Support for Indie Authors discussion

hi everyone,

I just published my first book this year on amazon.

I am enrolled in the KDP select program.

I also have a paper back book version and audio book version coming out real soon.

How can I promote my book without spending tons of money.

I prefer not to do free give aways if possible.

Any suggestions would be helpful

does advertising on amazon's website help.?

It's not just an uphill battle to get sales, its a vertical climb up a cliff. Some say that after your 5th book things start to take off. I have 4 out and have yet to see anything.

Done AMS; it's kind of meh. You have to bid really high to get lots of impressions but then your book better be selling for a lot or you're spending it all on advertising. Typical numbers are 1 click per 1000 impressions and 1 sale per 10 clicks.

Don't leave your day job.

does any one use book trailers

The best marketing is your next book. Keep writing.

I also have had success in publishing multiple formats: Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover and Audible. All have their own markets. Good luck!

I use AMS ads. The key (no pun intended) is choosing the right key words. "Key words" are not just "words" - they can be, but it is better to use the titles and authors of books (with decent sales) that are in the same genre as yours is. And you really need a minimum of 200 key words to get some sales. At the moment, I have almost 600 (AMS allows up to 1000).

AMS ads have gotten me the most regular sales I've ever gotten. I usually have at least a few every day. I've used the book marketing services such as Fussy Librarian and Book Bub ads (not the higher priced placements), and they've helped, but not a lot. I haven't gotten much of a response from Goodreads ads. Facebook ads are (IMHO) pretty useless although when I've mentioned my books in my history-specific Facebook groups (I write histfic), that has helped.

The answer is also going to vary depending a bit on your genre. You can also join discussion groups - e.g. murder mystery readers - and join in the discussions with a gentle hint about your book in your avatar but not go round going on about your book.
As a reader I second the "write more books" - I often find that when I come across a new author I fancy reading they have six or more books out by that point and I can gallop through the series. I occasionally hear about a newly published author's first book and start reading them at their first book, but not often. An example of discovering a first book is "We Are Legion - We Are Bob" - I saw it in the advertising banner on the Absolute Write forum and shouted with laughter at the glorious title, went off to look and bought it. My most obtuse discovery of an author is Lois McMaster Bujold - for whatever reason she wasn't regularly stocked in UK libraries or physical book shops that I used to frequent and she'd already won Hugo awards by the time I was given a copy of A Civil Campaign (which is almost at the end of the series) and then found all the earlier books. A Hugo award winning author in a genre I love - and I'd not heard of her.
My three main sources of new authors are people talking about them in discussion threads, things friends are reading (Goodreads and elsewhere) and the public library. I do look at the front page Goodreads adverts as I log in, but am rarely tempted to click on a link.
Having been to take a look at your book - I have to say I wasn't that keen on the part of the blurb where you are talking about all the spin-offs that will be happening but haven't yet. I want to know about the current book you are trying to sell me, not something that might or might not happen in the future. You might want to try floating the blurb on here for comment. If I get as far as a book page, I read the blurb, if that passes muster I start to read the sample.
But that is just one person's experience and opinions. :)
Can't post links in this group, but if you try doing a search with "How readers discovered a debut novel, a case study on Goodreads" you should come up with some Goodreads info from a few years back.
One other thought - if you do write a second book in a series before doing a lot of promotion, then when you do promotion, if it works, the effort is selling two books not one.

Bruno, could you please tell me what an “AMS ad” is. I am sorry, but I am very non-tech savvy. Thank you.

how much do you spend on ams . I assume you mean amazon ads

To Frances: "AMS ad" means ads on Amazon. My best guess is that the AMS means something like Amazon Marketing Services or something along these lines.

Thanks so much, Tomas.

I will add to all of this, don't get spammy. Don't post 'buy my book' on every page you find without having a relationship with that group. Don't post to my FB page or messenger daily. Once or twice is enough. Don't send me daily emails for three months about your book. After the first two to three, I'll delete and most likely unsubscribe from your list if it continues.

