Non-Fiction Fridays Book Review
Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author's Guide by Brian D. Meeks
Mastering Amazon Ads: An Author’s Guide is widely known among authors as THE definitive guide to how to get Amazon ads working to sell your book, and there’s good reason why. Brian D. Meeks has spent an enormous amount of time and effort, and a fair amount of money, figuring out the arcane art and he really has mastered it.
The burning question, of course, is can you make this method work for you and YOUR books? Meeks does his level best to hold your hand every step of the way, patiently leading you through Amazon’s different types of ads and how best to make them work, keyword selection and even optimising cover design.
Now, I bought this book more than a year ago, and I’ve been slowly and intermittently puttering along trying to follow all the steps to get things right, but I’m pretty ADHD and I really think this is one thing you need to dedicate time to every day in order to really see the results. Which means I’m not really seeing them. Yet. I’m not giving up, though, because I really do think this is something I can get to work for me, once I get my keywords sorted out and a proper set of ads up and running.
It’s something of a logic equation. IF you have the patience and the time to put in on a daily basis to follow Meeks’ program AND IF you have a quality product (professional book cover, ad copy, blurb and well-reviewed) THEN you WILL see good results. You don’t need a heap of money like you do to experiment with Facebook ads; it’s actually very possible to run an extremely profitable set of ads on $10 a day or less.
There’s follow-up support available in a Facebook group where Meeks himself is an active presence, and plenty of people who are happy to give you advice and feedback on your book cover and ad copy. That in itself is absolutely invaluable; too often there’s no support for you to figure out where you’ve gone wrong.
In summary, if you consider yourself a professional self-publishing author and your book is eligible for Amazon advertising (you can’t advertise erotica, for example) you should have this book, and you should work through it. Take it at your own pace, but do it. Unless you have an advertising budget in the thousands to spend on Facebook, Amazon ads really are where it’s at. You can start small and scale up once you’ve found the sweet spot of readers and keywords which work for you.
Five stars for a book which should be in every serious self-publishing author’s library.
Mastering Amazon Ads is available in most major bookstores.
I have a huge collection of writing reference books and plan to review one every Friday in a continuing series I’m calling NonFiction Fridays.
You can check out all the writing reference books I’ve reviewed already on my blog here and see the upcoming ones here on Goodreads!