How I Sold Over $44,000 Worth of Books Using Amazon Ads

I set out to publish my own book and found something else, learning to use Amazon ads to boost sales.

As a course creator and digital marketer, I thought writing a solo book would be fun. I had been in collaborative book formats before but wanted to base my own book based off of my course: How to be authentic online.

I wanted to publish a book, and then I learned about the underground world of KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and creating passive income. To give you an overview of my background, it didn’t happen overnight.

In 2019, I learned how to run Facebook ads, and then I decided to learn Amazon ads for KDP publishing. Here are the steps I took:

Getting Started with KDP Publishing

I started KDP publishing on January 1st, but I didn’t know that it took 72 hours for a book to get approved. So my first book was published on January 3rd or 4th, and my first organic sale came on January 21st. I continued to publish 150 books in 90 days, but I was uploading without intention or strategy, and I expected sales. Most of my time was spent uploading journals and notebooks with pretty covers.

I didn’t know anything about keyword research in order to be successful.

So I took a step back, took a couple of courses, and watched tons of YouTube videos. There is a lot of helpful free information out there to get started, so there’s really no excuse not to invest in researching keywords before expecting sales.

After doing keyword research, I picked a niche, launched a book, and turned on ads for it, and that’s where the success came from.

The Power of Amazon Ads

In my first six months of learning ads, I sold almost a thousand books from ads only. I talk about the power of ads, but it’s deeper than that:

What if you could write a book, you knew beforehand was in demand?

Would you write the book?

I’ve spent $3,000 on ads in 217 days, which rounds out to be around $20 to $30 a day. You might be thinking:

Well, I don’t have that kind of money to start with.

In fact, I didn’t start with a $3,000 budget either. I started with a $20 budget, and as soon as I got a sale, I made sure to reinvest the money to scale appropriately. I learned the hard way with Facebook ads when I didn’t reinvest my profits back into ads.

Results and Benefits of Amazon Ads

In six months, the book sold almost 2,000 times. But I’ve only paid for 967 of them. Paid for it, meaning I used ads to achieve those sales.

So altogether, the sales have totaled out to $44,000. Please note that this is not royalties, and the dashboard doesn’t show royalties, which would be nice if it did. But the idea that books are profitable is a big deal!

What’s exciting for me is that I didn’t pay for the impressions I got from the ads. Three million people saw my book, and many of them put it on their Most Wanted wish list. My book is in the most wished-for books, so there are other perks to running ads. In my opinion, if you are interested in publishing a book on Amazon, it’s a fun platform to master that leads to additional income.

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