Free books do work. A prequel (make sure you label it as such.) works as a promotional tool to build a list ($50-60 for something like AXP where you get 1k + email for your list), promo sites for your genre, and ads on AMS, BookBub, etc to get results, but you need to write decent copy. have a good blurb and hook for your book along with cover which gets the people to look twice at it.

Once you get things set up, it doesn't take much to keep it going. It's all a learning process. Oh, for ads, start of with like a $1 or 2 a day. Use two different ads and see which one works the best. You can always scale up for the ones that are working and stop the others. You will need to allow at least a month or two to get traction. That is coming from experts.

I'll repeat again, DO NOT SPAM groups or your email list.

I spend nothing on ads.

Marc wrote: "how much do you spend on ams . I assume you mean amazon ads"

I'm advertising 2 of my books with AMS ads at the moment, with a limit of $5 a day on each book (which doesn't necessarily mean all of that budget gets spent each day). In February so far I've spent about $213 and made $242 in sales directly from AMS ads. This actually means I've made a slight loss, because not 100% of the money from sales is going straight to me. February has been a bit unusual though because I experimented with bidding on some more competitive keywords, which meant I got through my advertising budget really fast because I was paying more for the clicks. It's settled down now that I'm focusing on keywords that I don't have to bid so high for. Pretty much every single one of my keywords is an author name or book title, and I update the list now and then with new releases in my genre.

It does take a bit of effort to get your AMS ads set up and you might need to test different ads for a bit to see what works. I've made some ads that have been useless, but I've managed to find ones that work OK for two of my books (I have a third book I've tried to advertise but given up on because I just couldn't seem to make it work!). You need to keep an eye on what is going on with your ads to make sure your money is being spent effectively - I look at which keywords are getting the most clicks, how much I'm paying for clicks, whether I've ever had any sales on each keyword, or if I am getting sales but the ACOS (average cost per sale) is really high I'll turn that keyword off, or keep a close eye on it for a few days as it can take a bit of time for sales to register. In the entire time I've been running AMS ads (just over a year now), I've basically broken even. However, that doesn't take into account KU reads, people reading one book and going on to buy my other books, mailing list sign-ups etc, so I definitely feel it is worth it.

I also run facebook ads continuously in the UK on two of my books. I vary the budget on these quite often, for example during a price promotion I might spend more, then reduce it down at other times (otherwise the costs can get quite scary!) It's slightly more tricky to keep track of sales from facebook ads (unless you use amazon affiliate links, which I do now) Most of the time I am at least breaking even and some days making a bit of profit. I get a lot of comments from readers on my facebook ads which is lovely, I didn't expect that to happen and it's actually one of the main ways I communicate with my readers now.

so should I try amazon marketing services. I dont want to waste my money.

I was thinking of trying their automatic targeting feature and run th ad while I have a countdown deal going.

Or should I do it when I dont have a count down deal

i figured it out. but i just hope I am not wasting my money. its now like there is a lot of profit in general when you sell a book.
especially when its on sale.


I am also promoting a book my 11 yr old daughter wrote

Does anyone know why some sponsored ads are next to the "also bought" books, and some are a lot further down, after the author biography? There seem to be a lot more of them in the bottom section ones.

I think AMS (Amazon ads) can be very effective but I haven't figured them out yet. Reedsy has a free course that I plan to take. You can also get Mark Dawson's Learn Amazon Ads booklet for free on Amazon. He also offers a course which is extremely expensive. Has anyone taken it?

It's hard to get traction when you only have one book out but writing more books doesn't guarantee sales. If you're going to write a series, I recommend waiting until you have at least 2 books published before advertising the first. If it's a standalone, go ahead and get the word out.

which ads have you run on amazona I am trying sponsor ads with my own keywords. its only been day but still no sale.

I also have my daughters first book published via draft2digital for her first ebook and our paperbacks are also listed on barnes and noble.

