I usually promote the first book when introducing subsequent books in the series. Advertising geared to the second book or later may be lost on people who haven't read the first yet.

BTW, AMS ads can be used to promote multiple books if you are content not to write a tagline as part of the ad. That means you could have an ad showing your first three books, which I've had some luck with. I haven't had luck with sponsored brand ads, which allow to show three books and then point to your author page.

Unfortunately, "branding" is another word, like "exposure", tossed around when results can't be measured.  You could spend a bunch of time and/or money on doing things that cannot show any measurable results and the excuse will be made that you're "building your brand."

If you're making money selling things, you may be able to justify spending a percentage of profits on things to build or expand your brand.

If you're not making money, you need to focus on things that will sell stuff, not on flushing good money and time down the "branding building" drain.  If "brand building" efforts cannot demonstrably sell things, you need to focus on efforts that can and do.

Thanks for keeping us up on this insane plan. Very Big Brother and a huge task to oversee--by what government employees? They're all being fired, right? (It's a joke. I'm not being political Timothy.)

What I did with my first legal thriller was make it 99 cents for my newsletter and then run a bunch of 99 cent promos followed by a FreeBooksy promo. Sales really improved after the FreeBooksy promo. Now I have the sequel to that legal thriller, and I'm wondering if the same strategy will work or if there's a better way of approaching it? (I heard a while back that when publishing sequels it's best to make the first book, not the sequel, free and run a promo for the first book.) Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

Ah, that's the dilemma. We agree that we need data--but it is hard to come by.

I understand people's reluctance to share all their data in a public forum. And companies like Amazon don't ever provide an big picture data at all. We can get a rough idea of how different genres are doing, but that's about it. As far as how individual authors are doing, we can look for people that rank well and get reviewed well on Amazon and elsewhere, and we can make educated guesses about why based on the books themselves, their covers, the author's social media presence, etc. We don't necessarily know if they use AMS ads unless the ads pop up while we're poking around. Same with other kinds of ads. There may be other things about their secret sauce that aren't discernible from any public detail.

So a lot of research might get us to the educated guess level.

I suppose we all need to keep experimenting. We might not know if someone would work universally--but we can tell if it works for us.

We also know general things, like creating quality products and branding them well. (Although how to brand them is still something requiring quite a bit of thought.