Unless you're writing nonfiction that a certain politician could construe as defamation, I don't think you have to worry. That same politician is running into all kinds of issues right now. I think the number of non-political fights he's going to want to pick in the foreseeable future will be very limited.

The US has gone through periods of time during which freedom of expression has been more limited. But the overall trend has been in favor of freedom, at least in most instances. Some things, like pornography, have been put into a separate category.

Quote from: Anarchist on April 23, 2025, 04:17:10 AM

The people I watch spend six figures each month. A few spend much more. (I'm a peasant compared to these advertisers.)

I'm not even a peasant on AMS; I'm the dirt beneath a peasant's bare foot.  On an increasingly rare good month, I break even on AMS.  But AMS accounts for 2/3 of my overall sales and I can't give it up if I want to get my books before even a few eyeballs.

Your experience sounds a bit better than mine, but the pattern is certainly similar.

But can there be that many people who are spending six figures? Probably not. It's a shame that the system really only works for them, or for people like Anarchist who spend huge amounts of time. This feels more like a large corporation thing rather than something designed for small, independent vendors (though the KDP version started out not only as indie-author exclusive but as a benefit of KU). I still think Amazon could make more money if it found ways to make the system work better for smaller (but far more numerous) advertisers.

I wonder if your AMS success is based on KU, Bill? I've always wondered if my failure is due to me being wide and not offering subscription price.

Well, remember that I don't have a positive ROI, so "success" is a very relative term here.

AMS has always sold books for me, right from the very beginning (which was also roughly the same time KU started). The ROI has gotten worse as the field got more crowded. I don't think I ever had a positive ROI, but in the beginning, the loss was much smaller, and it was possible to write it off as an investment in the future.

Unfortunately, as I get older, my work day gets shorter. So, much as I'd like to try putting as much time into it as Anarchist does, if I did that, I wouldn't have any productive time left to write. I have been trying to monitor more carefully. Typically, I kill ads that don't perform. I add negative keywords when inappropriate search terms are leading to hits. I kill keywords or products that produce lots of hits but no few or no sales. Sometimes, that helps. Sometimes, it doesn't.

Books in smaller niches come closer to having a positive ROI. I assume that's because the genre-type searches lead more directly to interested buyers. In broad genres, you inevitably draw in more people. But even subgenre terms (like urban fantasy) are defined differently by different purchasers, and those are big umbrellas with lots of different approaches. Ask someone to distinguish among urban, contemporary, and paranormal, and you'll get lots of different responses. Ask someone what mythology is, and the definitions will be much closer. Hence, ads for my two retellings of myths consistently come closest to positive ROI, sometimes actually achieving it (fewer sales, but far fewer extraneous clicks). One of my education books used to do the same thing, but I notice it's not doing much of anything now. (I don't know if Amazon does this on purpose, but after a while, ads don't accumulate any impressions even if they're still listed as serving. Creating a more or less identical ad solves the problem.)

To your original question, KU is the gateway to making more on Amazon. It's consistently more than half my income, with a few recent exceptions. And the current calculations don't show projected royalties from it as part of ACOS calculations, which would look somewhat better with it included. But the raw numbers don't look that impressive. This month, as I mentioned, about 75% of my sales are from ads, but the ads only claim responsibility for about 10% of my KU pages read. I don't see any logical reason for that discrepancy and think that the KU part of the system may be undercounting how many pages come from ads, but that's just a guess.

I always gross much higher in KU than out of it. But as we well know, your actual mileage may vary.

The other puzzle is the way ad performances fluctuate for no particular reason. One month, an ad will pull in lots of sales. The next month, it will pull in almost none. Does the competition shift that much? Does the type of people who see the ad shift that much? I have no idea, but the fluctuations are wild. I guess if I had the time to do something like Anarchist does, I might find out.

Quote from: Bill Hiatt on April 22, 2025, 11:08:09 PM

That is indeed true, but I can't help thinking that Amazon loses a lot of potential advertisers because the system just doesn't work well enough. So while they may be getting decent income from it, I would be willing to bet they'd get a lot more if they made it more worthwhile.

I classify AMS as gambling.
And like all gambling, the house always wins in the long run.

I've always seen it as that. AMS has never worked for me and was always a money pit. I spent over $2k to realize that in pain. Fortunately, being wide, I've had mileage with BookBub ads. But even there it's not 1:1 ($1 bid for $1 sale) (I once hit the right algorithms for half a year or so on BB and had that 1:1 success). Unfortunately, ads everywhere always make you lose money. Only by selling in series and collections can you recoup.

Back to "heavy lifting", yes Amazon sends emails but it doesn't correspond with a lot of sales for me. Ranking really doesn't either. I don't think the old strategy of releasing a perfect launch is reliable anymore. It'll help, of course, but you have to be working on a larger plan. Maybe if you're KU, it's all different. I wouldn't know. But wide, I can't rely on Amazon. I pay attention to them, cause I have to due to volume, but my focus isn't solely with Amazon.

Other things I've heard earlier suggest that people with a huge budget (and a decent knowledge of how to optimize AMS ads) can make a profit.

But that's a dangerous proposition. I heard that too a long time ago and bumped up $. No avail. Anyone new to the biz and ads, I advise starting small. If you're ad is going bonkers with sales, then up the ante. But I caution people not to throw down loads of cash and start small.

I wonder if your AMS success is based on KU, Bill? I've always wondered if my failure is due to me being wide and not offering subscription price.

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