Amazon Advertising for Books A How-To Guide

Amazon ads are a powerful way for authors to get their books directly in front of people who are actively shopping on the platform. It's a pay-to-play system that lets you buy prime real estate in search results and on the product pages of similar books, giving you a huge leg up over the crowded organic listings.

For a new book, or even an older one that needs a boost, this kind of paid placement is one of the best ways to get that initial traction and start teaching Amazon's algorithm who your book is for.

Why Amazon Ads Are an Author's Best Friend

The "publish and pray" strategy just doesn't work anymore. With millions of other books out there, you have to actively lead readers to your product page. This is where Amazon Advertising becomes an indispensable tool for any serious author today. It’s not about getting a quick, temporary sales bump; it's about training the algorithm.

Think of it this way: every sale that comes from your ad tells Amazon that your book is a good match for certain keywords and reader interests. This initial push often starts a snowball effect, improving your organic search rankings and helping you show up more often in those coveted "Customers also bought" carousels.

Turning Readers into Data Points

Every click and sale from your ads is more than just a transaction—it's valuable data. You get to see exactly what keywords shoppers are using to find books like yours, which competing authors your target readers are interested in, and what kind of ad copy makes them click.

This feedback loop is gold. A well-run ad campaign gives you the power to:

Get Seen Immediately: Your book can be visible from its very first day, letting you skip the painfully slow climb up the sales ranks.
Gather Reader Insights: You'll learn what makes shoppers tick, which helps you make smarter marketing decisions everywhere, not just on Amazon.
Improve Organic Rankings: Paid sales contribute to your book's overall sales history, a huge factor in how Amazon's algorithm ranks you organically.
Build a Real Business: Consistent, profitable ads can create a reliable income stream, turning your author career into a sustainable business.

Thriving in a Competitive Marketplace

Let's be real—the scale of Amazon is mind-boggling. They command an estimated 50% of all print book sales and a staggering 67% of e-book sales in the US alone. Books are still the site's most popular product category, moving around 57.2 million units a year. To stand a chance in that massive ecosystem, you have to be proactive.

Running ads isn't an expense; it's an investment in your book's long-term discoverability. You're buying data, visibility, and momentum that pays dividends long after the campaign ends.

The most successful authors see Amazon Ads as one key piece of a larger multi-channel marketing strategy. While the ads drive traffic directly on Amazon, your work on social media, in your newsletter, and elsewhere builds the brand awareness that makes those ads perform even better. For more on this, check out our guide on https://barkerbooks.com/book-promotion-ideas/.

Ultimately, Amazon Ads give you a direct line to the largest gathering of book buyers in the world, putting you in control of building your audience and your career.

Choosing the Right Campaign for Your Book

Jumping into the Amazon Ads dashboard for the first time can feel overwhelming. You're hit with terms like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Lockscreen Ads, and it's easy to get stuck wondering where to even begin.

The secret is to shift your perspective. Don't think of them as just "ad types"—think of them as different tools designed for specific jobs. The right one for you depends entirely on your immediate goal. Are you launching a new thriller and need to drive those critical first sales? Or are you looking to build awareness for your entire five-book fantasy series? Each objective has a perfect ad campaign to match.

Choosing the Right Amazon Ad Type for Your Book

Deciding where to invest your ad budget can be tough. This table breaks down the three main ad types to help you align your campaign choice with your specific goals as an author.

Ad Type	Best For	Primary Targeting	Key Goal
Sponsored Products	Launching a new book, boosting a single title, targeting specific competitor books.	Keywords (e.g., "psychological thriller") and Products (e.g., a competitor's ASIN).	Direct Sales
Sponsored Brands	Promoting a book series, building author brand recognition, showcasing a catalog of books.	Keywords, but focuses on broad terms to capture a wider audience.	Brand Awareness
Lockscreen Ads	Visually-driven genres like fantasy, sci-fi, romance, and thrillers. Best for discovery.	Reader interests and genres (e.g., readers who buy epic fantasy).	Discovery & Impression

Ultimately, a strong advertising plan often involves a mix of these types working together. Each one plays a unique role in a reader's journey from discovery to purchase.

