Do Authors Still Need Paid Advertising?

Have you optimized the seven essential elements of your Amazon book page before you even consider marketing? Are you making the most of A+ content, and advertising with Amazon? Amazon Ads expert Geoff Affleck gives his tips.

In the intro, potential TikTok US changes [BBC]; Special editions [Written Word Media]; Self-Publishing with Dale Kickstarter books; Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition; Egypt beyond the pyramids, an example of fiction-adjacent content marketing [Books and Travel]; British Powerlifting; Starting something new, clearing space, beginner's mind, and Leuchtturm1917 journals.

This episode is supported by my patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Geoff Affleck is a bestselling nonfiction author, self-publishing consultant, and Amazon ads expert working with authors to produce and promote their books through his business, Authorpreneur Publishing. Geoff is originally Australian but now lives in Canada.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• The seven essential elements every Amazon book page needs before spending a penny on advertising, from cover design to A+ Content
• Why Amazon ads work like shopping in the soup aisle (targeted intent) versus Facebook ads being like impulse candy purchases at checkout
• How series authors can break even on book one ads while making profits from organic read-through on subsequent books
• The critical difference between automatic ads and manual targeting, and why manual campaigns with specific ASINs get better results
• When new authors should start advertising (even with few reviews) and how established authors should maintain their backlist keywords and categories

You can find Geoff at GeoffAffleck.com.

Transcript of the interview with Geoff Affleck

Joanna: Geoff Affleck is a bestselling nonfiction author, self-publishing consultant, and Amazon ads expert working with authors to produce and promote their books through his business, Authorpreneur Publishing. Geoff is originally Australian but now lives in Canada. So welcome to the show, Geoff.

Geoff: Hi Joanna, thanks for having me here. It's great.

Joanna: Yes, this is an interesting topic. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you, how you got into writing and self-publishing, and why you decided to move into author services.

Geoff: Sure. It was about 15 years ago that I started getting involved in this industry. I had always been involved in marketing in more of a corporate job.

I got involved in personal development for myself, just for personal growth, and managed to connect up with some New York Times bestselling authors who appeared in the movie The Secret.

Joanna: Oh yes, wonderful time!

Geoff: Right. So I worked as a marketing director for a couple of these authors who were part of that movie and, as a result, got exposed to the world of traditional publishing because they had New York Times bestselling books.

We started a course where we would invite people to come and learn about—basically the premise was we'll teach you how to become a bestselling self-help author.

I was the marketing guy, mostly talking about building their author platforms, and became really interested in the self-publishing side of it because that was really the door that most of these authors would come into rather than traditional, and had to learn very quickly about self-publishing.

So this was, as I mentioned, probably now 2012 or thereabouts. As I learned about self-publishing, we decided to self-publish a book ourselves, the four of us. Since then, I've just continued to be really enamored by the whole industry.

I realized quickly that I'm not really an author. I've co-authored a number of books, but writing's not my passion, although copywriting is, but not story writing.

I really love the production side of it and the book launches, the marketing, especially with Amazon. So that's really where I focused in my business over the last eight years or so.

Joanna: That's so funny with The Secret—it brings back those days. I remember reading that and it's where I really first learned about affirmations. My first affirmation that really changed my life was “I am creative. I am an author.” And I said that years before it actually happened.

I know it's funny now, isn't it? We kind of look back and I don't think it's been tarnished, but there's not so much a halo around the law of attraction stuff. At the time, I feel like that really made such a big hit. A lot of the mindset stuff around it I still feel is valuable.

Let's get into the advertising stuff, but before we get into that, I feel like a lot of authors jump into ads like they're some kind of magic bullet.

What are the basic things that an author needs to get right with their Amazon book sales page before they even think about advertising?

We're going to focus on Amazon today.

Geoff: Right. Yes, absolutely. This is the starting point, and it should be the starting point for anyone who's looking to publish a book, let alone promote it or spend money on it with Amazon ads.

You have to think about the conversions. What I mean by that is that if you're going to generate clicks to your book page, you have to be confident that a reasonable percentage of those clicks will turn into orders, or if you're in Kindle Unlimited, you know, Kindle Unlimited page reads.

The number that we look for is 10%. So if you get 10 clicks from an ad, you want to get one sale or the equivalent of that in page reads.

So it's really important to optimize your Amazon page—some people call it a product page or a book listing—so that when people land, they're going to be attracted to buying your book. Just makes sense, doesn't it?

