This Crazy Writing Life: Dipping Our Toes In The Amazon Part Two — On Swimming Upstream...

By Steven Womack

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It’s hard to believe that this is installment number twelve of This Crazy Writing Life. How did a whole year go by so fast?

Maybe it’s just me. Time does seem to go by in a blur these days. Add to that the information overload and analysis paralysis we all seem to be afflicted with these days and it’s easy to see how time and life can both just go streaming by like another dreary Netflix movie.

If you’re a newcomer to this little adventure, thanks for joining us. If you’re a regular, thanks for hanging with me. I hope you’re getting something out of it.

So let’s get to work…

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We left off last month with the basics of Amazon ads and, by extension, some fundamentals of digital advertising in general. CPC versus CPM ads, Sponsored Product ads, Sponsored Brands, and Lockscreen ads were all explored. If you need to catch up on some of this stuff, then pull up last month’s column. It’s all there.

Now let’s go a bit deeper, into the underlying architecture of a digital ad campaign. By architecture, I mean how ads are built on Amazon. There’s a hierarchical system at work here that looks something like a pyramid. It’s important to have a basic understanding of how the system works because this is how you organize your advertising efforts. If you’re only advertising one book with one ad at a time, there’s not much to keep track of. But if you’ve got a dozen books out there (or as some indie authors have, dozens or even hundreds of books), then keeping all this stuff straight is a completely different challenge. And as Ricardo Fayet observed in the best book I’ve ever found on learning this platform—Amazon Ads For Authors—the best performing ad campaigns are almost always the best organized.

At the top of the pyramid is the Campaign. Amazon gives you two options here: Custom text campaigns and Standard ad campaigns. There are a couple of key differences between the two.

As the name implies, Custom text campaigns allow you to write your own distinctive ad copy (up to 150 characters) that you can use to try and convince a potential reader to buy your book. The downside here is that you can only advertise one book at a time.

An Amazon Standard ad campaign, though, will allow you to advertise as many books as you want within the same campaign. Say you’ve got ten books in a cozy mystery series. With a Standard ad campaign, you can get all ten books into an “ad group” and Amazon’s algorithm will decide with books will pop up in an ad. The downside here is that the only information the prospective customer will get is the title, the series title, the author’s name and a few other elements of metadata. No creativity allowed…

So the real issue here is twofold: 1) how many books are you trying to wedge into your campaign; and 2) how important is it to be able to write some custom ad copy. If you’re promoting a single, standalone suspense/thriller, then maybe those 150 characters of sparkling creative ad copy are important to you. On the other hand, if you’re campaign is plugging a private eye series with 25 installments, then the Standard ad campaign may give you the most bang per buck.

One big, albeit fairly advanced, component of Custom Ad campaigns is that you can run what’s called A/B testing. You write one set of copy for Ad #1, then a second set for Ad #2. You launch both campaigns at the same time with the same parameters, then measure the success of each one, which is usually done by comparing click-through-rates (CTR) and actual sales. But again, as always with Amazon, this can be a bit complicated. For one thing, you have to create two separate campaigns. You can’t run two ads with different copy in one Custom ad campaign. And you have to launch both campaigns at the same time, with the same product, same budgets, and same targeting.

Lastly, you have to let each campaign run long enough to get a true assessment of how each one’s doing. The longer, the better.

Patience: that one thing we all have so much of…

In last month’s column, we examined the three basic kinds of Amazon ads and examined how the Sponsored Products ad was the one most commonly deployed by indie authors. One of the many things you have to consider when you’re creating a campaign is the bidding strategy you’re going to deploy. As we explored last month, Amazon ads are based on a bidding system. You don’t just buy an ad on Amazon and it suddenly appears; you bid for space on the platform.

Amazon ads, as we also explored last month, are CPC—or Cost Per Click—only. You don’t get a choice on the type of bid, but you can choose the strategy to take when you create the campaign.

You can choose to go with dynamic bids. Dynamic bids change depending on certain parameters—the search terms the customer used, for example. Dynamic bids can be down only, which means Amazon, in its great wisdom, will lower your bid for clicks that are less likely to convert to a sale. This can help preserve your ad spend budget.

The other alternative dynamic bid strategy is called up and down. With this strategy, they’ll raise your bid by as much as 100% for placements, for example, at the top of the first page of search results—prime real estate on Amazon—or when a search query is especially well-matched to your book. Since they raise your bid in these cases, you are more likely to see a better conversion rate and higher sales.

Conversely, in cases where the search query is not such a good match or your ad’s going to be relegated to a less juicy spot, then the algorithm can lower your bid by as much as 50%.

