The 2 Biggest Mistakes Authors Make With Amazon Ads

How to spend less and sell more books

Todd Brison
Better Marketing
Published in
5 min readAug 8, 2020

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Screenshot and annotations by the author

You wrote the book. You got it published. Now it’s time to make some money. Since you don’t want to pimp yourself out on social media to make money (which is tiring and ineffective), you’ve turned to Amazon Ads.

If you’re like most people, you gave up after a few weeks.

I know that because it’s what I did…at first.

Now, I’m comfortably enjoying anywhere from $500 — $1,200 in profit every single month from my two self-published books. The kicker? I spend less than four hours each month starting, monitoring, and maintaining ads.

Screenshot by the author…can you tell when I started figuring it out?

Amazon Ads can be tricky, but you don’t have to be a math wiz to figure them out. In fact, most of the strategy boils down to not making critical mistakes and keeping your money in the machine long enough to see what works for you.

Here are the two most common ways beginners mess up.

Mistake 1: You Choose Amazon’s Selected Bid

Amazon serves customers the most relevant ads. They do not necessarily serve the ads that submit the highest bid.

If you’ve run ads on Facebook or Google, this might be a bit confusing. How could an ad bidding $0.15 on a keyword beat out an ad that is bidding $0.75? Simple: Amazon has determined the cheaper ad is more relevant.

Put yourself in the shoes of Amazon for a moment. Amazon’s goal is to keep people on their platform and to sell users what they are most likely to want. That means, if I’ve typed in “Best Fishing Equipment Book,” I don’t want to see “Best Running Equipment Book.” Amazon knows how dangerous it is to start feeding users what they aren’t interested in. That’s how customers leave.

However, this desire to serve relevant ads conflicts with another big interest Amazon has — making an enormous pile of money.

What’s one way for Amazon to earn more money to toss in the pile? Convince ignorant ad-runners to spend more than is necessary. Take a…

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