Amazon Ads – MyriadLifeBooks

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.

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

The Isolation Sex Stories

The Eight of Swords

The Putsi

My obsession lately (aside from writing a new book) has been with Amazon Ads. For a long time, I have avoided them as my budget is tight and they looked complicated. Plus, I struggle with gambling my hard-earned cash on something that may never work.

There is the saying ‘face the fear and do it anyway,’ so I decided to cast aside my fear and do some research so that I can make some calculated risks when it comes to spending money on advertising. I have been watching endless YouTube videos, Googling and scanning to see how other authors get on with Amazon Ads and the results are mixed and varied, as you would expect.

My conclusion so far is that as with any gambling, you need to decide on a budget and stick with it. It is too easy to throw money away, not get anywhere and then become despondent.

Years ago, I worked with a market trader who liked to gamble. He only ever gambled low amounts and he had a ‘system.’ From what I could gather, because he kept his cards close to his chest, he normally broke even. I will never know if that was actually the truth, but I suspect it was. For him it was a hobby.

For some, writing is a hobby and breaking even is good if you enjoy what you do and can live from other means. For others, we need to treat writing as a business and that is where we need to adjust our thinking when it comes to marketing. A book is a product and any product needs advertising. Nothing happens by magic alone.

As writers, we all have social media which is free advertising. Or at least we think it is. In fact, it isn’t, if you factor in the time you spend on it and how much your time is worth per hour, you can see that it isn’t so free after all!

I believe E.L James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey worked hard on her Facebook profile and that was a part of her achieving success. I think it’s good advice not to spread yourself too thin and try to do everything. Which is amusing coming from me because I have accounts with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. My favourite is Twitter for writing, Instagram for photography and I’m a bit of a random Facebooker but I continue to try to work on it. Promote on the platform you enjoy the most as you are more likely to stick with it.

Anyway, I digress. This post is meant to be about Amazon Ads. After watching umpteen YouTube videos and Googling away, I found two good avenues of advice this week. One is a book by Deb Potter – Amazon Ads for Authors 2021. I have not read it all yet but so far so good. Easy to read, cuts to the chase, offers clear and concise advice. Great for beginners.

The other is a chap called Dale and his YouTube channel is Self-publishing with Dale. Again, he cuts to the chase, doesn’t encourage you to throw away your life savings on Amazon Ads and although I can’t prove his system works, it makes sense to me. So, I am cautiously trying it and will report back on results, which could take as long as a year according to what he says. As much as we all want sales quickly, we should remember the story of the hare and the tortoise…

The information I give here is impartial, I am not using affiliate links for this, simply imparting what I learn as I go along. The best advice I can give is do your own research and see what fits for you and your budget.

I have seen Mark Dawson’s Self-publishing formula heavily advertised; you may want to look into that. From what I can see you will need a higher budget to take his courses, but the reviews are good. If you are on a lower budget, Amazon offer their own free course to teach you how to use their advertising platform. You can find it on their website.

Do what you can for free!

We all work hard on our books, but we have to work just as hard on marketing if we want to reach as many readers as possible. If you have any tips, please feel free to share them in the comments section.

If you like what you read here and it helps, you can always buy one of my notebooks– all writers need notebooks right? Every penny helps me keep this website going and they are lovely notebooks, if I say so myself… and postage is free to UK customers.

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