Amazon Advice

[Ned Marcus]

Yes, some of the suggested bids are crazy. It's in Amazon's interest for a price spiral to start—and it probably already has. With keywords, I'm mostly guessing at which authors and titles my readers would also like. I don't have enough data to know for sure. Most of my also boughts are from indie authors with small sales. I'm not in KU and avoid using KU authors for comparison.

I've only been doing this for a short time and am learning every day. I know that automated keywords didn't work at all for me. I've tried targeting genre; it's better than automated keywords but still bad. So now my focus is on trying to choose the right keywords.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

One popular piece of advice is the also boughts... and yes, they often suck. I found more applicable stuff in the audiobook's also boughts. An automatic campaign may or may not reveal some connected books, but it might be useful as an exploration. There is a website that somehow taps the Amazon data and gives you a visual representation of books linked to yours... What you might be able to do is to take a guessed target and peel off some of their linked books or use their also boughts, or whatever Amazon is calling that these days. Of course, i can't recall that website's name.

Amazon ads are just a pain in the ass.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

How screwy can things get? I went back and checked an old ad campaign, and what two keywords were most profitable?

eve book
snow

Pure genius to figure that out. So, now I need to plug in "things people might type when they forgot the name of my book and are searching for it" heh heh.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I don't think it's in Amazon's best interest to have the CPC as high as possible or that they are actively manipulating the value to be as high as possible. I think it's mainly down to the demand for ads. If you're running ads then you're competing with people with series 10+ books long. Many of them can reach 50%+ read through. Read through of 50%, 75%, 95% for the first 4 books in a series are not uncommon, they might even be low in some cases. Which means that the lifetime value of each reader will be high. And so you can bid higher to get those sales and still make a profit. It's one of the reasons people write long series.

An ad targeting eBooks can also show on paperback, and ad targeting Paperback will not show on eBook

Amazon prefers ebook sales over paperback sales. It's why they offer the ads this way round. With the ebook ad on the paperback there's a chance the reader will buy the ebook and then slowly get sucked into the Amazon eco-system. By not showing the paperback ad on anything other than other paperbacks you don't do the reverse.

I think the way to work around this is to directly target ASIN's. They're edition specific, so if you target an ebook ASIN with your paperback you can still get it to show I think. From what I've heard it's not the most profitable option, since people tend to stick to their preferred format.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

ASIN targeting isn't something I've done a lot with, but I should be using more. But this time around, I'm going to stick the ASIN targeting as its own campaign so I can really watch it.

 

[Ned Marcus]

There is a website that somehow taps the Amazon data and gives you a visual representation of books linked to yours... What you might be able to do is to take a guessed target and peel off some of their linked books or use their also boughts, or whatever Amazon is calling that these days. Of course, i can't recall that website's name.

I know the website you mean, but I can't remember the name either.

Amazon ads are just a pain in the ass.

YES.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I'm at profit on an Amazon Ad! Without considering read through, which is the promising part. This is a variant of my earlier attempts, with a CTR of .46% and sales at 2 per 11 clicks...

The trouble? Getting this sucker to run enough to see if it's a fluke! Only 22 clicks in 5 days. But considering my sales from FB ads have absolutely tanked ever since the FB freakout the other day, I'll take it.

But, it's always something with Amazon Ads.

 

[Ned Marcus]

Have you noticed any increase in sales or downloads for other books? I'm not getting many clicks or any sales on the ebook I'm advertising, but I've had quite a few downloads of my free book (more than normal), and I've just sold a paperback of the book I'm advertising.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I did have a bump in paperbacks, selling 1 every two days for a bit, but that's been quiet the last few days. Sold one PB since the FB fiasco, and a hardback moved the other day. I just have the one series, nothing else to buy. Audiobooks are stready, but my one audiobook ad that seemed to be doing well never recovered from the FB fiasco, it had 1 click yesterday before I turned it off. Gonna have to rethink that one and relaunch it or something.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Averaged a paperback every 3 days for 30 days... was at two before I dropped one of the Amazon Ads, then it bumped back up after turning it back on. No idea if there is a connection.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

So, just got other numbers... 11 paperbacks and 4 hardcover Eve of Snows in February. Hardcover, historically, has been unpredictable as heck, I've had months where they outsell PB and months where I sell none. But, for February which trends a not-so-good month, it hints at a trend with more advertising directed at trad authors with cash readers paying off in PB/HC sales. This is something to keep an eye on going forward. We'll see what march looks like.

 

[skip.knox]

Just dropping in long enough to say thank you for this narrative.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I'm kind of "letting it ride" at the moment trying to collect data, then (maybe) I will have more to say. It's a rough time of year for sales, it seems. Purely observational, but the other day EoS sold 3 copies on Amazon and spiked to just over 50k in the overall sales rankings, while in January it had days of 7 sales that reached the same ballpark area. I was a tad surprised by the level of that spike.

