Do they really work?

Well for me they do.  If you are thinking of following the steps below to set up an ad I would suggest you do something first.  Go to Amazon, put in books and then write your category in the search bar.  This will bring up 400 pages of books in your category.  Search for your book, if you find it then congrats you’re already doing something right.  Didn’t find it?  Good, now when you run the advert you will see how fab it is!  Before I ran my advert for my book Grace in Mombasa I went through the 400 pages and didn’t find it.  After I put my advert on the book has always appeared within the first 5 pages as a sponsored ad.

Don’t be put off by technical jargon.  Just follow the steps below and if you have any difficulty please don’t hesitate to ask me a question below.  Good luck!

Before you run the ad you need to do something very important.  Go to Amazon.com select kindle books, then type your genre in.  Look at the first five pages that come up.  Make a note of the books that have lots of reviews and I mean way over 100 reviews, the more the better.  Write down the author names and the book titles.  Keep the list next to you when you start your ad.

1. Go to your kdp Amazon Direct Publishing book page
2. Click on promote & advertise to the right of your book
3. This brings up a new page, click on ‘create an ad campaign’ (you’ll probably be asked to sign in again)
4. Choose your campaign type is your next option. Select Sponsored Products
5. Give the campaign a name.  It can’t include any signs such as an exclamation mark, do not include numbers.  The name should be all letters, no spelling mistakes. Don’t leave two spaces after a word.  Make it as tight and clean as possible.  Such a fuss just for your campaign name but trust me my campaigns got rejected over and over just because I couldn’t get the name right.  I now keep mine simple so something like… book title and campaign one. eg Grace in Mombasa campaign one.
6. Dates: leave this as it is, it will start as soon as it is authorized and you don’t want to put a close date in, if it is successful you want to run it for ever, and if it isn’t after a month or so you can go in and cancel it.
7. Put in a daily budget.  Don’t be frightened to put in here more than you would like to spend, for two reasons, 1) I’ve never yet spent my daily allowance and 2) you will hopefully be making this money back!  It really is up to you how you wish to proceed, if you are a bit hesitant then just put in $15 per day.  I have set all my campaigns (yes all because I am adding a campaign once a week now) at $25 per day, I have never, ever spent this amount of money.
8. Underneath Daily Budget is Targeting.  Select Manual targeting.
9. Next is Ad Format.  Select Custom text ad.
10. Products, if you only have one book this will appear here, if you have more than one book make sure the book displayed on the right hand side is the book you want to advertise.
11. Next is Targeting.  Select keyword targeting.
12. The next box is keywords and bids.  It will automatically default to $0.75 – change this to $0.45. Then tick the little tiny box under it that says bid+ (this means for you to win the bid Amazon might have to increase your bid slightly, I suggest you tick this.)
13. You can now see ‘Suggested’ ‘Enter Keywords’ & ‘Upload file’ depending on confident you are you could upload a file.  I always choose ‘Enter Keywords’.
14. Click in the box that is now saying, enter keywords separate by a new line.  Now type your list you wrote down earlier of authors and book titles that are in your genre.  Put one name or book title in, press enter and start the next one on a new line.
15. The next section is ‘Creative’ here you must put in your catch line to attract people to come and have a look at your book.  Must be interesting and catchy.  Your ad is now displayed below and you can check the catch phrase really is eye-catching.  Remember we can go through all the logical steps of setting up an advert but if you don’t write something interesting here people are not going to want to look any further.
16. Press launch Campaign.

Hurray you did it!  Good for you, so pleased you have taken a step of faith and launched yourself into the world of advertising.

It takes a while for Amazon to authorize your ad, then it takes at least 24 hours after its been authorized before your book starts having ‘impressions’ on Amazon.  An impression is when your book is presented on a page in front of a prospective buyer.  Reading your results and changing your ads is a whole new lesson, so maybe if anyone wants that lesson please let me know and I will do a new post in a few weeks time.

Lastly, give it a day or so and then repeat the first instruction… go to Amazon.com, select kindle books, put in your genre… now where is your book?