If you’re an indie author, then you’re likely selling your books on Amazon. There are a lot of indie authors that sell exclusively on Amazon (as opposed to publishing wide) to take advantage of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program.
For many authors, running ads to help spread the word about their books is a no-brainer because you don’t have to spend a lot to start getting impressions, you only pay for clicks, and you can determine how much you want to spend for a click.
I have been running Amazon ads for my books for a little more than five years. Here are how my books’ Amazon Ads campaigns performed in the month of November 2024.
Spoiler alert — these results are not that impressive.
Amazon Book Ads for Indie Authors
Amazon book ads are part of Amazon’s advertising platform and can be a powerful tool for independent authors to help increase the visibility of their books in a super-competitive marketplace. Depending on your budget, ads can appear prominently in search results and on product pages, targeting potential readers who are already browsing for similar books.
By using specific keywords, categories, and audience targeting, authors can connect with readers actively interested in their genre. Amazon book ads are used by many indie authors to help boost discoverability for their books, drive traffic to an author’s Amazon book page, and ultimately (ideally) increase sales.
For indie authors with limited marketing budgets, these ads offer a scalable and cost-effective way to compete with traditionally published books and build their readership.
My Book Ads Budget
My books are seasonal — Naughty Week takes place during Christmastime and Lucky Day takes place at St. Patrick’s Day — so I generally pay closer attention to my Amazon Ads dashboard leading up to these two holidays.
For most of the year, I keep the ads on with a max spend of $5 a day and a max bid of 35 cents per click, just to keep ads going in the off-season. I don’t end up spending a lot during the year but I can see that Amazon is still serving my ads because there are always impressions showing, just not a lot of clicks because I keep that max bid so low.
Since Naughty Week is a holiday chapter book geared towards younger readers, I would normally start increasing my max bid and daily budget in mid-November. This year I decided I wouldn’t do that because what tends to happen is that I pour a couple hundred dollars into ads for the six or seven weeks leading up to Christmas, and I make sales, but I only earn enough in royalties to maybe break even. It has been super frustrating, so I decided I was not going to do that this year. This year I launched an organic awareness campaign through my social channels. I am spreading the word through organic channels like my author blog, social media, and video content.
So let’s see how that’s working out for me…
Amazon Ads November Results
Naughty Week is available on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, audiobook, and ebook, but I run a manual campaign for the paperback only, and I target about 700 keywords. That may seem like a lot, but in some cases, I use the same keyword for broad match, phrase match, and exact match, so I might actually have about two to three hundred unique keywords that I’m targeting. These are pretty curated but I also have some keywords in here that are a little bit like throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks.
I started this awareness campaign on November 12. I promised myself I wouldn’t mess with Amazon Ads for all of November, but I ended up making some bid adjustments to the most relevant keywords like ‘middle grade christmas books’ and ‘christmas chapter books’ and similar keywords.
So in November, I spent a grand total of $4.57. My ads received 22,079 impressions and got just 15 clicks at an average cost per click of about 30 cents. There were no orders from ads, but I did sell two ebooks and one paperback copy. One of the ebooks was me sending someone a copy, so I sold two books in November without being too aggressive with Amazon Ads.
Looking Back on November
I’d like to sell more books of course, but the goal in November was just to build awareness from organic channels, which I think I did a good job of.
I started to get a little more aggressive in my Amazon Ads campaigns in December, and I generated some sales. I’ll be doing another update to explain general observations, the adjustments I made, why I launched a new campaign, and the results, so be sure to check back next month for that post.
If you have any questions about Amazon Ads, please reach out here or on TikTok! I have a good deal of experience running them, and I’d love to chat with other authors about their experiences.