Just dropping in long enough to say thank you for this narrative.

 

[ThinkerX]

So...if I'm following this right, you are selling 20 books a month, digital and paper, give or take?

 

[Demesnedenoir]

20 EoS in Audio. Most audio I've sold in a month was... a couple hundred. February sold 11 PB and 4 HC. Digital, somewhere over 100, I haven't combined streams. That's all Eve of Snows.

Also to note, 3-4 per day (ebook) is my baseline goal for the ad budget being spent, as with read through that should turn to profit. I tend to consider, audio, PB, and HC as "gravy", although that will change if I go to advertising at audio on a regular basis. I might also experiment with direct targeting PB on Amazon as well, seeing that the current targeting appears to be bumping print sales.

Historically, I tended to move 100-300 ebooks per month depending on ads, budget, etc. With freaky things like, over 3k with Bookbub Featured Deals or whatever else might be going on. Right now, I'm experimenting more with advertising than I am purely trying to drive sales because I would be doing several different things for that purpose.

So...if I'm following this right, you are selling 20 books a month, digital and paper, give or take?

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Lots of weirdness going on and I can't track the hows and whys, heh heh.

Ebook sales are surging and falling, leading to the phenom of paperback EoS being higher ranked overall on Amazon than the ebook. This won't last, I suspect, but paperback has just climbed and climbed and climbed (although not all sales have appeared yet as they haven't shipped). So, for the past few days now, more people have been willing to shell out $20 than $3 for Eve of Snows. Audio EoS has also pretty much matched ebook sales as well. How and why, I can't say. What I have noticed has been a whole lot of clicks on Amazon Ads but very few digital sales, which makes me wonder if they aren't coming from there. I don't know if I ever had days of 20+ clicks on Amazon Ads outside of the KU days and higher ad spends, so it makes sense those are driving the audio and print sales, but I've no way to prove that.

Irritating not knowing what to give credit and blame to, LOL.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Interesting. It's rare to hear about having more paperback than ebook sales.

Who are you targeting with your ads? Perhaps traditional authors have readers who prefer physical books instead of ebooks. And they could be more accepting of the higher prices. It sometimes feels like indie authors are participating in a race to the bottom price-wise...

But that's all just speculation of course.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I'm targeting all trad authors, but on the FB side there is a possible, but strange interconnection in that I can no longer target "A Song of Ice and Fire" to separate the book fans from GoT/HBO Fans and that is my largest audience. On this ad I haven't reduced the target to "ebook readers" because I wanted to dick with the algorithm as little as possible. I can certainly see that as big "whack" to my baseline sales which should be higher. What I'm seeing a combined rise in PB sales and a reduction in ebook. Now, this is a short-line trend, but I've never really seen it before.

Interesting. It's rare to hear about having more paperback than ebook sales.

Who are you targeting with your ads? Perhaps traditional authors have readers who prefer physical books instead of ebooks. And they could be more accepting of the higher prices. It sometimes feels like indie authors are participating in a race to the bottom price-wise...

But that's all just speculation of course.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

All these things are hard to judge with the opacity of Amazon et al, but considering when I noticed the paperback ranking spikes and typical order-to-shipment time, I'd say PB copies of EoS outsold ebook by at least 6-5 on the likely days of sale. I still think a 7th shipped is likely to appear. PB sales rank then dived hard for 2 days, but now, it has spiked again. In between that time, the audio sales ranking spiked, my experienced guess is 2-3 audio sales from that spike. It's almost like Amazon is tapping PB and Audio readers back and forth, a behavior I've suspected with ebook-audio before, but have not seen with print.

I know I know, I'll never know, but I do enjoy the attempt at reading tea leaves, heh heh.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Shipped the trilogy in PB this morning (the exact timing of the ships suggests one person buying them) which is probably the 7th EoS I was expecting, and I'd guess 1-2 more coming from yesterday's ranking spike. Normally it takes 2 days between orders and ships. If I could identify the source of sales, and it was repeatable, I'd do more! LMAO. Amazon affiliate links suggest some of the PB sales are through Facebook ads... Good grief. So the FB targeting ads are pushing more print readers than the old one? Here I was thinking of shutting down FB to see what happens, heh heh.

And took a glance at another metric, with PB sales having been up in general, the last 30 days print sales make up ~23% of Amazon royalties. That doesn't even take into account audio, which on a quick calculatory guess, would make non-ebook sales about 27-30% of royalties. I've experienced massive shocks in Audio sales before, outearning all other sales due to promos, but I've not seen this sort of thing with print sales before.