Best-selling author Bryan Cohen explains how long-term ads help readers find his books

Amazon Ads can help authors reach more readers and gain valuable insights for your book sales. After helping over 50,000 authors start their first ad campaigns with my free 5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge*, we’ve seen these benefits firsthand. But how long should you actually keep your ad campaigns running?

I’m Bryan Cohen, an author of eight novels and multiple nonfiction titles. I’ve sold over 150,000 copies of my own books, and I couldn’t have done it without Amazon Ads.

Since 2015, when Amazon Ads opened to authors, I’ve had some ads running continuously to my most profitable books. There are great benefits to continually creating new ads and keeping other campaigns going to increase your long-term chances of growing your reach and engaging new readers.

Here are a few key reasons to keep your ads going.

When thinking about advertising, you may be focused on how these campaigns can improve sales of your newest book. However, advertising has helped me boost sales on books that I published years ago, which has also helped me reach new readers. Even if a book has been out for a decade or longer, you can still run ads to it.

Now, you’ll still want to apply all the fundamentals of advertising to ensure your campaigns are set up for success. One strategy that I’ve found successful is running additional campaigns to help readers discover your books when you find that your royalties are higher than your return on ad spend (ROAS).

From my experience working with authors, I’ve learned that most fiction authors write multiple books for one series. This means their latest book isn’t necessarily the ideal one for a reader to start. Most readers would rather start from the beginning, even in a series of romance or thriller novels where the stories tend to be more stand-alone. This makes the reach of your series starter that much more important.

Since readers may not always discover you with the new release of Book 3 or Book 4 in a series, it may make more sense to keep running ads to Book 1. That’s why even when you have a new release, the most valuable step is concentrating your attention on the older book that serves as an entry point for readers. Using Sponsored Products to drive traffic to your first book can lead to readers discovering that book before reading through to the future installments in the series.

By continuing to run ads to Book 1 year-round, you may get more readers into your series who can catch up to the most recently published book. By consistently funneling new readers into your series, you’ll keep reaching new customers who can become fans.

As you start getting more experienced with advertising and analyzing your metrics, you may find that certain books or series are steadily profitable. If you’ve earned a consistent profit over the course of your first few months of advertising, then you can try marketing your most profitable books in other marketplaces like the UK, Canada, and Australia. This strategy tends to work best when you only run those ads to books that provide reliable metrics, rather than just guessing that certain books can sell better than others.

If you have multiple profitable books or series, then you can also consider trying Sponsored Brands ads. These campaigns work most effectively when you have multiple stand-alone books or series starters because Sponsored Brands show three books at once. For instance, if you have three significantly profitable series in the same genre, then you can run Sponsored Brands campaigns to display the first book in each series. This can give new readers the opportunity to discover each series through the ad and potentially scale up what’s already working well in your Sponsored Products campaigns.

When you run ad campaigns to your books, they appear in the Amazon store based on your bid and your ads’ relevancy. To optimize your profitability, it’s a good strategy to only advertise to the most relevant keywords and categories. If you focus on relevancy, you may pay less for clicks over time, especially if your books convert well from those campaigns.

When you check your metrics on the Amazon Ads and Kindle Direct Publishing dashboards, you may find that your ads are consistently profitable. Keeping them going long term can lead to new readers, more advertising opportunities, and additional awareness during your campaign.

If you want to dive deeper into setting up campaigns and decoding the metrics, you can learn more at Bryan's free 5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge. Go to AuthorsAdvertise.com to sign up for his next quarterly event.