AMS ads aren’t a guaranteed overnight-success model for marketing your book. Authors should take the time to learn how AMS ads work and how they can optimize them to help their books the most.
Authors might start an AMS ad campaign and not realize the ads are working because the reporting system might not show them how successful the campaign is. But tracking the number of books sold before and after using AMS ads and the consistency is a better way of analyzing the success.
The keyword tool in KDP Rocket will help you use keywords that you may think, at first, have nothing to do with your book. But KDP Rocket is using Amazon to get those keywords, even though you might not see the connection. If you’re at the maximum of keywords, then maybe you can reconsider which words to scrap, but it takes a lot of time.
You never know which keywords will be the ones that work best for marketing your book. Even if you think the keywords may be referring to a different genre than your book, realize that readers may not just focus on one genre. Let it play out.
The more keywords you use, the better. And that includes misspellings or even extra spaces after keywords. Many people find success using 900 keywords in multiple campaigns.
Going after terms that are not being targeted may increase your chances of coming up when someone searches for another book in your genre.
Remember, AMS ads are not set-it-and-forget-it, it takes time, patience, and analysis of not just the report from AMS, itself, but from overall book sales.
Bio of the Author in the Case Study:
Brian D. Meeks writes under his name and the pen name Arthur Byrne when he’s feeling snarky. Brian has written several books in the Henry Wood Detective series, a thriller and a YA novel.
He lives in Iowa, enjoys tennis and gold, and loves researching book marketing techniques and gathering data for his books.
Resources Referred to in this Episode:
- Brian D. Meeks’ Author Page
- Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) – Advertise at Amazon
- Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author's Guide by Brian Meeks
- Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author's Course
- Kindlepreneur Sell More Books With Amazon Book Ads
- Publisher Rocket: Self Publishing Software to help find Kindle Keywords
- Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money by Pat Flynn
- Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author's Guide – Beta Group
- Book Marketing Show Marketers & Coffee: Mistakes Authors And Ourselves Have Made
- Kindle Direct Publishing 
I’ve been devouring your podcast and learning tons! I just dumped my publisher and am relaunching my first book. So grateful for all the information you share. Also just purchased KDP Rocket. Amazing tool! cannot wait to put it to use. Thanks for all you do, especially for us newbies.
Thanks Kim – that totally makes my day to hear. You know, recording these podcasts actually makes me sooo nervous…haha.
Love your podcast and I’ve learned so much. This episode opened my eyes about what I was doing wrong with KDP Rocket. I was removing ones I thought weren’t valid.I have a question, when I’m doing split testing for the ad copy, should I keep the same keywords or would that make me bid against myself in order to get impressions?
Awesome Veronica! That totally makes my night to read. As for your question – you really do not bid against yourself so I keep them in.
Truly helpful episode. It made me realize how much I DONT know. But glad to hear all about it before wasting lots of time making the mistakes you and Brian talked about. I think I need to read this guy`s book. Or maybe he wants to take on my book as a pilot project…? Thanks Dave. I listen to every episode!
Awesome – and glad you enjoyed it and the podcast – that means a lot to hear. 🙂
Wow, this was an amazing episode! I listened to it twice today! I’m trying to figure out how to get a better balance between what I’m spending and what I’m making (I basically had as much coming in from April sales as I had going out in AMS ads–even though it was my 2nd best sales month ever) and this could not have come at a better time. Guess I’ll be buying and reading Brian`s book this week. :p
Awesome and thanks for letting me know – yeah, I love that book!