Lockscreen Ads: The Visual Power Play

Available exclusively to KDP authors, Lockscreen Ads are a different beast altogether. These ads put your book cover directly on the lockscreens of Kindle E-readers and Fire tablets when the device is asleep. It's a purely visual format that lives or dies by the strength of your cover design.

This ad type is a game-changer for genres where the cover art does the heavy lifting. A striking fantasy illustration, a romantic couple, or a chilling thriller design can capture a reader's attention instantly without any ad copy.

This format shines for authors in highly visual genres like fantasy, sci-fi, romance, and thrillers. Because it targets readers based on their established genre interests rather than specific keywords, it’s more about discovery than direct sales. Think of it as putting your book on a special shelf right in front of the perfect reader.

For a deeper look at using ads to build your audience, you can check out our complete guide on how to promote your book on Amazon. The best long-term strategy often involves a smart combination of these campaigns. You might start with a broad Sponsored Products "automatic" campaign to gather keyword data from Amazon, then use those insights to launch a highly-tuned "manual" campaign for maximum return.

Getting Your First Ad Campaign Off the Ground

Alright, let's get into the nitty-gritty of creating your first campaign right from your KDP dashboard. We're going to focus on a Sponsored Product campaign, which is hands-down the best place for most authors to start. No need to get bogged down in jargon; I'll walk you through it.

The process starts with a few simple choices: picking your book, giving the campaign a name you'll actually remember, and deciding between automatic and manual targeting. Every decision matters, but the great thing is, nothing is permanent. You can always adjust as you go.

This just shows that good advertising isn't a one-and-done deal. It’s a continuous loop of researching, organizing your campaigns, and tweaking them based on what the data tells you.

Automatic vs. Manual Targeting: What's the Difference?

Right off the bat, Amazon will ask you to choose between two targeting types. Think of it this way:

Automatic targeting is like handing the keys to Amazon's algorithm. It scans your book's genre, blurb, and keywords to decide where to show your ad. This is an incredible tool for discovery—it helps you find out what search terms readers are actually using to find books just like yours. You'll be surprised what pops up.

Manual targeting, on the other hand, puts you firmly in control. You give Amazon a specific list of keywords, author names, and even competitor book ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Number) where you want your ad to appear. It requires more homework upfront but gives you pinpoint precision.

My Two-Cents: Don't choose. Do both. Seriously. Run a small, low-budget automatic campaign (think $5-$10 a day) for a week or two. Its only job is to be a research tool. At the same time, build out a manual campaign using the keyword strategies we’re about to cover. This approach gives you immediate control and long-term data.

Digging for Keyword Gold

The success of your manual campaign lives and dies by your keywords. You need to get inside a reader's head and find the phrases they type when they're ready to buy. Here’s where I find the best ones.

Become the Amazon Search Bar's Best Friend: Go to Amazon and start typing phrases related to your book. "sci-fi with dragons," "gritty detective novel," "clean contemporary romance." Watch the autocomplete suggestions like a hawk. Those are real searches from real readers.
Spy on Your Competition (Ethically!): Pull up the book pages for the top 3-5 authors in your niche. Scroll down past the blurb to the "Customers also bought" carousel. This isn't just a recommendation list; it's a ready-made list of author names and book titles you can target directly.
Mine Your Own Categories: Look at the specific categories and subcategories your book is in. Those niche labels, like "Hard-Boiled Mystery" or "Military Science Fiction," often make for fantastic, highly relevant keywords that convert well.

To help craft compelling ad copy and descriptions for your campaign, some of the top AI content creation tools for marketers can be a huge time-saver and spark some great ideas.

