Pay per click ads for useful books

If you’re following the approach from the book, then properly configured Amazon PPC ads (pay per click) should reliably deliver extra 50-200 sales per month at a moderate profit. For example, the ads for my previous book, The Workshop Survival Guide, generate an extra 100 monthly sales for a $500 boost in royalties and a few more happy readers. Ads aren’t a magic bullet and don’t scale as far as you’d like, but are generally worthwhile for this type of nonfiction.

You can certainly run these ads yourself. Amazon ads are fairly easy to set up (about five hours to optimize properly) and well worth learning (mostly intuitive if you already know other PPC platforms, otherwise 5-20). But if you’d prefer to have someone else take care of it, we’re potentially happy to run and optimize your book’s campaigns.

If so, you’d be working with Teresa Fradera, who runs the ads and Amazon pages for all my books.

The general structure is a flat $400 fee to get everything started and optimized throughout the first month. After that, we’ll (optionally) continue managing them for an ongoing share of the ads’ profits, or you can simply take it over from there. You’ll also pay the cost of the ads, but we’ll keep budgets low until the ads are proven to be profitable to minimize downside risk.

The $400 flat fee includes:

• A kick-off call to understand the goals and message of the book so we can target it properly (30 minutes)
• Setting up the first 3 campaigns, using one each of the three major options of category targeting, keyword targeting and product targeting. (5-6 hours) (Covers either amazon.com or amazon.co.uk; +$150 for both)
• Two weeks of active monitoring and optimizing (4 hours / week)
• A summary report at the end of the first month to give you a reasonable sense of what’s possible with ads for your book, and to help you decide whether to continue using us or to switch to doing it yourself (2 hours)

The ongoing profit-share is completely optional and there’s no long-term committment of any sort if you’d prefer to carry it forward yourself. The exact percentage is up for discussion after we’ve seen the data on the first month’s performance.

It’s also possible that the ads won’t be profitable. Most useful books are able to profitably advertise on Amazon, but you never know. In that case, at least you’d know that you don’t need to invest a lot more time and money into it.

Overall, the costs work out to below $30 per hour, which is a steal for a specialist nonfiction advertiser. (And if you’d like additional help optimizing your store page, author page, or anything else Amazon-related, additional hours can be added at $30 apiece.)

To get in touch with Teresa, just reach out to hello@robfitz.com with any questions, plus some details about your book.

 

(And if you haven’t already, grab the guide to learn how to write something with real potential for long-term growth and profits.)