You may remember my recent posts on my experience advertising with Amazon Marketing Services (AMS). It turns out I’m either a slow learner or an incurable optimist since I had another go at it in April. And guess what? This time, it worked!

AMS earnings | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's books

I followed the same strategy as with my Facebook ads, and only advertised a high-cost title – in this case, my $9.95 bundle of all my works. As you can see above, during the first few days I ran the ad, I had 126 downloads, only 3 of which were of said bundle. Because of the high value of the title, however, that accounted for the majority of my earnings in that period.

The ad cost me some a total of $13.36 and I made $30.53, so it had a pretty decent ROI of over 200%.

The main takeaway, which is worth repeating here: bundle your work and advertise it as a high-cost title. That has been the only way I’ve found so far to make ads work.

Now, if I can only scale these numbers up. Perhaps the following tips by Amazon will help.

Amazon’s Tips for KDP Authors to Improve Ad Performance

Q: How do I increase impressions to my ad campaigns?

A: Review the core components of your campaign including:

Targeting- If you are using interest groups, are there other interests you can target? If you are using product targeting, try targeting popular books and authors in your genre.

Bids- Are you bidding competitively? If your maximum bid is close to the average CPC (cost-per-click), consider increasing bids.

Pacing- Update the campaign pacing to deliver impressions as quickly as possible.

Q: I am getting a lot of impressions, but I want to increase clicks. What can I do?

A: Review your campaign from the eyes of a reader and check:

Targeting- Is the targeting relevant to the book’s genre? If not, try changing the target interest group.

Headline- Is the headline enticing and well-written? If not, try improving the ad headline with relevant book content.

Custom Teaser- Are the cover art, title, and text aligned to form a cohesive message? If not, be creative and try the custom teaser to share some insights on the book.

Q: Any additional tips you can share?

A: We see the most successful book campaigns running simultaneous Product Display campaigns to target similar books as well as interest areas. Targeting other popular related books offers the opportunity for like-minded readers to see your book, while targeting multiple interests will enable broader reach on Kindle e-readers.