When I published my daughters first book. I did not want the ebook to be limited to just amazon so I used draft2digital to published to others sites like itunes.

In general though we got most of her sales on amazon and thru kdp select program.

When I published her second book and my first book I decided to keep the the ebook version on Amazon for six months but then put a paperback on both amazon and barnes and noble.

I have created a blog for our books and each of us has author profiles on amazon.

Where else should I advertise.? Should I advertise our blog.

should I just do amazon advertising or is there place to market all the sites where our books are available

No links. Thanks.

sorry i just want to know if anyone use onlinebookclub to promote their books

Do they still charge to do reviews? Best to stay away from stuff like that.

Marc wrote: "which ads have you run on amazona I am trying sponsor ads with my own keywords. its only been day but still no sale.

I also have my daughters first book published via draft2digital for her first e..."

How many key words do you have on your AMS ad? You need a minimum of 200, and the more you have, the better.

I guess maybe 20 not sure
where do get 200 from

Marc, what many people do is search for books like theirs or that are selling well in their genre. They then use the author names and titles as keywords to bid for. That's what I have done.

Hopefully you will get a bunch of impressions from that. But then come two more hurdles, to be overcome consecutively.

1) Converting impressions to clicks. You should get about 1 click per 1000 impressions. If you're not getting that then you may have a problem with the cover or logline. At the moment the first book in my Martin Chalk series is doing over 2000 impressions per click which is not good. It tells me that I may need to redo my cover, which is aggravating because I have JUST redone it.

2) Converting clicks to sales. You should get roughly 1 sale per 10-13 clicks. If you're getting a bunch of clicks and no sales then that indicates some sort of problem with the book itself. Are you sure that you have it in the right category? Is the Look Inside showing a boring intro? Is the book properly edited? Things like that.

Hope this helps.

Advertising on Amazon: You're likely to get a lot of impressions, but few clicks, unless you find some magic combination of keywords and CPC (Cost Per Click) bid price that A) are related to your book and B) are being actively searched for.

I have been trying different Amazon ads for a while now, and I haven't found that magic combination. Thankfully, running their ads is CPC so that means if you're not getting clicked, you're not being charged. I haven't yet had any significant sales from Amazon ads.

Book Trailers: See my post in the Book trailer post you also replied in. TL;DR Book trailers aren't going to really pull in organic sales. They're mostly there as eye candy, much like the bookmarks we all invest in to give away for free.

Marketing Tactics: So, my method isn't by any means cheap, and I understand that you're looking for cheap ways. Unfortunately the cheap ways are not likely to get a lot of attention.

Gaining traction is an uphill battle and as new authors, we're fairly invisible to the public. The biggest and best way I have found to gain visibility is to do conventions. Not readings or book signings at a local book store (those are largely hit or miss).

Conventions (depending on the size) could have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people walking through the dealer areas, just looking to purchase things. Money is burning holes in their pockets, and people buy regular books even at comicons. The downside is that for conventions you need some up front money. Money for the table/booth, decorations, bookmarks, parking, etc.

There's no easy and successful way to do it without spending money.

I tried using james Patterson and alex cross and a.mazon rejected my ad. so I don't think they let you do that I even got an email about it

I only got 15 impressions for my kids book she published my add runs today

tell me more about conventions. I don't mind spending money if I make money.

my daughter and I each wrote are books for fun but this marketing aspect is interesting to me. I don't expect to get rich but to make some money would be good for our efforts.

I have read some books that gotten over 500 good reviews that i felt were not as good as our books.

so far we only sold 16 books total without advertising.

I like to get more.

Marc, if you use Patterson in your logline then probably Amazon might well have a problem with it. But I am 99% sure that you can use that in the keywords that your ad campaign bids for.

Basically what you're bidding for is a spot in 'books recommended' at the bottom when somebody searches for that keyword on Amazon.

