As a high-volume seller with hundreds of thousands of units in sales, Chris Raydog shares his exact, no filter results and strategies for launching profitable products through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
That was a really good video. I just started using Amazon Ads at the end of April. The biggest lesson I've learned so far is to start slowly and be patient. Even though I have large savings that I would like to invest, it doesn't make sense. After about 3 months I'm at $10 - 13/day that I invest in ads. In the last 30 days I have spent approximately $370 and made 186 sales. My ACOS is at 24%. I would be happy if I could bring my ad spending to $50/day by the end of the year and keep my ACOS that low. All I want to say is: Be patient with the ad spending and slowly work your way up!
@@andreasommerrock7775 I've been self-publishing since 2014, so many of my books have a longer sales history (and Amazon has the data). Because Amazon has this data (e.g. which keywords customers used to find my books in the past and buy them), I started with Auto Ads and optimized them regularly. Because Auto Ads now allow me to see which keywords and products I'm currently in the process of creating separate portfolios for all the books I'm setting up 4-5 campaigns within these portfolios. So far, the campaigns have been unprofitable but I think that is normal and I have to optimize them in the long run.
You talk about proportionate return. Do you have any rules of thumb or techniques to estimate the production costs, and/or production time, for a book?
This strategy made me lose a lot of money. I should have known better. Amazon doesn't have much data on a brand new book, so the keywords that it uses are too broad and irrelevant. Manual targeting is best to start. Do a keyword research and use relevant ones to give Amazon data before launching an automatic one.
Slightly off topic here Chris. If you create a wordsearch or a childrens learning book, anything that has a spelling requirement, how do you approach the issue of UK English vs American English. Can you produce two separate books with 90% similar content but have the 10% different spelling as a big enough difference to not get done for duplicate content? Whats your approach or is it something you haven't considered?
My book lunching on free promotion as got me the BSR badge #1 New release and the free promotion has just ended, can i run Ads to build on the momentum or what yoir opinion?
I find it difficult to get past the personal information part....my tax info takes more than forever to load...not really loading 😢 what could be wrong 💔
Thanks for clear information. Question. I wrote a book a decade ago (non fiction, high content, expert in field). I never used ads. It sold well as i blogged and did media. I got sick and it no longer gets natural promo, so sales have fallen over past years (and others are using ads!). Am I better off doing manual targeted ads? I can see a couple of books i could "product target." But i am totally new to ads. I don't want to waste money with amazon maybe showing it to the wrong customers through automation. But it's still kinda daunting as I am totally new to ads.
Your book has a long sales history. This means that Amazon already has a lot of data, for example keywords that sold your book. That's why I would set up an auto ad campaign for the book. Over time you will see which keywords/products generate sales. You can take these keywords / products and set up manual campaigns.
I have trouble with mid-game in ads. I've just launched a word search book, got a 4-digit ranking, a #1 new release badge and even got an #1 bestseller badge in UK but what then? I ran with a minimal price and spent quite a lot of money in the month since the book was released. What's the correct path of weaning the book off ads and starting to make some money from it?
Yeah so I think what happens is people run the ads to get the super low BSR, and then continue to desire that BSR with a lower ad spend. But really, even if dropping your ad spend means your BSR doesn't look as nice, you still need to make money from it. Likelihood is you reduce your ads and the BSR takes a little hit - but provided you are already making organic sales, you can probably afford to do it. A low BSR doesn't mean much if you ad spend is pissing away profits - whereas a BSR of say, 10k on the UK store with less ads might mean you're actually in profit. So I would take a look at the ads current ACOS and see if you can drop your CPC. For me, if I am getting over 10-15 clicks a day, then I am happy to drop the bid down a few cents, then leave it for a few days then repeat. Without seeing your exact situation, it's a little hard, but that's what I do - I weigh up if the organic sales are strong enough to reduce the ads, and in some case for my books I don't have any ads running now - but I definitely suggest you keep campaigns going, but as you know, you can't just keep running them forever at a loss. Feel free to share some more details about the CPC, ACOS, spend etc
@@ChrisRaydog the ACOS for these book was quite ok - between 32 and 50% but the CPC is high. I started with 1.00 and then gradually reduced to 0.50 for UK and 0.70 for US. If it gets lower I start to loose impressions. maybe it's because it is a competitive niche + a new book. A couple of days ago I had a bad review (which could be from a competitor) and decided to make an experiment. Because of this review the ads results got worse, so I switch off the ads for US and left them on in UK (where the reduction of sales because of bad review wasn't as bad). Plus I reduced the price to minimal for US again. I'll wait several days to see what happens. Maybe some new reviews will arrive meanwhile.
@@ChrisRaydog sorry, I've left a reply but youtube seems to have filtered it. the ACOS was ok - below 50 percent most of the time which I think is ok for a new book. the CPC was quite high - 70 cents and 50 pennies in US and UK. now I was forced to shut down the ads anyway. got a couple of bad reviews and the acos rose dramatically. so I shut the ads down and lowered the price again. I'll wait for some time until more favorable reviews and ratings arrive and see if the book can hold organically.
Great advice that applies to fiction too. KDP isn't a get-rich-scheme. It takes time to build reader/buyer trust by consistently producing high-quality content.
it has been a week now since I started Kdp however I couldn't find a niche whenever I research on Amazon I find either saturated niches or the researched niche keywords has nothing to do with the books in the results I mean that these found books on the first page are running in different theme.. I am depressed since I can't afford paid tools it's such a hard stuff.
Hi Chris, Do you think kdp is still worth it currently since there's an influx of less valuable materials coupled with the use of AI tools? Is it really worth the hustle?
Thank you very much, could you please make a video of how you check for trademarks especially for long tail keywords and different keyword variations like in the subtitle and description etc... I used Trademerch but it's down now.
I think I can tell exactly why people are not buying the faerie coloring books with the illustrated covers. It's not because the covers are AI created, but because they do NOT represent an actual coloring page as the user would see inside the book, and nice, simple, high-contrast line art that anyone could easily color in using color pencils, markers or some other traditional method. So those covers are a big turn-off to those people who want to color in a traditional style coloring book, and a potential red-flag to the type of pages on the inside. Which proves to be true\ by lack of sales. The cover is NOT LINE ART, as one would expect to find in a traditional coloring book, it is a painting. The insides of those faerie coloring books are also NOT traditional line art. The coloring pages are grayscale drawings, similar to pencil drawings. They do not have the high-contrast black line artwork that is all the same thickness that users find easy to color in. There is just not enough contrast in the artwork, no outlines to easily color in, and most people overall just do not like the look or the difficult method of coloring-in a fully rendered pencil drawing (aka "shading"). Overall, those just look too fussy and laborious to color in. People want nice, simple graphic design, with solid line art that has consistent line width throughout. The book as a whole should also look like it was done by one person, and not have inconsistent styles of art even if it all the same theme.
Ok, here's my take on mandalas: B0CV7WJGZ3 What I don't get about coloring books is how to get them off the ground after that first month. What generally happens to me is that I have this initial period of sales with bsr below 100k, I get some good reviews but after that it just drops dead. I think I figured out how to do a solid book but I can't grasp how to get the book past gravity to the orbit.
I wanted to ask about something. I watched your keyword finding videos where you talked about main and sub keywords. If let's say I found a main keyword with search term '' Cute coloring book for adults'' so I need to add this keyword as it is or can I also add it like "cute coloring book for adults and kids". What I want to ask is that can we add another word in main keyword? Or we need to add as it is.
I'm trying to get my own thing going with 'mindless patterns' coloring books but it's not easy especially when people complain about issues that I have no control on like paper quality.
@@ChrisRaydog yeah, I have these pages in the kids activity books. I figured that variety could be a better option than a whole book of one thing. also trying to get into word search for adults. never had much luck in this niche in the past but now I'm better at doing books, so I figured... launching seems to become even more of a pain in the ass. $1 bids just to get some impressions and early sales :(
Thank you, great video. I would like to learn mire about coming up with book titles that are not trademarked. It seems everything is taken. I published my first 2 books, and they called me out for 1 of tge titles ..👀
Hey Chris! My activity books sudoku in particular have been getting blocked even when i tried changing the cover multiple times i made original covers myself. Is it that im not allowed to make these books on kdp because of my account being recently new or something else? Interior was quite fine too.
My ad dashboard is showing $9.8 ad spend for this month till 19th. While invoice is showing $50 for this month. Is there anyone else who has been the same issue
Great video, as always, thank you! I just had a demoralizing experience. Launched a new book, modest sales, and the first review came in.... 2 stars! Complaining about the paper quality! 😢 I hear that it happens sometimes, but this is my first time. Have to decide what to do next, aside from carrying on of course.
Free course 😬 I didn't find this video until now but I just had to try anyways😊 thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.. this is a really good and in depth video that I learned a lot from so thank you I really do appreciate it.. this video is basically a course itself being that you cover pretty much everything important that someone would need to know to be able to succeed in this business so I don't know what you could even add that you didn't already cover.. great video and much appreciated.. peace & love ~Lorin
6:42 I agree! I think you can produce a better book if you go for niches/genres where you are comfortable with the subject matter or you know will be able to offer a unique spin (better content + book cover) rather than pursing one trendy hot niche after another. Btw Chris congrats on your website. It is... sick 💥! It's a treasure trove of real practical resources, will be looking forward to the goodies😊
Interesting stuff, I'm totally new to KDP but after eating knowledge about it for a few weeks I started to also do that exercice of guessing how a book is performing just based on the look and feeling only from the cover, in some areas I also do 'guess exercices' about which books are Independant or not I might be in the right path, thanks for the video !
