Advertise your book with amazon?

Promoting your new book to an audience seems like a daunting task to so many authors, where do you start and how much will it cost? Well, if you’re publishing through KDP then advertising upon Amazon’s own website may be the option you’re looking for.

With Amazon Marketing Services you can run a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign where your ad is displayed upon search pages for relevant other titles, the ads are normally highlighted as being sponsored but because the product / book cover images are displayed in a similar fashion it looks more natural than a great deal of advertising.

With PPC advertising you set a daily budget (from $1 to $100, dependent upon the type of ad you choose) and only get charged when a person actually clicks on the ad itself, the views of your ad don’t by themselves incur a fee(just when they’re clicked upon).  Once your ad is live they will let you increase the daily spending, so starting lower whilst monitoring it you can adjust it upward as needed.

With Amazon Marketing it allows you to target your readers by keywords, interest, genre, titles or authors, you can run a continuous backlist to promote to new readers looking to purchase your other books. Promoting your books along with similar titles and authors will help increase interest and sales, you can also promote your new releases in order to push sales as soon as the new title is actually published.

You will need an account with Amazon Marketing and the ad itself will have to go through a vetting process prior to launch, during this they’ll ensure that the ad is appropriate, available in English, has the book’s title and author name, has good quality images, is readable, free of typos and conforms to their full book ads acceptance policy (more of this can be found from their website).

Currently Amazon Marketing is only available to KDP authors, now this may seem a little restrictive, but with Amazon being the major book seller online, it should still help millions of authors who want to promote their book to a wider audience, this combined with reasonable costs should allow you to trial your initial ad over a two month period and tweak for best results.