Now, if your book has nothing to do with Patterson then I'd strongly recommend that you do not enter him as a key word. Why? Because you're probably going to have to bid high to get a spot and then if somebody actually clicks on your book and its got nothing to do with what they are searching for you've just paid for nothing.

I looked at what books appear next to mine first, and picked the most likely candidates out of that as keywords. Since the Martin Chalk series is a fantasy / mystery set of stories I then typed in all the terms that I would associate with that if I were looking for that on Amazon. I used the books that came up as keywords to search for.

Amazon is pretty clever in that it forces you to optimize your ads for people that would actually want to read your book. It works both for them (less wasted recommendations) and for you (less wasted money). Took me a while to get the hang of it.

Still not getting the sales though :P

I to would like to know more about conventions

For those looking for specific booth and con info, there is an archived thread here in the SIA group that has some good info, including some of my previously shared experiences. I hope it helps you!

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I am using AMS ads and I have seen some good results, although most of my sales have been just in the US.

I've been told that AMS ads are just in the US, but when I checked out the Amazon UK site, they have sponsored products ads there as well, including some US published indie books.

Does anyone have any idea how to get books onto the UK site?

I've tried pretty hard to get ams ads set up for Amazon UK and exchanged many emails with Amazon. I think it is theoretically possible but I tried setting up amazon vendor and Amazon advantage accounts and in the end I had to give up. I've also emailed Amazon and said how much I would love to be able to do AMS ads on Amazon UK. Fingers crossed it'll be possible soon. As for the sponsored ads that show up on Amazon UK at the moment, I don't know how they managed to do it!

Thanks for the link Thomas. A friend of my girlfriend goes to several cons in our state and seems to do OK.

so far i have been getting click but no sales over 200

i got impressions in 7days. . i assume that is alot right

i got 9 clicks about 5 bucks out the door but no sales.

my orginal budget was 2 bucks per day. I lowered to a 1 dollar per day yesterday.

I have gotten sales but via advertising.

my avg is 62 cents a click .

I am guess my stats are bad. someone in this thread said 10 clicks per sale. so i hope my next click sells.

when you publish a book on amazon in the key word section when you publish your book can you list more than key word or just one word.

You get to pick 7 blank slots for keywords but I was sure if you can put multiple words in each slot separated by a commma or not.

Marc, you might peruse your competitors and see what keywords they used. When you have a good string (my example for westerns:
kindle ebooks>history>americas>US> 19th Century>old west)
you can email Amazon and ask them to add more keyword strings for your books. Kindleprenuer has a YouTube on how to do it.

thanks , i actually found some good youtube videos

all this market is taking away from my writing my next book lol

i guess you have to do it though to make money.

does anyone use the software kdp spy or kindle rocket

does anyone use the software kdp spy or kindle rocket

so far no sales from ams . really disappointing

so much competition out there how most authors succeed. I am sure there are tons of good authors out there.

should i do lock screen ads and not product sponsored ads?

Marc wrote: "hi everyone,

I just published my first book this year on amazon.

I am enrolled in the KDP select program.

I also have a paper back book version and audio book version coming out real soon.

How..."

This may not be what you want to hear and I won't be surprised if some authors here disagree with what I want to say but here's my two cents.

First of all, you need to define what success is to you. Some authors define sucess as seeing their name listed next to their books, some other authors define success as getting 5 star reviews.

I love using SMART objectives when trying to achieve something.
Be specific - what do you want to do? sell books
Measurable - how would you measure your objectives? eg sell one million copies
Achievable - how achievable is this for the average person? not very achievable
Be realistic - sell 10 copies, very do-able
Timely - within the next one month

So now you have a plan - to sell 10 copies of your book over the next month. The next question is, how will you do this?

I like working with mathematical equations, so here's a rough gesimate:
For every 1 book you sell, 100 people would have landed on the book page. For every 1 person who visits your book page where they can buy your book, 100 people would have read about your book somewhere else online.

