EIE Newsletter September 13, 2023

“The customer is not a moron; she's your wife.” - David Ogilvy

I’m seeing sales for my book, The Double, driven by my ads. I believe this is primarily from AMS (Amazon Marketing Services). However, I have an ad running on Facebook, and it is a high-performing campaign with many clicks. However, with AMS, I can see the actual corresponding sales.

David Ogilvy held that the function of advertising is to sell and that successful advertising for any product is based on information about its consumer. He also believed that advertisers should respect the intelligence of the customer. “The customer is not a moron; she's your wife.” - David Ogilvy

Despite this, I almost made another blunder. I had a campaign running beginning in August, when the book launched, targeting a popular author who writes in the same genre. At first, these ads produced no results. Then, I raised the per-click bed from one dollar to $1.50 and increased the percentage I was willing to bid for top-of-page placement. At this point, I started to see some sales. The problem is that my average cost of sales was extremely high. Last week, I lowered the daily budget and per-click bid to reduce costs and determine the threshold where my ad spend was not enough to generate sales. At the same time, I had one AMS auto ad running that I had also determined to be unprofitable. By auto-ads, I mean ads where the audience targets and placement is left to Amazon’s algorithm. Initially, when I checked it, the ad had not generated any sales, but it had yet to spend any of its budget. No harm, no foul, so I wasn’t paying much attention to it. However, when I looked only at the first two weeks of September, I saw that the spend-sales curve had inverted. Those ad targets produced a profit, if only by the thinnest margin.

One of the things that they don’t tell you when you are a self-published/indie author is how much time you spend trying to master ads. Whereas writing, in most cases, gets easier over time with experience, AMS ads become more challenging. Mainly because there are more people who you are competing with in the Amazon advertising market., That number continues to grow daily, as does the number of people publishing books, and thus, so does the total advertising dollars spent to attract the eyeballs. This will only increase with the intrusion of AI-published books into the marketplace. I imagine there will eventually be platforms offering AI-powered AMS campaigns that authors can sign up for the way we do with Book Funnel to distribute our books. And if there isn’t one yet, I should probably get on creating one! But I digress.

I realized that my auto-targeted ad was profitable due to Kindle page reads (KENP). It makes a certain amount of sense. Amazon’s algorithm likely targets people inclined to read in Kindle Unlimited, seeing as how Amazon just raised the monthly Membership fee and growing that platform subscriber base is good for their bottom line, so they push my books to them. When you think about it, the number of people who use Amazon is in the hundreds of millions. The idea that I could pick audience targets as good as Amazon’s algo can is ridiculous. So, rather than ignore the Auto-targeting-AMS-ad, or worse, switch it off, I increased the budget. I’ll have to watch it to see if that further increases sales. To test that theory, I ran another AMS ad for my book, The Strange Crimes of Beatrice Clover and set the targeting to auto. 

Similarly, an ad where I manually targeted an indie author writing in a similar genre generated some small sales in the first three weeks, but doing so cost me a tidy sum. I thought the ad was losing money. I was going to switch it off when I checked the numbers just for September and saw that I was profitable between Kindle sales and KENP page reads. Once again, the KENP page reads made the difference.

This is straight out of Mark Dawson’s course and what he teaches to his credit. It also explains why so many indie authors remain loyal to the Amazon platform instead of going wide. This is especially true for authors who don’t have an extensive back catalog. Either way, I’m just happy that my books are able to turn a profit. This makes me much more eager to finish my next book, The Crew, though I know the most important is to write the best book I can and not rush to finish something.

In Hollywood news, I’ve been wearing my producer hat while my writer-self stands on the strike line, unable to work. It’s Day One hundred-and-I can’t-even-remember, and I don’t see any end in sight. Despite this, I have had some successful meetings with producers about partnering on some IP (intellectual property) I am attached to as a producer. My company, Elice Island Entertainment, is making a big push to bring bestselling indie authors to the Holywood marketplace.

These writers are remarkable storytellers working in genres not fully exploited. As someone who loves writing books, I want to help get as many of these books made into TV and movies as possible. A few titles have been optioned already, with the goal being to be ready to approach writers and Showrunners when the strike ends. In the meantime, I am looking at directors since the DGA did sign an agreement with the AMPTP.

These are strange times, but anyone can make it in when times are good. The key is to make it when times are tough.