Joanna: Mm-hmm.

Geoff: There are about seven elements that we focus on that you really need to get right, and you need to get all of them right. Sometimes just having one of them a little bit off can skew it. I could do a two-hour talk on this, but I'll just give you a quick introduction.

Obviously the first one is the book cover.

And that's the one that actually helps generate ad clicks because people don't see a lot about your book. They just see the cover, the title, how many reviews you have and so on.

If it looks interesting, they'll click on it. So if you've got a cover that stands out as a little thumbnail on an Amazon ad, you're more likely to get a higher click-through rate on your ads, which means more traffic. So that's super important. Of course, the cover has to be aligned with the genre and be legible and all of that.

Here's one that a lot of people miss, and it's the attention to keywords.

You probably know that when you self-publish, there's seven keywords you can put in the metadata when you upload your book to Amazon, right? Most people don't give a lot of thought to that—just put in some words and hope that's okay.

Keywords are really important, and it's a whole thing to learn how to get them right. Finding keywords that are popular yet not too competitive is the key because that's what Amazon's algorithm looks at when it's deciding whether your book's going to show up or not on a search.

It's really important to get at least one good keyword phrase into your title or, more often, into your subtitle. I see a lot of authors that they'll publish a novel with a title and then leave the subtitle blank.

So adding a subtitle that describes a little bit about the genre or a trope—like “A Billionaire Office Romance” could be a subtitle for a romance novel—that tells the reader something, but it also tells the algorithm something. That is one of the most important fields I find.

If you're only relying on your seven keywords, I think you're potentially missing out on organic traffic. Beyond that—

Obviously people look at how many reviews you have and what the quality is of the average star rating.

Those are super important. So doing whatever you can to boost the number of reviews and ratings early on will give your conversion rate a big boost.

So beyond that though—

We've got to have a strong blurb.

Usually there's a whole structure for blurbs, but not too long. Back even a few years ago, we were writing longer blurbs. Now it's around 200 words. A really strong headline with a hook, bolded is nice. Short paragraphs, the right elements, and then a call to action. I won't go any further than that, but that is key.

But beyond that, a lot of people don't read blurbs. They kind of skim them. That's why shorter is often a little bit better.

Increasingly, A+ Content is another way to supplement the blurb.

So it's kind of like an additional blurb where we can put graphics up on the page that will help the reader understand more about the book and some reasons why they should buy it.

Finally, I think price is really important.

It can't be too high or even too low—that can sometimes be a disincentive because price and quality are often correlated.

You've got to make sure your books are in the right categories, so that's really important too.

Categories that are relevant. Sometimes I see people, even people who are helping other authors, put their books in categories that just aren't relevant in order to try to game the system and get a bestseller badge. That just doesn't work.

Joanna: Yeah, that again feels like a tactic from like 15 years ago.

Geoff: Let's just put it here in basket weaving, even though it's a basket weaving romance!

Joanna: That is interesting. Lots of things to come back on here, but the A+ Content—your team helped me do some A+ Content for my How to Write a Novel book. I think as a buyer, like as a reader, I never, ever, ever scroll down that far. So I had some hesitation of, was this worth it?

So talk a bit more about A+ Content and why you think that it is a good idea to have.

Geoff: Well, first of all, for anyone who's not familiar with A+ Content, it doesn't say that word anywhere on your book page. But if you notice, as you're browsing on Amazon, you'll see the section called “From the Publisher.” So that's what we're referring to.

You go below the book description, below the first couple of carousels of ads or suggestions, and then you'll see it there. It'll be snuggled in just above the editorial review section. What it is is kind of like a magazine-style layout of banners and images.

You can have up to five rows of them, and you can choose as few as one or as many as five different banners. There are different layouts, and it's all template-driven on the backend of Amazon through your KDP account. It's also available to traditional publishers using Amazon Advantage.

So I think the only time you can't really use it is, let's say you publish with IngramSpark or Draft2Digital—you won't be able to apply Amazon A+ Content to your books.

Anyway, lots of different layouts available, including for nonfiction you can do side-by-side charts and this type of thing. You can provide, for a series, a series layout where people can see all the books in your series, or up to six anyway, and then click directly through to the different books.

I think, other than being visually appealing—provided, and this is really important, they must be designed well—you design them outside of Amazon usually, although Amazon does have some sort of an AI image generator.

Last time I checked it wasn't very good, so I don't use it. I get a professional graphic designer to design the graphics and then we upload them ourselves.