Thus to sell 10 books, your promotional activities should have at least 1,000,000 impressions.

As a 'buyer', I rarely make buying decisions without seeing what others think about that item. So it is extremely important that shortly after your book is published there are reviews. One of the easiest ways to do this is by offering book bloggers a copy of your book for free in exchange for them CONSIDERING to publish a review. Not everyone who receives a free copy of your book would be able to read it. Life happens and that's why the more people you offer your book to, the greater the chances of you getting some reviews.

Giveaways on Goodreads are good because entrants can add your book to their bookshelves and lists and that increases the chances of your book being discovered.

If you have a website (and seriously why would you not?) it is essential that your website is optimised for search engines. Research keywords in your genres. Doing so enables your website to show up when people are searching for books in the genre. Obviously, your website will not rank highly compared to older well-optimised websites, unless yours is a low competition keyword. But this is still an important aspect.

Be NEWSWORTHY! Don't simply tell people to buy your book. Help people to discover you. 100s of free and paid books are published every day. Even if your book was free, why would someone invest the time in reading your book over another free book? By being newsworthy, you form an emotional connection.

One way I know a number of authors have used to be newsworthy is by appearing on podcasts. The key here is not just telling people only about your do but ensuring that you have a message you want to pass to the listeners that would be beneficial to them. The more helpful you are, the greater the chances are that people would want to find out about the other things you do and the greater the chances that they would consider purchasing your book.

One author came on my podcast The Segilola Salami Show. His book is about Thor and at the end of the show, he offered listeners the chance to win Thor's hammer. According to him, he was able to use that giveaway to get more podcast speaking gigs and increase brand awareness and consequently get more sales of his book.

Short term strategies to get immediate sales involve listing on book promo sites. In my personal experience, not all of them are as good as each other. You would need to try them out to figure out which ones suit your books

I'm going to stop now, cos I'm tired of typing. I hope you find this useful a little bit

The problem with promo sites is that the good ones generally want 5-10 5 star reviews before they will consider accepting your money to give your book away for free. Naturally, to get reviews you need sales. Bit of a problem ...

Marc if you got 9 clicks from 200 impressions then your click through rate is exceptional. Or am I misunderstanding you? At the moment I am struggling with converting impressions to clicks. Might be my cover.

I got got 12 clicks but no sales from over 3047 impressions.

i my ad I just said I had countdown deal .

still no sales.

The ad for my daughter only got 1 click total was almost 8 bucks for ad campaign.

Well Marc, for a bit of context I got 3 clicks for 3000 odd impressions. No sales either. Although, I did recently get a full read of one of my books so it could be that somebody clicked on the ad and read it on KU instead of buying it.

I would say that you're doing pretty darn well, statistically speaking.

I would guess that you probably have a good blurb and cover, but maybe the first few pages of the book for the Look Inside have a problem. Maybe take a look at the first ten pages or so and make sure they are absolutely as good as you can make them. If you have typos etc on the opening pages, it could be a big turnoff.

Sorry I have no better advice to offer.

It's a really tough market at the moment, seems to me.

Edit: I'm betting that you have grammar / typo problems, on second thoughts. I just looked at your comment and you have several in only four lines, no offence. Maybe get an editor to recheck the opening pages, at the minimum.

yah I know 7 bucks is not alot of money

if anyone out there spends money advertisiting . I like to know what is averarge spend per book per year.

For now I will focus on my next book.

I will kept advertiisng my book in free discussion groups

and on my blog and facbook page

i just release my first audio book.

I will make a youtube video for that

so far since the release of my audio book a few days ago i got some sales so that is good

That's great. You sound like a really determined person, and I'm thinking that it will stand you in good stead. Did you get it professionally converted or were you able to do it yourself?

BTW, my spend up to now has been minimal because I'm not getting clicks. I did spend some money (40-50$) in trying to promote a free giveaway, but didn't see much bang for the buck.