Amazon Marketing Services Offers Cheap Ads for Self-Publishers

by Lois Wickstrom

 

For the self-published author, Amazon is the single easiest and least-expensive way to get your book in front of readers. Amazon lists self-published books from many sources, such as IngramSpark, Lulu, CreateSpace, and Kindle Direct Publishing.

 

But once our books are created, published and up on Amazon, the next question is: How can we get customers to find and buy our books? Most advertising for self-published books costs more than it brings in.

 

Amazon Marketing services now has an advertising program for Kindle books that links in the paper editions (printed) of those books as well.  You do need to make sure that the Amazon listing for your Kindle book also shows your paperback and/or hardcover versions.  If they don’t, just contact KDP Customer Service, giving them the links to all versions of your title, and they will combine the listings.

 

My Kindle books were lingering in the 2 millionth most popular on Amazon for Ladybugs for Loretta and 4 millionth most popular for Oliver, A Story About Adoption. This means they were selling one or two copies a month combining all forms of each title, and had been selling that slowly for about a year.
Then I decided to try the Amazon Marketing Services.

 

This is a program that lets you buy sponsored positions on Amazon’s search pages.  Ladybugs for Loretta is about a girl who finds ladybugs under rocks and behind tree bark.  I want people who are looking for books about ladybugs and books for girls to consider my book.

 

Amazon Marketing Services is designed to let authors choose their own search terms (you can buy a pre-selected list, but I don’t recommend that.) The AMS site also offers a default price of $0.25 per click, calculated when people click on the link to view your book. I changed that to $0.15.  Sometimes a click only costs me $0.06. (The actual price depends on what other sellers have bid for the selected search terms.) Also, AMS lets you put a daily cap on how much money you will spend.  I capped my costs at $2 per day.  I rarely spend more than $0.20 per day per title.

 

I selected the key words I wanted and I wrote the short description of each book that will appear beside a small version of the cover, when people search for my key words.  My books now appear on the top pages of an Amazon Search – maybe not the top 10 listings, but in the top 40 listings. That’s a reasonable number for a customer to look through.

 

Amazon will display my ad when people search for my key words. I only have to pay when somebody clicks on the ad.

When you set up an AMS account, you will be able to see how many times your book ad was displayed and how many times people clicked on each of your key words.
The bottom line here is that my books have gone from selling one or two a month, to selling about 13 a month.  This doesn’t sound like much, but it means that my Ladybug book is now in the 200,000s and Oliver is in the 600,000s. This is a huge jump in rank. I figure the increases can become cumulative.  The higher my books are in rank, the more often people will see them and the more often people see them, the more copies I will sell. And my marketing costs remain less than $10 per month.
The most important aspect of selling on Amazon is the number of reviews your book gets. But you can’t get reviews if you don’t have readers. Amazon Marketing Services is one easy, inexpensive tool you can use to start building readership for your book. It’s not the only tool you should use, but it can help generate some buzz. And once people start talking about your books, you’ve found the best advertising of all.

 

Lois Wickstrom’s books include:

 

Ladybugs for Loretta

Bees in Loretta’s Bonnet

Loretta’s Pet Caterpillar

Oliver, A Story About Adoption

Invisible Magic Wand

Hot Chocolate Underpants

Rooster Under the Table

The post Amazon Marketing Services Offers Cheap Ads for Self-Publishers appeared first on   WriteForKids - Writing Children's Books.

It’s OK If Your Readers Cry

If you’ve ever feared that your manuscript is too “real” for children, or if you feel the urge to write about a sanitized reality in order to protect young readers, remember this: kids learn how to navigate the world through their books. And if they are experiencing pain, seeing that pain acknowledged in a story helps them know they are not alone. But you should really hear this from two of the greatest children’s book writers of our time. Matt de la Pena, in his essay “Why We Shouldn’t Shield Children From Darkness” for Time magazine, and Kate DiCamillo’s response, “Why Children’s Books Should Be a Little Sad“, beautifully articulate how a little sadness in a children’s book teaches readers that they can, indeed, bear the burdens life may give them.

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Simple Advice for First-Time Self-Published Authors

By Guest Author

by R.F. Kristy

 

The intelligence and allure of cats has always enchanted me. Writing the Inca Cat Series arose out of the blue. I had never dreamed of self-publishing stories for children. My specialty, due to my work with the United Nations, concentrated on reports of a technical nature — a world much removed from the milieu of children’s books. However, I love reading detective stories. So when I started writing about my cats Inca and Cara, the ideas for mystery-themed adventures started flowing.

 

The Cats Who Crossed Over From Paris, Book 1 of the series, came to me from reading rather than from living or observation. Christmas Cats followed and the third, Cats in Provence is currently bubbling. I don’t think we choose our genre, I think that a genre chooses us. Or should I say, my love of detective stories and living with my cats Inca and Cara made the choice inevitable.

 

Despite my new-found passion for writing the Inca Cat Series, I found out that as a newcomer to this competitive arena, having an appetite for writing alone is not sufficient. In my enthusiasm to get my thoughts on paper, I made several errors.

 

While I reviewed the internet and read several articles about the positives and negatives and compared the various self-publishing sources such as BookBaby, CreateSpace and Ingram Sparks. What I did not pay much attention to, to my cost, were the technical specifications required for illustrations in ebooks and paperbacks. A mistake I had made was not expressly requesting the graphic illustrator of my choice to prepare the illustrations in the correct format. While the illustrations were accepted by both BookBaby (for the first book) and CreateSpace (for the second book), they correctly pointed out that the specifications would not provide the best output of the illustrations in the printed book. Worst of all, when I tried to upload to Ingram Sparks, the illustrated cover was not accepted.

 

Another mistake was not fully understanding how the self-publishing sources work. For example, for The Cats Who Crossed Over From Paris I decided to go with BookBaby. BookBaby’s technical support is strong, but a complete newcomer can still run into trouble. I found this out after I clicked on the wrong buttons for purchasing the printed version and the ebook which had appeared later on in the screen pages. This necessitated paying double after the book had been developed. In my ignorance, I had not asked the correct questions and talked my way through the whole process with their support services.

 

In a nutshell, here is my advice to new authors about to embark on the journey of self-publishing:

 

Decide on your self-publishing agent while you are writing but prior to hiring an illustrator.

 

Contact the chosen self-publishing sources and ask them to provide you with the exact specifications for the book. This includes requirements for the text formatting and layout, as well as anything your illustrator needs to know about image sizes, bleeds, or preferred resolution. This information may be available on their respective sites, but sometimes for an unfamiliar reader so much technical jargon can be overwhelming. My advice is to contact the self-publishing source either by telephone or email and ask specific questions about their requirements.

 

Above all, give some thought to your marketing strategy and work with a specialist to start devising a marketing plan before the book is published. You want to hit the ground running as soon as your book is available.

 

At the end of the day, I was pleased with the end results of both books produced by BookBaby and CreateSpace. My hard-earned lessons will help me move forward as a self-publisher as I complete the third book in the Inca Book Series.

 

See R. F. Kristi’s books here:

The Cats Who Crossed Over From Paris

Christmas Cats

 

This is a post from writeforkids.org. Read the original post: Simple Advice for First-Time Self-Published Authors