We find that generally speaking, it will help increase your conversion rate because as people skim the book blurb, maybe don't take it all in, it gives you another chance to connect with them.

It's visually appealing, so it tends to stop shoppers from scrolling because it's a little more interesting. So it's something they can quickly read and perhaps even get more of an emotional connection to the book.

You can use it to build trust and authority for the author in a way that you can't really do in the blurb. As I mentioned, you can showcase the series, and it gives you an SEO boost because behind each image you get to input more keywords.

We all know that Amazon is basically just a big search engine. Search engines are driven by keywords. So you can have, in addition to the seven boxes on your book listing, you can add more keywords on the backend of your Amazon A+ Content.

So I think for most authors, it's worth doing. It can work very well for series authors, children's authors, because you can show the visuals of the inside of the book. I feel like if you're not doing it, you're sort of leaving something on the table that with not much effort you could do.

Joanna: I think another important thing is it is free.

I mean, obviously if you hire someone to make the images that costs money, but actually you can just add it onto your KDP account per book and per country as well. It has to be done per country, which is a bit of a pain, but it's not a great interface, to be fair.

Geoff: No, no, it's not.

Joanna: But it's free.

Geoff: Absolutely. I will say that some authors that I've come across have done their own A+ Content using say one of those design tools like Canva or something, which can be great if you are a graphic designer.

I've seen some pretty poor A+ Content design, and that can detract from the book and it can actually impact your sales negatively because I think if readers see sort of amateurish graphic design, they subconsciously think, well geez, what's the writing like?

I'd caution your listeners to get a professional designer. It doesn't have to be expensive—a hundred dollars or something—and you get some good design.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

Joanna: Okay, so let's come to the advertising. We're going to assume now that we've got our page sorted with all those things, and I know some people who haven't heard this before are like, “Goodness me, that's a lot to do before just clicking on an ad.” But as you say, it's not just a magic bullet.

Let's ask a bigger question: do we really have to advertise?

People back in the old days could just upload a book on Amazon and it would sell. Is that possible anymore? Is organic reach a reality?

Geoff: I don't really think so. For new authors, for most authors who don't have a platform—say a large email list, social media following and so on—it's pretty hard to get noticed. I don't know what you've heard. I think it's something like 5,000 books a day are published on Amazon or something.

Joanna: It is ridiculous. It's just crazy.

Geoff: Right. So you've got all this clutter that you've got to cut through. I came across someone last week who'd done nothing. He'd published his book in July and he said, “Oh, I think we've done all right. We sold 1,800 copies so far.” I said, “Oh my God, that's really good.”

Joanna: That's very good.

Geoff: That's really good. It's his first book, and no advertising. “What did you do?” “Oh, well I've got a pretty big email list.” “Ah, right.” So we all know that that's important, but he's probably tapped out his email list by now.

So now we're doing the things we just talked about, optimizing the product page, and then starting Amazon ads, because eventually your email list is going to run dry.

So in the absence of a platform or some way to promote your book, Amazon ads are, I think, the best way to have your book put in front of thousands, even millions of shoppers over time.

Usually we see it takes about a thousand impressions to get a click. So in other words, your ads show a thousand times, you get a click—that's average, sometimes better, sometimes worse. So you've got to get lots of impressions of your ads to get a small number of clicks, to get a small number of sales.

So I think it's important unless you've got something else that works for you. Some authors do really well with Facebook ads, and I think that's great too.

To me, Amazon ads is like you're going to the supermarket and you're looking for soup. You go to the soup aisle and you look at the soup, and then another can of soup catches your eye. And you know what? That's interesting. I think I'll try that one.

Whereas something like a Facebook ad is more like you're at the supermarket and you're looking for corn, and then you're at the checkout. You happen to see candy or some gum, and so you go, “Oh, impulse buy.” It's not really what you were on Facebook looking for—it's sort of a random thing. It does seem to work for some authors, so…

Joanna: Yes, as you say, there's lots of different options. I mean, even like podcasting—you can't track clicks from podcasts because it's more of a brand-building approach and people will go look for stuff. But it's definitely a way to market. So there's lots of different options, but as we said, we're focusing on Amazon ads.

So your team helped me with some nonfiction books, and one of the things that I thought was great about your approach is even on your website, you are really clear about what books ads work best for and what they don't work well for. So let's start with the good stuff.

What are Amazon ads good for? What are the kinds of books they work best for?

