Thanks to your comments, I have learned you can see KENP Pages Read as a metric of Amazon Ads. If you're interested in doing this yourself, customize the columns of your Amazon Ads Dashboard and add the column: Amazon Device Conversions > KENP Read

Hope this helps someone!

Grim numbers... As a person who's all but vanished from social media, I do worry about my success when it comes to sales.

The most honest and realistic view of self-published advertising. Great work.

That was a fun experiment (I'm glad it was your $2500).  You did a really good breakdown of the different ad campaigns.

Very interesting comparison! Another thing with Amazon ads is any sales they generate will push the book higher in the algorithm, which result in more free sales.

One thing to keep in mind is it can take three months or longer of running ads before you really see the true results. A lot of people put it on there to be read list so you may not actually see those results for months. And like you mentioned, the more books you have out the more advertising pay for itself. Generally you lose money on the first book. Your second book you make a little bit of money if they follow through and read that one or at least breakeven. Your third book is where most people make the money. So if you have less than three books, you’re likely not to make much money when it comes to advertising. It’s more about trying to get reviews and get your book out there until you get to that third book. That’s why there’s so many trilogies.😂

You should have 1 each outlet 30 days at a time before switching to another marketplace

As a reader, nothing makes me run to buy a book faster than actual content. Ads almost never get me. For example, I kept seeing ACOTAR content online. (Yes, it’s AI, but hear me out) Those videos are everywhere and little by little, I started to become interested in the characters. I think we should start making some scenes into content and advertise that way?Just to see if it works. My theory is that once they care about a character, they will want to know what happens.

It just seems like that money is better spent buying proof copies and sending them/giving them out guerrilla style to influencers, little libraries, book clubs etc. I almost never read books that I see as an ad though so maybe that’s just me. I read what people recommend. Thank you for making this video, this info is so helpful.

Watching this had me thinking about other forms of marketing, specifically on things smaller websites with a literary focus like Horrortree or Clarkesworld. Sometimes I'll be browsing publishing opportunities on the former and an advertised novel will catch my eye. I checked both their websites and they both look pretty easy to reach out to and set up an advertising campaign. Might make for an interesting section, if you ever do a part two to this one!

I loved the ACOS guitar rendition! Quite fun with an unfun word! As a struggling person (dare I even say the word author) on Amazon, the learning curve is quite daunting. However, if you plough through it, you will come to learn that sales are possible, albeit with huge ad spend. At first I had no clue, but I kept at it, and guess what! I still have no clue!

I really appricate you going into this much detail. First time on the channel.

This was excellent and somewhat depressing. Going to watch twice. Great study

I buy almost exclusively from Amazon. And sometimes when I see a bike title somewhere else, I’ll go to Amazon to read the premise and get a sneak peek into the book to see if I vibe with the author’s voice.

Thanks for your analysis. You mainly see videos on people raking in the big bucks using ads on Amazon KDP. Makes me wonder how truthful they are.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to spend money advertising on those platforms, but Amazon ads track page reads for the book you’re advertising, so that would also factor in to the ACOS.

Also, Amazon lets you create attribution links, so you can track sales from different platforms (we used them for Meta ads). The performance will still be the same overall 😅 but at least you’ll know how an ad platform does

A few things to add onto this video as someone who has experimented with ads.

It is almost impossible to make your money back on a single title. You can make sales but the cost of those sales will outweigh the spend. Your ACOS is always going to be high because it's a single copy. Like you said at the end of the video.

The other issue is genre and targeting. If the bots can't understand what your genre is, they have difficulty putitng your book in front of the audience. My book Narco Hotel which is a sci-fi fantasy superhero book is stuck in advertising limbo because superhero is not a popular genre and the tags are confusing the bots. So even though I have a decent budget to spend for Narco on AMS, the money isn't being spent because it doesn't know where to put the books.

Having comps and knowing what books your story is similar to will immensely help with targeting and narrowing down your audience. I don't remember if this is still true of Meta, but there was a time you could hyperfocus on an individual demographic, down to the very specific individual. Now meta forces you to expand even to non-english speaking audiences because of... discrimination? I forget.

Meta ads are also dicey because even though they are cheaper, Meta uses algorithms and AI to enforce everything. One ad got declined because I used the word "superheroine" with heroine being the trigger. There are no humans you can reach out to anymore. Everything is done by bots and they can choose to suspend or ban your account and your only option is to file an appeal without knowing why you were banned in the first place.

Unfortunately, Meta is a great way to get sales, but you should only be exploring ads when you have a series. You need the, I forget what the term is, but you need the reader to buy the first book and continue on to the second and the third.

You will never be able to make your money back on one book alone. So if you're thinking about doing ads and you only have one book? Don't. Focus on increasing awareness and exposure by doing blog tours, podcasts, maybe in-person selling. But don't waste the money on ads.

I was not expecting the musical break 😂

it's so crazy frustrating that Amazon doesn't give you access to any of that data.

You could spend at different times and track overall sales during those times.

But Meta in particular is super powerful when you can feed it back conversions so it can train it's AI to find you more buyers.

I have been watching several indie authors and one of them gave the advice to make Tiktok and IG post where you share a high emotion scene from your book without the resolution on 5 or more slides. It sounds like it works for her. When she described one of the scenes she uses in her ads, I realized I had seen her TT and only didn't get the book because I don't generally read that genre but was curious what happens 😂