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Making an Amazon Ad 2: Reading the Data

In the first Making an Amazon Ad Essential, I showed you how to start an Amazon ad campaign by walking you through starting one myself. It’s been two months, so now we have data to look at. Here’s how it went. Week 1 When you view your ads, you can adjust what shows on the chart and what boxes are visible by exing out or clicking on the top boxes. I have it set to: I would normally not adjust an ad after only a week, but this ad was clearly not getting it done. 99 impressions is brutal. Also,...

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Promotion Basics

I want to start out by saying I don’t believe promotion is more important than writing a good book. Nothing is more important than writing a good book. But if you want to sell that good book, there is nothing more important than promoting it well. The Promotion Box Promotion opportunities exist in a four variable box, as pictured below. There are successful authors who occupy all sections of this box. However, most authors begin in the bottom left corner and move through several stages until they are spending money as well as doing both online and in person activities....

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Making an Amazon Ad

To make it as an independent author, you need to bust out of your own social circle and into the wider world. There are millions of readers for your books out there — you just need to get their attention. Advertising, especially on Amazon, is an excellent way to find your readers. Amazon vs. Facebook The only other site with the reach and effectiveness for advertising comparable to Amazon is Facebook. And though FB ads are useful, especially for direct sales and Kickstarter campaigns, the big difference in converting viewers to purchasers is that people are on Amazon to buy....

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Series and Speed: The Keys to Self-Publishing Success

Writing fast, and in a series, offers the best chance of success as a self-published author. It isn’t the only chance—there are other paths—but it is the most reliable. Because if you write fast, and in series, you can make a living without ever having a hit book. A hit book—or at least a moderately popular one—is a requirement for the other paths. And a hit book is far more dependent on luck, and hitting the right mark at the right time, than your skills as a writer. Readership trends are notoriously hard to predict. Even if you write a...

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Advertising Basics

There are a lot of different places to advertise, and we have articles about the specifics of many of them. However, platforms change, get updated, gain and lose pieces of functionality. If you understand the basic concepts in this Essential, then you will be able to adapt to whatever platform that suits your books the best. The important thing to remember is that everything works together. There are a lot of parts in an ad campaign, and if any one of them is subpar, the possibility of profit plummets. Profitability The main thing an ad has to be is profitable....

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Why Do I Need to Write a Series?

Most self-published authors who make a significant income write in series of books. And most of them have many books available for readers who like what they do. It’s something beginners in the self-pub world rarely understand. They expect to write one book and have the world discover how brilliant they are and then rake in the money and the fame. But it rarely works that way in traditional publishing, and almost never in self-publishing. This is primarily because there are only so many readers who want what you have to offer, and only a few ways to reach them....

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Don’t Get Rid of All the Negative People in Your Life

Let’s talk about critics. There are a lot of affirmations rolling around the internet about how you must get rid of the negative people in your life. And while this can be helpful to your self-esteem, jettisoning everyone who is the slightest bit critical of your decisions is limiting to self-growth. I am speaking mostly, of course, about writing. My best friends are extremely critical of my work. Hell, I give them my manuscripts with the express intent of them being critical of it. It’s how I improve it. The more I engage with this process, the better my work...

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