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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Every self-publishing author has a moment when they look at their Amazon dashboard and ask, “Should I try running ads?”
It seems rational.
Amazon is the largest bookstore on earth. Ads theoretically boost visibility. And there are endless YouTube gurus claiming to “crack the code” with simple settings and a little patience.
When we launched Lightning Strike Marketing, we decided to test ads.
Pirate Eddie spent six weeks inside Amazon’s ad platform, running multiple campaigns, tracking spend, monitoring royalties, and doing the one thing every Category Designer in the world has to do:
Follow the money, and see if the story matches the math.
What follows is the high-level narrative you’ll want to understand before you ever consider running Amazon ads yourself. We share the gory details, the a-has, and the frustrations. By the end, you’ll know the strategic takeaways so you can quickly grasp the truth (from our point of view).
Let’s start with the thing we learned first, and the thing most authors never discover.
Surprise #1: You can’t measure what you earn.
The promise of Amazon ads rests on an illusion that you can spend $X and know whether it drove $Y in sales.
That isn’t true.
Pirate Eddie found three different “numbers” that claim to describe your book sales:
