KDP Advertising: Why It's Worth It, and How to Get Started

If you're a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) author, and are looking for ways to get your book in front of more readers, and drive incremental revenue, you should be advertising on Amazon. With access to Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads, Amazon has enabled KDP authors to promote their books within the Amazon marketplace. And if you're enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program, advertising can be a great way to promote borrows and reads of your books.

In this article, we'll be walking you through what you need to know to get started with KDP Advertising - why you should be doing it, how to optimize your ads, and some unique challenges authors face and how Perpetua can help you solve for them.

Why You Should Be Using KDP Advertising

With Amazon dominating the majority of the US ebook market share, and owning approximately 50% of the print market share, promoting your books across the Amazon marketplace allows you access to a highly engaged consumer base.

With KDP Advertising, you can:

• Promote your titles alongside similar books and authors

• Drive sales of new releases as soon as they are published

• Run backlist campaigns to attract new readers

• Target by related genres, titles and authors

• Reach readers in multiple marketplaces

How to Advertise on Amazon KDP

Creative

For KDP authors, your ad creative is pulled from your book cover and back page. When setting up your title, make sure that your cover is eye-catching and relevant to your genre, theme and title.

Description + Look Inside

Readers often look to your book's description and 'look inside' information before purchasing or "borrowing" (for Kindle Unlimited). Your book description should be catchy, and provide an accurate overview of what your book is about.

For authors enrolled in Kindle Unlimited specifically, the goal is to drive readers to read as many pages as possible. If your description does not match your book's contents, readers will be more likely to drop off and you may see a decline in royalties.

Targeting

We recommend targeting keywords and ASINs based on complementary books and categories, popular themes/keywords, and your competitors' books. At Perpetua, we offer several targeting types based on your goals (universal, branded and advanced) that you can use to help drive sales and borrows. You can learn more about goal targeting types here.

Perpetua for KDP Advertising

One of the biggest challenges KDP authors can encounter is ad burnout. And as authors, you should be focused on creating. Putting your time towards writing page-turning books that attract readers to your collection or series - not spending all of your time on ads.

And this is where ad automation comes in. While Amazon's KDP Advertising platform allows you to target and advertise on Amazon, setting up campaigns, manually optimizing bids, and managing keyword and ASIN targets can be incredibly time consuming, especially for authors who often don't have a team of performance marketers behind them.

Limitations also arise for authors with measuring and tracking key KDP-specific metrics like royalties, KENP Reads and more, as most ad automation software is not optimized to the unique needs of KDP. For example, while advertisers generally aim to decrease target ACoS, KDP authors typically accept a higher ACoS to help drive visibility to their titles, or increase organic rank on the search results page. Higher ACoS can also be indicative of driving Kindle Unlimited borrows and increasing KENP Reads as these do not result in direct sales but still impact overall revenue.

At Perpetua, we acknowledge the unique challenges KDP authors face in advertising their books on Amazon and are dedicated to building solutions that solve for those needs. This is why we've recently introduced KENP Metrics into Perpetua. You can now track KENP Reads, Estimated KENP Royalties, and measure ACoR (Advertising Cost of Royalties) from your Perpetua dashboard - learn more here.

We are constantly working to build out more features and capabilities for KDP authors, so stay tuned for future updates!

And if you want to learn more about how Perpetua is currently supporting KDP authors with ad automation and optimization, you can reach us at hello@perpetua.io