Setting Your Bids and Budget (Without Breaking the Bank)

Once you've got a solid keyword list, you have to tell Amazon how much a click is worth to you. This is your bid. When you're just starting, there's no need to be aggressive.

I usually recommend starting with bids between $0.25 and $0.45. For most book genres, this is the sweet spot for gathering initial data without burning through your cash.

Next is your daily budget—the absolute maximum you'll spend in a day. A starting budget of $10 per day is plenty. You're not trying to sell a million copies on day one; you're trying to see what works.

Finally, you'll see a setting for bidding strategy. Amazon offers a few choices, but the safest bet for beginners is "Dynamic bids – down only." This simply tells Amazon, "If you don't think this click will lead to a sale, feel free to bid lower for me." It’s a great way to protect your budget from wasteful spending.

With these settings in place, you're ready to launch. Now the real fun begins: watching the data roll in and learning what makes readers click.

Managing Your Ad Spend Without Losing Your Shirt

This is where the rubber meets the road. Getting an ad campaign up and running is exciting, but a campaign is only truly successful if it's profitable. To get there, you have to ignore the vanity metrics and focus on the numbers that actually put money in your pocket.

Let's cut through the dashboard clutter. You really only need to care about three things to start: Impressions (how many people saw your ad), Clicks (how many were interested enough to click), and the king of all metrics: your Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS).

Decoding Your ACoS

What is ACoS? In simple terms, it's the percentage of your sales revenue that you spent on ads to get those sales. It answers the most critical question you have: "For every dollar my book earned, how many cents did I spend on advertising?"

A lower ACoS means your campaign is more efficient and profitable.

The formula itself is pretty straightforward:
ACoS = (Total Ad Spend / Total Sales) x 100

So, if you spent $20 on ads and that brought in $100 in book sales, your ACoS would be a healthy 20%.

Finding Your Break-Even Point

Knowing your ACoS is one thing, but knowing what a good ACoS is for your book is the real game-changer. This all boils down to your royalty rate. To figure out if your ads are making or losing money, you have to calculate your break-even ACoS.

It’s simpler than it sounds: your break-even ACoS is your royalty percentage. If Amazon pays you a 70% royalty on your ebook, your break-even ACoS is 70%. Any ACoS below that number means you're in the black. Anything above it, and you're paying for readers.

For example: Your book earns a 70% royalty.
Your ACoS is 45%: Nice! You're making a 25% profit on every sale driven by that ad.
Your ACoS is 80%: Ouch. You're losing 10% on each sale. Time to adjust your bids or targeting.

Here's a pro tip: your goal isn't always immediate, massive profit. A break-even campaign can be a huge win, especially during a new launch. You're essentially getting new readers and goosing your sales rank for free, which pays off in long-term organic sales down the road.

Profitability is the engine that lets you scale your author business. Keeping a close eye on these numbers is non-negotiable. It helps to have a system; in fact, our guide on how to track your book sales can give you a much clearer view of the bigger picture.

Setting a Sensible Daily Budget

When you first launch a campaign, you're not just buying sales—you're buying data. You need to learn what works. During this discovery phase, a modest daily budget is your best friend.

I always recommend starting new campaigns with $10 to $15 per day. This is the sweet spot. It's enough to gather meaningful data within a week or two without risking a ton of cash on unproven keywords or targets.

The main metric here, ACoS, tells the story of your campaign's efficiency. A really dialed-in campaign might hit an ACoS around 15.68%—a scenario where a $14.99 book needs about four clicks costing $2.35 to land one sale. But remember, after Amazon's cut and printing costs, your profit margins can get thin fast if you aren't careful. For a deeper dive into these calculations, the folks at SellerMetrics have some great insights.

Making Smart Bid Adjustments

Don't touch anything until your campaign has at least a few hundred impressions. Once you have that initial data, you can start making informed decisions. Look at your keywords and see which ones are pulling their weight (low ACoS) and which ones are just burning through your budget.

Your strategy from here is simple and iterative:

Boost the Winners: If a keyword has a fantastic ACoS, nudge its bid up slightly—just $0.03 to $0.05 is enough to start. This helps you get more impressions and sales from something that's already working.
Trim the Losers: For keywords with a high ACoS or those getting clicks but zero sales, lower the bid. If it still doesn't perform after another week, pause it and move on.

This process of gradual adjustment is the heart of long-term campaign management. It’s not about making drastic, sweeping changes. It's a steady, patient process of refining your targeting based on how real readers behave. Stay on top of your ACoS, make small, data-driven tweaks, and you’ll build a sustainable advertising engine that sells books while you sleep.

Keeping Your Campaigns Growing for the Long Haul

Getting your Amazon ad campaign live is just the first step. The real work—and where you'll see the biggest results for your book—happens in the weeks and months that follow. The most successful authors I know treat their ad campaigns less like a "set it and forget it" machine and more like a living, breathing part of their business that needs regular attention.

Think of it like tending a garden. You can’t just toss seeds on the ground and expect a prize-winning harvest. You have to monitor, water, and pull the weeds. The good news is, a simple routine of just 15-20 minutes once or twice a week is usually all it takes to keep your campaigns healthy and profitable.

Your Secret Weapon: The Search Term Report

If there’s one tool you need to master, it's the search term report. This isn’t a list of the keywords you chose; it’s a report showing the exact phrases real shoppers actually typed into Amazon before they clicked on your ad. This thing is an absolute goldmine of reader data.

When you dig in, you'll start to see a few patterns:

Proven Winners: These are search terms pulling in clicks and, most importantly, sales at a profitable ACoS. Jackpot.
Irrelevant Spenders: These are the terms eating your budget. They get clicks but have zero to do with your book. Think of someone searching for "vampire romance" and clicking on your sweet historical romance ad.
New Opportunities: You'll find relevant terms you never would have thought of on your own that are getting impressions or a few clicks.

Your job is to sift through this report and act on what you find. It's a constant cycle of harvesting what works and pruning what doesn't.

The search term report is the unfiltered voice of your customer. It tells you, in their own words, exactly what they're looking for. Ignoring it is like turning down free, invaluable feedback from a focus group on how to sell your book.

Turning All That Data into Action

Once you've spent some time in the report, your next steps become pretty clear. You'll want to take those promising keywords you found in your automatic campaign's search term report and move them over to a manual campaign. This gives you much more control, allowing you to set a specific bid for that proven keyword and really dial in its performance.

At the same time, you have to cut off the budget-draining terms. This is where negative keywords are your best friend. By adding an irrelevant search term (like "free kindle books" or that "vampire romance" example) as a negative keyword, you're telling Amazon, "Stop showing my ad to anyone who searches for this." It’s a simple click that immediately stops the cash bleed and makes your whole campaign more efficient.

The Fine Art of Patience and Scaling

I see so many authors make this mistake: they panic and make changes way too quickly. A keyword with only 50 impressions and no clicks isn't a failure yet; it's just statistically insignificant. You have to give the data time to mature.

A good rule of thumb I use is to wait until a keyword has at least 500-1000 impressions before I make a final call on whether it's a keeper or a dud.

Once you have a campaign that is humming along and consistently profitable, the big question is what to do next. You really have two choices:

Scale Up: If a campaign is performing well with a low ACoS, you can start to gently increase the daily budget to get your book in front of more of those hungry readers. I recommend raising it in small steps, maybe 20-25% at a time, and watching the results closely.
Hold Steady: Sometimes, the smartest move is to do nothing at all. A stable, profitable campaign is a massive asset. Instead of getting greedy and trying to scale it aggressively, you can just let it run, consistently driving sales and boosting your book's organic visibility and sales rank.

Checking in on your campaigns regularly is crucial. As of 2025, the average conversion rate for Amazon ads is around 10.33%, which means about one in every ten clicks turns into a sale. For more on this, check out these key advertising stats on adbadger.com. By keeping an eye on your impressions, clicks, and costs every few days, you can fine-tune your campaigns to meet—or even beat—these benchmarks. This consistent effort is what separates a fleeting sales spike from sustainable, long-term growth as an author.

Got Questions About Your Amazon Book Ads? We've Got Answers

Even with the best game plan, stepping into the world of Amazon Advertising can feel like navigating a maze. It’s completely normal for questions and a few "what-if" scenarios to pop up along the way.

Let's cut through the noise and tackle some of the most common hurdles authors face. Think of this as your personal troubleshooting guide for those moments when you're staring at your ad dashboard, wondering what to do next.

How Much Money Should I Actually Be Spending?

This is the big one, isn't it? The good news is, you don't need a Hollywood-sized budget to make a real impact. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes I see authors make is throwing too much money at their ads right out of the gate.

A daily budget of $10 to $15 per campaign is a fantastic place to start. Seriously. That's enough to let Amazon's algorithm do its thing and gather some valuable data over a week or two without you having to mortgage your house.

Your initial goal isn't to hit the bestseller list overnight. It’s to learn. You're on a fact-finding mission to see which keywords and targets actually work. Once you find a winner, that's when you can confidently start to inch the budget up. Always scale your spending based on solid data, never on hope.

Help! My Ads Aren't Getting Any Impressions!

It's a special kind of frustration to launch an ad you're excited about, only to see a big fat zero in the impressions column. If your ad isn't being shown to anyone, it almost always comes down to one of a few usual suspects.

Here's a quick checklist to run through:

Are Your Bids Too Low? This is the culprit about 80% of the time. The ad space on Amazon is a constant auction. If you're bidding $0.25 for a keyword and another author is bidding $0.75, their ad is going to get the spot. Try nudging your bids up by $0.05 or $0.10 at a time until they start getting some traction.
Are Your Keywords Hyper-Niche? I love a good "18th-century left-handed Victorian detective romance" as much as the next person, but chances are, not many readers are typing that into the search bar. You need a healthy mix of these super-specific long-tail keywords and some broader, higher-traffic terms to get things moving.
Did Amazon Disapprove Your Ad? Amazon has some pretty strict rules. It's easy to get an ad rejected for something simple, like making a claim in your ad copy ("award-winning author") that isn't reflected on your book's sales page. Always check your campaign manager for any alerts or notifications.

My advice? Always check your bids first. It’s the quickest and most common fix.

When Will I Actually See Some Results?

In the world of advertising, patience isn't just a virtue—it's a strategy. You won't know if a campaign is a home run or a total dud in just 24 hours. The algorithm needs time to learn, and more importantly, you need time to gather enough data to make informed decisions.

Hands off for the first 3-5 days! Let the campaign run, breathe, and collect data. Making knee-jerk changes based on a tiny snapshot of performance is the fastest way to kill a potentially great ad.

After about a week, you should have enough information (I like to see at least 1,000 impressions per target) to do your first real analysis. Optimization is a marathon, not a sprint, but you'll start to see those initial glimmers of what’s working within that first 7-10 day window.

Is It Okay to Target Other Authors By Name?

Not only is it okay, it’s one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for Amazon advertising for books. Targeting a competitor author's name or a specific book's ASIN is your chance to get your book in front of a perfectly primed audience.

Think of it this way: if a reader is actively searching for an author who writes stories just like yours, they are your ideal customer, pre-qualified and ready to buy. Placing your ad on that author’s book page is like setting up a booth for your sci-fi epic right outside the premiere of the new Star Wars movie. It’s smart, it's relevant, and it works.

At BarkerBooks, we help authors navigate every stage of their publishing journey, from manuscript to marketing. If you're ready to see your book in the hands of readers worldwide, we have the expertise to make it happen. Learn more about our comprehensive publishing packages at https://barkerbooks.com.