The Optimization Goal

Once you have a great book, a book page aligned to your target market, you’ve done your research of the right targets and have your campaigns created and running (phew, I started sweating just by thinking about this) — what’s next? 

We’re not going to lie to you: Amazon is a very competitive marketplace — meaning, there are a lot of books out there and only a few will stand out. As such, we want to maximise our chances of getting seen (impressions) and getting interactions (clicks). 

Only this will get us to our biggest desired outcome: Purchases and/or reads!

But how do we maximize this? BooksFlyer has been designed to aim for the optimization goal that experts like Ricardo Fayet preach, and that we too have been applying with good consistent results: 

Cover our spend in advertising (we’ll call it ad spend from now on) with our revenue from advertising  (ad revenue from now on). In fancier words, breaking even. 

This is based on two ideas:

• Since Amazon asks for competitive bids, we want to give it as much as we can, without cannibalising our total revenue.

• If our book is relevant for our audience, this extra visibility earned via Amazon ads will have an added impact on our overall revenue. Kind of like a snowball effect.

Now, this is all clear as a sunny morning sky when it comes to standalones: aim to align your advertising spend with your Amazon Ads dashboard's revenue figures. However, things change when you advertise a series. In this case – tell me the books you are advertising and I’ll tell you where your break even point is. The main strategies for this are two:

• Advertise only book one in series. If this is your case and you try to cover your ad spend with just the ad revenue of book 1 — good luck getting competitive bids! The best option you have is to take into consideration the purchases / reads of the rest of books within the series. To rephrase, you would aim to break even on your expected ad revenue (not on the ad revenue you see on your dashboard!)

• If you advertise all books in series, part of your revenue after read-through will reflect in your Amazon Advertising dashboard. In this case you can aim to break even on your immediate ad revenue, the one you see on your dashboard. This is also what applies to standalones. 

💡Note: The following question — should I advertise my first book in series or all of my books? — has been a pain for all of us that have had to advertise a series, or at least for this particular writer. There is no clear answer as to which one is better, although I try to provide some guidance here. 

Next steps

We will set up the metrics of BooksFlyer so that we can optimize for either of these break even points.

P.S.: You may have noticed that we do not mention mixing up books from different series or different formats. For the most part, avoid this if you want to properly optimize your campaigns.