SFFMP 198: Mastering Amazon Ads with Brian Meeks
Jo and Lindsay talked with the famous (not infamous!) Brian Meeks today, author of Mastering Amazon Ads, as well as thrillers, satire, and science fiction (under a pen name). He started tinkering with Amazon ads a couple of years ago when they first came on the scene, and they turned into a game-changer for him, allowing him to sell a lot more books and eventually quit the day job.
Now, he spends a lot of time in his Amazon ads Facebook group helping other authors, and he’s also got a course you can sign up for if you want more than is in his book. If you want to check it out, he’s offering our listeners 30% off — throw in the coupon code of SFFMP30.
Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author’s Course
Here are some specifics we covered in the show:
- The basics of Amazon ads and how they work.
- The difference between product display ads and sponsored product ads (and why Brian is a big fan of the former even though most people jump on the latter).
- How long you should wait to see if an ad is going to catch and run well.
- How recent changes to the ad system (August 2018) have got everyone bidding higher right now and authors may want to wait until things settle down again.
- Why you should be patient and give everything time before raising the bid or selecting the new option to increase your bid up to 50%.
- Whether it makes sense to advertise books that are wide and that can’t make money from page reads in Kindle Unlimited.
- Whether it’s possible to pay for ads on a free ebook and come out ahead (i.e. when it’s a series starter).
- How good copywriting is important, not just for the ads but for your book description.
- Having an effective hook and drawing the reader to click more on Amazon.
- How much time it really takes to get Amazon ads to move the dial for you — it’s not a quick fix or a set-it-and-forget-it method.
- Once you get some success, scaling it.
Don’t forget to check out Brian’s Mastering Amazon Ads book, and you can also take a peek at his fiction. He’s written some scifi under Arthur Byrne starting with The Magellan Apocalypse.
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