The author’s guide to Sponsored Products

This guide helps authors connect their books with readers actively searching for stories like yours. Whether you're self-published, indie, or traditionally published, this guide is for you. Learn how to set up your first Sponsored Products campaign, understand key concepts such as bidding, and measure performance to help expand your book's visibility, find new readers, and grow your author platform.

Books are in our DNA. The Amazon store started as a bookseller, and today we're a destination where readers all over the world shop for books and browse to discover new titles. Sponsored Products ads can help you stand out to readers searching for books or genres similar to yours, giving your book a better chance of being their next discovery. Sponsored Products ads may appear in relevant shopping results and on book detail pages on Amazon, Kindle, and Goodreads. When readers click on your ad, they're directed to your book's detail page. Best of all, you only pay when a potential new reader clicks on your ad.

Ready to get started? This guide will teach you what you need to know about Sponsored Products—including how to find your ideal readers, bid, budget, and optimize your campaign—as you work to grow your readership.

• Launch phase: Boost visibility during pre-release and post-launch to help your book gain early momentum and reviews.
• Post-launch momentum: Build your audience of potential new readers after your initial launch period to help climb bestseller lists.
• Series promotion: Cross-sell between books in your series to help readers discover your complete catalog.

1. Review the requirements. Keep these guidelines in mind as you prepare to create your ad:
• Books you advertise must be available in the country where you’re advertising.
• Books must be listed in Author Central.
• Ads must meet the creative requirements in the Amazon Ads guidelines and acceptance policies.
• Titles must meet the ad policy for books.

2. Register to advertise. When registering, select the country where you want to advertise, choose the "Amazon Author" option, and complete the rest of the registration flow.
3. Create your campaign. When you're registered and signed into the advertising console, click the "create campaign" button, and then click "Sponsored Products."
4. Select your books to showcase. Search by book title or Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). Click "add" and make sure to include all available formats, such as Kindle e-book, paperback, and hardcover.

• Shopping queries/search terms: Words and phrases that readers use to look for books. They could be specific (e.g. "Hard Times," "Charles Dickens") or generic (e.g. "classic novels").
• Keywords: Words or phrases that match your ad to queries readers use when looking for a book (e.g. "classic novels") and should be relevant to your book.
• Automatic targeting: This targeting is automatically determined based on details about your book, such as its genre. If you're new to Sponsored Products, this targeting type can help you learn as you go.
• Manual targeting: This targeting option gives you greater control by manually selecting the keywords or books you want to target. There are two types of manual targeting:
• Keyword targeting: Uses keywords to match your ads with queries readers are using (e.g. "vegetarian cookbooks").
• Product targeting: Matches your ads to specific books or genres. If you are advertising Wuthering Heights, for example, you might want to use product targeting for Jane Eyre.
• Match types: This determines how closely a reader's query must match a keyword for an ad to be shown. Match types include "close match" and "loose match." For example, if you use close match for the keyword "historical romance," your ad may show when readers search for "historical romance novels" or "romance historical fiction," but not for broader terms like "romance books."
• Negative targeting: Allows you to specify which keywords or books you don't want to trigger your ads. For example, if you write urban fantasy set in modern cities, you might add "high fantasy" or "epic fantasy" as negative keywords to avoid showing your ads to readers searching for medieval or otherworldly settings.

A bid is the price you're willing to pay for a reader to click on your ad. Multiple authors might target the same keywords or books, so the amount you bid, along with the relevance of your ad to the reader's query, determines whether your ad will be shown. For example, say you select "war novels" as a keyword and set your bid at $0.75. Another author chooses the same keyword and sets their bid at $0.60. Based on your bid, you will win the auction and your ad will be shown.

There are three different bidding strategies you can choose from:

• Dynamic bids—down only. Amazon Ads will reduce your bid if your ad is less relevant to the shopping query or is on a placement that doesn’t perform well. This strategy can offer greater control over spend as you learn what works and can help control spending on underperforming campaigns.
• Dynamic bids—up and down. Amazon Ads will increase your bids for auctions that are more likely to result in a sale. Bids will be increased by up to 100% for placements at the top of the first page of shopping results and by up to 50% for all other placements. This is a useful strategy if you want to learn how much you should be bidding for specific keywords or books, if you want top-of-the-page placement, or if you have a high-performing campaign and want to maximize reader discovery.
• Fixed bids. Amazon Ads uses your exact bid for all opportunities and won’t adjust it. This strategy may get you more impressions but fewer clicks, compared to dynamic bids.

Your daily budget allows you to set the maximum amount you’re willing to spend on clicks per day. It’s averaged over a month, so if you budget $10 a day for 30 days, your total spend for the month will never exceed $300. While the actual daily spend could vary (some days you may win more bids than others) it will ultimately even out and the total spend won’t exceed your budget for the month.

1. Read your reports. You’ll have access to reports with insights on search terms, placements, keywords, and more. To find your reports, go to the "measurement and reporting" tab on the left sidebar in your advertising console and click "Create a report." Review the results and adjust accordingly.
2. Try manual targeting. If you started out using automatic targeting, try making some adjustments to keywords, match types, product targeting, and more to better reach your ideal readers.
3. Optimize your bids. Wait about two weeks after the launch of your campaign and then try getting more advanced with your bidding strategy based on what's working and what's not. For example, use dynamic bids to automatically increase or decrease your bid when it's more or less likely to lead to reader discovery. Make sure to check in every two weeks after that as you continue to optimize your campaign to grow your readership.
4. Use other Amazon Ads products. Check out some of Amazon’s other advertising solutions, such as Sponsored Brands, which can spotlight additional books and help build your author platform.

• Customer Reviews: Track how advertising may help increase your review count. More reviews build social proof for future readers.
• Sales Rank: Monitor your titles' Amazon Best Seller Rank in relevant categories. This shows if increased visibility is helping you climb bestseller lists.
• Bookscan Weekly Sales Report: If you're advertising books in a series, watch for increased sales across your other titles as readers discover your complete catalog.