Geoff: Yes, they work best for series or if perhaps you have multiple standalones. The reason, of course, is read-through. Usually you're going to spend a little more, perhaps break even, on getting those initial readers. But if they enjoy your books, they're going to want to read more.

Usually they're not clicking on an ad for the second, third, fourth, fifth book. They're going to just find it directly. So that becomes an organic sale with full royalties. So series can work very, very well with Amazon ads.

I think in general, any book where the book page converts from clicks to orders. So that can be the book one in a series, which perhaps has a low price to entice the reader. It can also be a standalone. It could be a standalone nonfiction, could be a standalone novel, as long as it converts.

We've got some examples where we just know that for every six clicks that this author gets, there's a sale. It just happens over and over again, probably because they've got the great product page and good reviews.

I think sometimes it doesn't work as well if you're in a very low-volume niche, something that's just really obscure. That's more because there's just not much traffic, you know? So I think those are probably the best answers I can give for you.

Joanna: What about KU?

Geoff: Yes, absolutely. Amazon ads will certainly drive up your KU. We've got one author in particular is doing 150,000 monthly page reads on KU from her ad clicks, but a million and a half monthly overall. So the ad clicks are just driving people into book one, and then they just keep on reading.

Joanna: You mentioned series, but for example, there are some genres where most of the series in a genre might be in KU, and then if you're trying to advertise a book that's not in KU, it might not work so well.

Geoff: Yes, we find it works either way. It really varies from case to case, but Amazon ads on the dashboard, it does track your page reads that you generate from the ads as well as the orders that you generate. So you can really effectively see the impact of the ads—exactly how many page reads came from your ads versus orders.

Joanna: You've mentioned reviews briefly. Many authors, who are new to self-publishing especially, think that they should be advertising at launch doing Amazon ads.

You don't really have any reviews at launch, so when is the best time to be advertising?

Geoff: Well, one thing about advertising at launch—it can help you certainly get your book, your brand out there with all of the different impressions of your ads. And Amazon gives you like a little banner on your ads when your book is new that says “Just Released.” It's a little gray banner that goes right above the cover.

I think even if you have low reviews, because you have the “Just Released” banner on, shoppers might be a little more forgiving about the low number of reviews because it's obviously just released.

So when we do book launches, I almost always include Amazon ads in the book launch. It might not be a really high budget, but just to continue to do everything we can to get that initial traffic. Because what we're trying to do with a launch is really three things:

1. Get the Amazon algorithm to notice your book and figure out how it fits into the Amazon universe
2. Get as many reviews as you can quickly
3. Royalties, because without the first two, long-term royalties are just not going to happen

So I think Amazon ads play an important role in helping the algorithm understand your book.

Joanna: But if someone is brand new, it's their first book, is that a good fit? Or are we really looking at—

Do you need a couple of books to make advertising worth the money?

Geoff: Yes, it's a good question. I think with new authors, in a way today, you have to be prepared either to invest in your book, in book marketing. It's kind of like, I used to often use the analogy of a rocket launch—rockets burn a lot of fuel to get off the ground. Without the fuel, they stay on the ground.

So there's that consideration that if you want the book to have a chance, you've got to invest in marketing somehow, whether it's Amazon ads or whether it's paid third-party book promotions through the different book promotion websites, or Facebook or TikTok, or whatever you are able to do. Email, whatever you can do.

A small Amazon ads budget can help. Even if you're not doing $20 a day, which is what we would normally recommend, you might find that you can start to generate some sales with a much smaller budget and very conservative bids or cost per click.

Perhaps you're only spending $3 a day and you're only picking up a couple of sales a week or something. But you've just got to do something to get that initial inertia going. Otherwise, the Amazon algorithm will basically drop you like a hot potato.

Joanna: So that's new authors, but then authors who've been around a while, like myself, who have big backlists—and as you are talking about the seven things we need to have, I know there's people listening in the same place as me. They're like, “Well, we've got 40 books, 50 books, 100 books. This is way too depressing.”

I was in my KDP dashboard like yesterday, and I realized that a whole load of my sales descriptions had reformatted to some old version. I don't even know when that happened, but it made me laugh. Then I looked down at my keywords and my categories.

So if we want to keep things moving, how often should we be reviewing these fields if we've been going a while?

When do we refresh categories? When do we refresh keywords?

Geoff: Yes, good idea. I think it was perhaps a year and a half ago, Amazon changed their category rules where you used to be able to have 10 and now you have three.

