I want to tell you about Amazon advertising.
Actually, I want to tell you about the version of myself that existed before Amazon advertising, because she was simpler and she slept better and she did not spend her Tuesday evenings reading about cost-per-click optimization and ACOS percentages and bid adjustments.
That version of me is gone. She has been replaced by someone who has strong opinions about dynamic bids and knows what a placement modifier is and once spent forty-five minutes trying to opt out of advertising in India, which is a sentence I could not have predicted writing six months ago.
Here is what nobody tells you about self-publishing: the writing is the part you know how to do. You sit down, you tell the truth, you find the funny, you edit until it is right. You have been doing that your whole life in one form or another. The writing makes sense.
The marketing is a completely different language spoken by people who are very calm about things that seem to me like they should be more alarming. My cost per click is how much? My what percentage is what? I need to set up a what in India?
I set up my first Amazon Sponsored Products campaign on a Tuesday. I chose dynamic bids — down only, because that was the recommendation and also because it sounded like the most conservative option and I was not ready to be aggressive about anything except the book itself. I set my daily budget to five dollars. I set my default bid to thirty-five cents. I adjusted my top of search placement to fifty percent because someone told me that was sensible.
Then I waited.
My campaign got 16,200 impressions in the first week. 16 clicks. Zero sales directly attributed to the ad. The ad was being shown to people. Those people were choosing not to click. I tried not to take this personally. The people did not know me. The people were just scrolling past my book on their way to somewhere else. This is fine. This is normal. This is the algorithm.
Then I got a notification that my campaigns had stopped delivering due to insufficient balance in India.
I do not want to advertise in India. I did not set up advertising in India. India appeared in my campaign the way things sometimes appear in a community management situation — unexpectedly, requiring immediate attention, and with no clear explanation of how it got there.
I fixed it. It took longer than it should have. I have opinions about this that I am keeping to myself for now.
The ads are running. The book is being shown to people. Some of those people will click. Some of those people who click will buy. Some of those people who buy will read. Some of those people who read will review. This is the funnel. I understand the funnel. I am living inside the funnel.
It is fine in here. A little weird. But fine.
See you next week.
— Kayla
P.S. If you are reading this and you clicked an Amazon ad to get here — hello. You are the click. You are what this is all for. Thank you.