FOR AUTHORS
What Should Authors Post on Social Media Between Releases?
What should authors post between releases? A balanced mix of story, process and reader posts, series reminders, countdowns and a weekly plan.
Find keywords and product targets for book ads, choose match types, use negative keywords and judge ACoS against read-through.
The best Amazon ads keywords for books are the phrases and products your readers already search for and browse: comp authors and specific titles (targeted by ASIN), plus subgenre terms and tropes. Start with an automatic campaign. Move the winners into a manual one with broad, phrase or exact match. Add negatives, and judge ACoS against read-through.
Most authors who struggle with Amazon Ads don’t have a budget problem or a cover problem. They have a targeting problem. The ad shows up for the wrong searches, or for the right ones at the wrong price. Get the keywords and product targets right in your book advertising and you have a campaign that sells books in the background. Get them wrong and it just burns money.
This guide assumes you can already set up a Sponsored Products campaign. If you can’t, read our beginner’s guide to Amazon Ads for authors first and then come back.
Think like a reader at the search bar or on a book page. Amazon gives you two ways to target. You can target by keyword, meaning what the reader types, or by product, meaning the book or category they’re looking at. For fiction you need both.
Learn Amazon’s own rules for keywords. They’re case-insensitive, limited to 10 words and 80 characters, and they can contain only letters and numbers, plus spaces. Punctuation isn’t allowed either, so no question marks or ampersands, and no quotation marks.
Product targeting puts your ad on the detail pages of specific books, or on search results where those books rank. In Amazon’s system you can target individual ASINs (the 10-character product code for each listing) or whole categories. Categories can then be narrowed by brand or price range, or by ratings. Your best source of ASINs is your own research. Look at the books on your also-bought list and the ones at the top of your subgenre chart, along with any books that turn up in your automatic campaign’s reports.
Be choosy. A comp book that looks similar, costs about the same and makes the same promise is a better target than the biggest name in the genre.
Start automatic. Then go manual. In an automatic campaign Amazon picks the targeting for you using four groups. Close match and loose match cover search terms. Substitutes and complements cover product pages. You can set one default bid or a separate bid for each group, and the results show you which searches and products convert.
Amazon’s own author guidance suggests automatic targeting for newcomers who want to learn as they go. Once you’ve seen what the automatic version turns up, it suggests trying manual targeting. In a manual campaign you choose the keywords or products yourself and set bids that reflect how much each one is worth to you.
Keep your automatic and manual campaigns separate. That way you can see which one is earning its keep. Move proven search terms and ASINs from the automatic reports into the manual campaign as they show up.
Match types decide how closely a reader’s search has to resemble your keyword. Amazon defines them as follows:
| Match type | What it matches | Book example |
|---|---|---|
| Broad | Searches containing your keyword terms in any order, plus related terms and variations | “cosy mystery” may show for searches that include those words with others |
| Phrase | Searches containing all your terms in the same order, plurals included | “cosy mystery” shows for “cosy mystery books” |
| Exact | Searches with the same words in the same order, plurals included | “cosy mystery” shows for that search and its plurals |
Amazon notes that exact match usually converts best. It recommends bidding highest on exact, lower on phrase and lowest on broad. A common approach is to use broad to find search terms, then promote the ones that sell into phrase and exact. Give each match type at least a week or two before you pause a keyword, because book searches are low-volume and a few days of data proves very little about whether a term will sell over a month.
A negative keyword stops your ad showing for searches you don’t want. For a book, that usually means searches for a different genre or a different format. Amazon’s own example for authors is a modern urban fantasy that adds “high fantasy” and “epic fantasy” as negatives.
You can add negative phrase, which blocks any search containing the phrase, or negative exact, which blocks that one search only. Either can sit at campaign or ad group level. In a product-targeting campaign you can also add negative ASINs, to keep your ad off the pages of books that pull in the wrong reader.
Amazon suggests judging a negative target only once it has at least 20 clicks. After you make a change, leave it alone for two weeks or more before adjusting again. Don’t start pruning after three clicks.
ACoS (advertising cost of sales) is ad spend divided by ad revenue, multiplied by 100. Amazon says a campaign’s ACoS has to stay below your profit margin for the campaign to be profitable. It says to work out break-even ACoS first and set any other target after that. It also warns that new campaigns often show a high ACoS just because they’re new.
For authors, the revenue in that sum is only the sale the ad drove directly. It misses what comes next. Say you advertise a series starter. A reader who buys book one and goes on to buy books two and three has made the campaign worth far more than that first sale suggests. That follow-on spending is read-through, meaning the share of readers who carry on through the series.
So stop asking whether your ACoS is under your royalty. Ask what a reader is worth across the series. A high ACoS on book one can be perfectly sound if read-through is strong, while a low ACoS on a standalone is fine but limited. No read-through figure yet? Estimate cautiously from your own sales reports and treat the first month as a learning period.
Amazon also points authors to TACOS, which is ad spend as a percentage of total sales. It shows whether your overall sales are growing in step with what you spend. Author Central and your KDP reports help you see the wider effect on rank and on series sales.
Keyword research and ASIN selection are the unglamorous work that makes ads pay. So are negative lists and weekly reviews, and they’re easy to let slide when you’re on a deadline. Our advertising for authors service covers Amazon Ads alongside Meta and BookBub campaigns, and our team came from the in-house team of USA Today bestselling author Jack Cartwright. We agree a clear brief, scope and fee with you before any work begins. For the full picture, see how we market self-published authors.
There’s no fixed number. Start with a focused set of comp authors and subgenre terms plus a handful of ASINs. Hundreds of loosely related terms will just muddy things. A shorter list is easier to review, and you can add proven terms from your search term reports as the data builds up.
It’s worth testing. People who search for you already want your book, so those clicks often convert well, and bidding stops others buying ads on your name. Keep these in their own campaign so the low ACoS doesn’t hide how your discovery keywords are doing.
Amazon gives no universal figure, and no author should either. Your break-even point depends on your royalty. Your target depends on read-through and on what the campaign is for. Work out break-even first. Then decide what you’re after: profit, series sales or visibility.
Not advertising is the real loss here, because readers who never see your book can’t buy it. Stop thinking of marketing as a cost. The moment you do, you cut yourself off from a vital arm of your business and turn it into a negative. Set a daily budget you’re comfortable with while you test, and only raise it on campaigns that sell.
Not at the start. Sponsored Products is the usual place to begin, and Amazon suggests Sponsored Brands as a way to promote more titles once you have a campaign that works. Get one campaign stable before you add another format.
What should authors post between releases? A balanced mix of story, process and reader posts, series reminders, countdowns and a weekly plan.
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