Advertising on Amazon

 As promised, I will blog not just about general writing and publishing topics, but I want to get into the nuts and bolts of what I'm doing.

Right off the bat, I ran into an issue I did not expect. When attempting to launch an ad campaign for my first anthology, the moderators at Amazon suspended the campaign, stating the following:

"Your ad contains content prohibited from advertising. This may include images and videos of weapons (including realistic and non-realistic firearms, swords, bows and arrows, etc.) that are shown in a violent, threatening manner, displayed in a gruesome way, pointed at a character, or directed out toward the customer. Please review section 6.4 Weapons under Book Advertising Guidelines and Acceptance Policies and update your ad."

See if you can spot the problem...

The moderators do a job, so I certainly don't blame them for suspending the ad campaign. I suppose a knife with blood on it qualifies as 'gruesome'.

Now, with the knife airbrushed out, the ad campaign went live. 

If you bought the paperback before this week, congrats! You own a rare early version depicting a gruesome knife!

Setting aside the specifics of a bloody knife, I suppose I should provide a bit more context. To come up in generalized searches on Amazon, one must buy ads which push your book up the results of any given query. For instance, if you search a general term like 'Black Mesa' you'll get a load of results. One of which is a vampire romance series involving werewolves. Fun.

So, if I run an ad campaign which outbids other advertisers, the algorithm pushes my book up the general search results, where it will, I hope, catch the eye of potential readers.

Amusingly, a friend messaged me, saying that even when he looked up the book by title and my name, the vampire romance series came up before my book. I chuckled. 

On a more serious-ish note, this is an aspect of self-publishing I wasn't entirely prepared for. I knew that running ads helps sell books. Shocker. But more to the point, I didn't realize HOW MUCH the Amazon algorithm favors advertised products in generalized searches. Again, I'm not shocked, just wearily disappointed at the ways Amazon makes money, not just off sales of the book, but on advertisements for the book. There's a reason Jeff Bezos is the richest (?) man on earth. God help me if anyone at Amazon bothers to read the book and notices the subtext of 'Summoners of Smith'.