Amazon KDP: Should You Run Ads To New Books?

I’ve noticed that this question is asked a fair amount online so, I thought I’d give my own take on it.

Whether you should run Ads to brand new books, really depends on a number of factors.

I go over some things you need to bear in mind before you consider running Ads to new books, a bit further down the page.

I was on KDP for over a year before I seriously decided to learn about Ads and even now, I am definitely still learning.

I guess if I wasn’t I’d be happy spending thousands on Ads a month, but I’m only spending a few hundred dollars if that and most of my sales are still completely organic.

However, what I learnt in that first year was a fair amount about what books worked for me.

I also got a bunch of reviews on some of my books.

It made sense by that point, to start running Ads on books with reviews. They already had feedback on them, I knew they sold as it was so – why not try and increase those sales?

Running Ads on established books was how I started to learn Ads.

However, now I’m a bit more strategic about things, including publishing new books.

Why I Run Ads On New Books Now:

I don’t now just run Ads to get more sales to books, but I also run Ads to books to get them ranked, make some initial sales and gain visibility on Amazon.

So, I will put up a brand new book, fully prepared that I will lose some money at first.

Hopefully, I get some sales from running Ads to a new book.

However, if I cannot get the ACOS down to a reasonable level, I pause the Ad after getting some initial sales and wait for some reviews to come in.

By that I mean organic reviews and those are reviews you just have to wait for. With any luck, you will get some – but not always!

Things To Consider Before Running Ads To New Books On Amazon:

1. Ideally, you will already have made sales on Amazon KDP already and will have run Ads already, by running Ads initially to established books with five star reviews. This is how I learned Ads originally and if you’re already at this level, then you can already be confident that your designs are high enough quality.
2. You should already have a budget. Don’t spend what you don’t have. Ideally your budget will be coming directly from your book sales profit already. This is profit that you can put back into your KDP business to help it grow.
3. If you have never run Ads before and have little to no sales, then you really need to be confident that your book is good enough. There are many books out there running Ads with a zero BSR and very little hope that it will change because their books just don’t match the quality of their competition. If you’re unsure, get a second opinion from people you trust to give you an honest answer.
4. If you have not run Ads before, be prepared that this will take months for you to learn and improve over time. Not every Ad will be a success and even profitable Ad campaigns need to be monitored and tweaked over time.
5. Be sure that if you want to rely on Ads to break into a competitive niche, this could potentially cost you a lot of money and no guarantees. If you niche down within a competitive area instead, you have more chance of gaining traction.

My Strategy For New Books:

I don’t run Ads to every new book but more recently, I intend to do this.

My strategy is simply to get sales and rank my book initially. If I make a profit then great, but this isn’t my primary concern.

My first aim is to get some sales in. If my ACOS still runs at a high level, I will pause the Ad until I get some reviews.

Then, I may try running some Ads to the book again and see if I can make the Ad profitable from there.

Typically, (at the time of writing this post anyway) I set up both an Auto campaign and a product targeting campaign to new books.

I run the Auto campaign in order to potentially find profitable keywords that I can use to set up a manual campaign later on.

My strategy is not always going to work out for every single book, but you will learn more about what works and what doesn’t as you learn more about Ads.

I have had the occasion where I made the mistake of thinking I could run Ads in a highly competitive niche and make sales right away with a new book, using Ads.

What I didn’t think about or research at the time, was what that many traditional publishers were also in that space and with a much bigger advertising budget than me.

Consequently, running Ads to the book was too expensive and I spent more than I wanted without even getting a sale.

When you’re competing against hundreds of others books with thousands of reviews, you will find it difficult to get sales on a brand new book with no reviews and additionally hard to run Ads, because the cost per click will be too high.

I spent a lot of time creating that book and believed it was one of the best I’d created to date but it didn’t matter, because I had not validated my idea in this case and had really just decided to do the book because I wanted to do it.

By contrast, I created another book at the same time in a very similar/connected niche but where the competition was much lower for my core keyword.

What do you think happened?

Yep…. It was THAT book that started to make sales and now makes consistent daily sales; both WITH and without Ads.

Look at the books in the niche you’re considering running Ads to and pay attention to the sponsored listings on the first page….

Are these books you could compete with yourself? Are they independently published, or traditionally published?

Are there books selling that have been published in the last 6-12 months, which are making sales and which you can compete with?

If you’re interested in a simple way to validate a niche idea, this post may help.

Have You Run Ads To New Books – How Did It Go?

If you have had success with running Ads to new books, (or not) let me know in the comments below.

Maybe you’re nervous about running Ads, but don’t want to get started learning right away.

The good thing about Amazon Ads is, that you don’t need a massive budget to start experimenting and learning the basics.

You can set your maximum bid price and even the maximum amount spent per day, so you can have a lot of control over how much you spend.

If you’re unsure how to set up your Ads, I did a video outlining this here.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment below.

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