I became struck by an idea so powerful I sat down and wrote my first novel. It went nowhere as really I wrote it because I wanted to. I wrote another novel and again, didn't have the persistance or determination to take it further, I simply enjoyed the process of writing and my characters. Then years later another idea struck me and during a severe bout of Pleurisy where I couldn't do anything physical for months, I wrote the Eight of Swords and The Putsi. This time I published them as ebooks and they became pretty popular. When I fully recovered, I had to concentrate on my business and looking after my mother who has various health issues and the writing went adrift again for many years until 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic hit the world. March 2020 I moved to my apartment alongside the Wensum to live alone for the first time ever. During the first lockdown I began to write a diary and then the idea for a new set of short stories came to me and in February 2021 they will be published. The Covid-19 Pandemic is not simply a scary virus, it is a historical time and here we are trying to live through it. To many it will feel like a punishment but to me as a writer, in some ways, it came as a gift. Please stay as safe and as well as you can. I hope to entertain you with my stories as we all try to get through this together, even though we are apart. Petra

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: