You sell books on Amazon. It makes sense to advertise on Amazon as well. Amazon Marketing Services lets you create ads that run on Amazon pages. While people are looking for books similar to yours, an ad will display on the page which hopefully entices them to click over to your book.

For an ad campaign I created for Redwood: Servant of the State, I chose to run the ad based on interests. My targeted interests were Teen and Young Adult, and Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I budgeted $125, and limited the time for a month total, running from about mid-May to mid-June. Here’s the stats for the run:

Over 45,000 impressions looks impressive, but out of all those page views you’ll note only 39 people clicked on the ad, and of those only one person bought a book which was selling for $1.35 at the time. While the run didn’t go over the budget by a long shot, ultimately it did cost $23.50 to sell the one book. Here’s what the ad looked like:

While it was fun to have an ad for my book running alongside some other great books on Amazon, the return on investment proved weak. Things that could possibly improve the return might be a better ad. The basic ad only allows two lines of copy above an image of the cover. Perhaps different verbiage would lead to more clicks, and thus more sales.