So some authors who were grandfathered into the old 10-category system, it may be well enough just to leave that alone because it's great to have to be across all of those categories.

I think keywords is probably the most important thing to look at. Well, I'll say book blurb and keywords. Book blurb for sure, because that's very much customer-facing. Keywords aren't customer-facing. They're Amazon algorithm-facing.

I was just listening to Dave Chesson last week with a webinar that he presented on Amazon's new algorithm. He stressed the importance of finding the right keywords, but also the importance of having the keywords in your book blurb. It must be done in a way that doesn't sound like it was just written by AI or something, you know?

So that's probably one area to really take a good look at and republish. Publisher Rocket is a great tool for researching the best keywords. You can look up other books and see what keywords those books are ranking for, and therefore that might be a good set of keywords for you.

So it is something worth doing and spending an hour or two on, as well as book blurb is also worth spending time on for sure.

Joanna: Yes, it's one of these things that the more you write, the more you publish, and then the backlist becomes this kind of sprawling thing, especially when you're wide like I am.

Then you have all these different formats and platforms, and you figure how traditional publishers forget to maintain things. It's kind of obvious when you realize how many books they manage.

Geoff: You mentioned formatting issues with book blurbs, and that's quite common too. Because Amazon's little WYSIWYG where you enter your book description isn't perfect, and it does strange things. So you've really got to—

After you publish your book description, make sure you look at it on your Amazon page and check the formatting.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen all bold…

Joanna: Oh yeah, all bold or…

Geoff: All bold or large heading, or all italic, no spaces between the paragraphs or whatever. So you've got to really check your output as well. There are tools out there that can generate the HTML so that you could put it in directly that way.

Get some eyeballs on your product pages, whether it's yours, but better off someone else's, or even better, someone like me who does this for a living. Get some opinions on what are customers seeing when they come to your product page.

Usually you're, as an author, too close to it. You can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. So get some other opinions on what do you think about my blurb and the cover? Is it clear? Because it might be clear to you, but it might not be clear to someone who's never heard of your book before.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. There are so many things, and that's partly why I wanted to talk to you because I feel like people just say “advertising” or “paid ads” as if it is going to solve all the problems of selling books. And yet so much stuff does go into it.

A lot of it is basics, like it's basic marketing 101, but it's still hard, particularly for cross-genre books. A lot of my fiction, I found that many of the standard approaches don't work on Amazon when you write cross-genre because just in the categories and the keywords, it doesn't fit the boxes.

Geoff: Yes, cross-genre is a tough one for sure.

Joanna: Yes, it is. So my answer to that is to focus on the books that are more easily marketed. That's another trick, isn't it? You don't have to market every single book.

Geoff: Oh no, you don't. Absolutely not.

Joanna: Just market the ones that are going to make you the most money and the ones that are more easily marketed on this platform. So for me, Amazon ads work best for my nonfiction because it's really obvious what it is.

Geoff: Yes, that makes sense. Absolutely.

Joanna: So I did want to ask you, because I've used a combination of auto ads and manual targeting.

Can you explain to people what's the difference between auto ads and manual targeting, and when might auto ads work and when might they not?

Geoff: Oh, absolutely. So with Amazon ads, the way that they work is all about something called targeting. And targeting, you can think of it like this: Which other books on Amazon do you want to piggyback on? Which ones are like yours?

If you can find books that are like yours, then when someone's browsing that book, they'll see your ad, they'll click on it, and they might buy your book. So we want to target, and there's really two—we call it three ways of targeting your ads.

One is automatic, often just called auto ads.

Amazon decides where it thinks your ads should be displayed, so you have no control over where they show up. You just trust the algorithm understands your book and will put it in the right place.

Now usually it's going to advertise it on books that are in the same categories as you. That's sort of the default. That can result in some wasted reach because it might just not be really zeroing in on books that are like yours, especially if you're in a little bit of a broader category.

The other thing we find with auto ads is that quite often you don't get that many impressions. Impressions is how many times your ads are displayed. When you have low impressions, you have lower clicks, and when you have lower clicks, you have lower sales.

So while auto ads can be a sort of a time saver—they don't take much research to set up, you just fill in the boxes and click the button and off they go—usually they don't have a terrific result until such time as the algorithm really understands your book.

So we don't set up auto ads at the beginning when we work with authors. We wait until we feel like the algorithm has a better understanding of the book.

So what do we do? We do manual campaigns.

Manual campaigns are, as the name suggests, where you have to tell the algorithm where to display your ads.

