Book Marketing

Advertising books

I chose to examine how my books advertising campaigns are running. I advertise 3 of my 6 books through Amazon. My motivation is to minimise administration and spend for the most impact in terms of sales and any potential unexpected impacts.

Last year I spent a month studying how to advertise books and then began implementing that knowledge. I spent far below the recommended amount of time managing the process. But despite that, I am selling about 50-100 books a month with a negative ROI, maybe £100/month. Not great from a purely financial perspective but given that is not my only target, I could live with it.

But it was time to look again. The Amazon dashboard is complicated but can provide some good summarising information (seel below). However, once you understand the key metrics it becomes easier. In essence, I focused on 3 elements:

1. Impressions.
2. Clicks
3. Sales
4. ASOS

For anything with more than 2000 impressions, is it getting clicks and sales. If yes, what's the ACOS. ACOS is advertising cost of sales and anything below 100% is a positive ROI. Anything that has no clicks or a bad ACOS, I archive. Anything doing well, I increase the daily budget. I should be running this process much more often as well as creating new campaingns.

Ingram Spark - my printer for a better description - will now allow direct sales. Conventionally, an order from Amazon or Apple triggers a print run from Ingram Spark. But now you can have links on your website and offer books at a discount from the traditional retailers while still making a good margin.

The process of creating those links was pretty easy - you create a US and UK one - and then its a question of getting them up on your website. They also provide QR codes and a neat little advertising box with your book and a link. As you can see below I created a table to help me organise my books along with the links.