And there are two types of manual campaigns:

One's called a keywords campaign, and as the name implies, you would enter in, let's say, 50 keywords that you want to use for your ads. They could be author names of comps, they could be other book titles or series titles, and they could be genre or trope-related terms or even character types, et cetera.

So if you have a combination of those things, which you should—which you have to manually research by perhaps looking at the also-boughts for your book that are showing up on your product page, using Publisher Rocket is a great tool. Even AI can help you come up with your keywords.

Then the second kind of manual ad is the product ad. With that ad, we're targeting specific categories of books and also specific ASINs. ASIN being a product number. So you find the ASIN of a book like yours and you target it, and we might target five categories and 20 ASINs to start with, something like that.

With those ads, we find that we usually get better results because we are in control of where the ads are showing. So it's one of those things—it's easier to show than tell.

If you can just remember, there's auto and manual. There's two types of manual. When you're starting out, manual's the way to go because you will get more traction with manual ads.

Joanna: I think another issue with the manual advertising, certainly for anyone who's like me, who's just not that interested in data—this is where it becomes difficult. People are like, “Oh my goodness, this is so difficult.” So if people are manually doing their own ads, should they have to log in every day to check things?

What are the time requirements if you want to do your own ads?

Geoff: Not every day. Although at the beginning, it's hard to resist the temptation sometimes to log in every day.

It's a bit like when I first started buying stocks for investments—I'd check the stock price every day, but you drive yourself mad. Every time it would go down, you'd get all stressed out, and then it would go up, you'd get all excited.

So probably once a week is a better timeframe. Maybe a little bit more in the first week, but you can set some parameters to make sure that your ads don't run away. That's important. You can set a daily budget, you can set a monthly budget, and then when your ads hit those upper limits, they'll just stop. So that's really good.

You don't want to have that problem where you suddenly get a huge bill that you weren't expecting. You also want to check on them to make sure that you haven't perhaps accidentally bid too high on one of your targets.

Every target, you set a dollar or pound or euro amount for how much you're willing to pay for a click on that target. Sometimes, if you're a little bit careless, you could accidentally bid too much because they may default to a suggested bid, which might be $2.

Well, imagine you're paying $2 for a click and you're making, maybe you're only making $2 on a sale—you could be really upside down on your advertising. So do take care, make sure nothing's gone awry.

You also want to be checking to see which of those targets are getting the clicks and the sales, and then adjusting bids up and down accordingly. If one of your targets is really working for you, you might want to increase the amount that you're willing to bid.

That'll make your ad show up closer to the top, which is going to get you more clicks. Similarly, if you've got targets that are getting clicks but not sales, you may want to turn those off. We usually use a rule of thumb of 20. When we get 20 clicks and we haven't had any orders, we'll turn it off.

So you do need to do some adjustments, and usually twice a month or so is enough time between adjustments.

Joanna: Obviously authors can do their own ads. It's just available. People can log into their KDP dashboard, or there's just one marketing link for the whole thing. You can go in and manage it all there.

If people want help, what does your team offer?

Geoff: Yes, sure. Everyone can do Amazon ads, even if you self-published, or even if you're traditionally published, you can still run Amazon ads. That's just fine.

I should just mention those who are traditionally published won't have a KDP dashboard, but you can get into Amazon ads through your Author Central account under the Marketing and Reports tab.

We offer a managed Amazon ad service. We've been doing that since 2019. Basically, you turn over your ads to us.

We access your ads account through what is known as editor access, which basically is a permission that you grant us so that we can log into your ads account through my account. We don't need your password. We can't go shopping and buy anything on your Amazon.

We handle the setup of the ads, including all the keyword and target research, set up the ads, and then monitor, analyze, and optimize regularly. We provide support for authors as well.

In particular, we'll take a good look at your product page—back to the beginning of our conversation. That's actually our first step before we even run the ads. We'll have a session with you.

One of my team will evaluate your product page and make written recommendations about what we recommend that you would improve before you even start advertising. Then we give you the guidance on what to do. If you can't do it yourself, we can help you with those things usually too.

Joanna: Fantastic.

Where can people find you and everything you do online?

Geoff: Thanks. My website has everything there. All our pricing and everything is upfront. It's GeoffAffleck.com. Or you can go to GeoffAffleck.com/ads. That goes directly to the Amazon Ads page on my website.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Geoff. That was great.

Geoff: Thanks, Joanna. I appreciate you having me on today.

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