If you don’t want to employ dynamic bidding and want more control, then you can check the box that triggers the Fixed Bid strategy. In this case, Amazon will only bid the amount you choose, but like everything Amazon, there’s a trade-off here. With the Fixed Bid strategy, you may get more impressions, but fewer conversions. Depending on the goal of your campaign, that may be okay.

Finally, you can use a kind of hybrid strategy, where you don’t give up total control to Amazon but you create a set of rules that will take the guesswork out of moving your bids up or down to achieve a goal. This gets into concepts like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), which leads us into some pretty advanced stuff in the world of digital advertising.

So we’ve tackled two important first considerations: the type of ad campaign and the bidding strategy we’re going to employ. Now we tackle the issue of targeting. The beauty and genius of digital advertising is it’s not like broadcasting a commercial on TV, where your target audience is every bozo who owns a television and happens to have it on when your ad runs. Digital platforms—especially Amazon—devote an enormous amount of time and energy to tracking and analyzing what their customers search for and buy. With decades of experience and billions of dollars expended, Amazon’s pretty good at it.

For many authors, your best bet is to choose Automatic Targeting. This is the easiest to set up and you’re basically, to coin a phrase from the old Greyhound Bus commercials of my youth, leaving the driving to them.

But how does Amazon do this? As Ricardo points out so eloquently in his book, like many things Amazon, that’s a bit of a mystery. Amazon guards its algorithms and proprietary information very closely. But they look for matches in their automatic targeting: close matches to search queries, loose matches, substitutes, and things that complement the search query. Amazon decides in each case if the search query is anywhere near relevant to your product and to what degree. How does it do this?

Through your metadata…

This might mean the title, subtitle or series title of your book. The categories you chose when you uploaded the book (and, oh boy, that’s a whole ball of wax) and your keywords and product description. All of this data goes into the Amazon machine, goes ‘round and ‘round, and then comes out here.

One caveat here is that for novelists or mystery writers like most of us, this is a much more inexact science. Novels, in general, are much harder to fit into a niche or category than nonfiction books. A nonfiction book on organic farming is pretty easy to target; a dystopic LGBTQ, YA, coming-of-age standalone is a bit more of a challenge.

One of the great benefits of Automatic Targeting is that Amazon will tell you what keywords and products your ad targeted. It’s a bit of a process with a couple of ways to get there, but that’s valuable information. Once you know the most successful search terms and keywords, you can go in and adjust your ads to increase their performance.

You can also use this data to find out which keywords are misleading or inaccurate and plug those into your campaign as negative keywords. What are negative keywords? These are search terms that if a prospective buyer types those into the search bar, your book will deliberately not show up in the results. How is this useful?

You write cozy mysteries. So you enter gore, erotica, horror as negative keywords and it guarantees someone searching for those terms will never see your book. That can be mighty useful.

Next month, we’ll move onto Manual Targeting and keep going. As you might have guessed, tackling Amazon ads is a multi-installment rodeo on This Crazy Writing Life. And even then, this is all designed as a beginner’s primer on Amazon and other forms of digital advertising. What you’re willing to learn and take on is up to you. If you’re really into this, you can go back to college and get a graduate degree in this stuff.

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One of the reasons the last couple of columns for Killer Nashville Magazine have run a little late is that I’m up to my nether regions in indie pubbing a book right now. This was a novel I published first in hardcover a long time ago with Severn House in England and later with Harper Collins in mass-market paperback. The novel, By Blood Written, was a standalone serial killer novel and it was by far the most graphically violent and cutting-edge book I’ve written. I had great hopes for this as a breakout book, but in both cases, it was so badly published it went nowhere. Even the Harper Collins paperback sank without a trace when the editor, who was really pumped about the book, took another job a few months before pub date (which is called being orphaned in the book biz).

For years I tried to get the rights reverted to me. Harper Collins is notorious for not reverting rights to authors, but after several years and many attempts, I finally got a rights reversion letter. I’ve retitled the book, which will now be called Blood Plot, and commissioned what I think is a fabulous cover that serves as an homage to the great pulp fiction paperbacks of the Forties and Fifties. Here’s a look:

I’m just completed formatting the eBook with Atticus (which I’ve written about before) and am going to tackle the learning curve to use Atticus for typesetting the hardcover and trade paperback editions.

I only mention this because the column is all about the freedom and options of indie pubbing (as well as the enormous amount of sweat equity that’s involved). This can be a case study for what we’re all talking about.

Thanks again for playing along. I’d love to hear what you think of the cover or anything else that I bring up in This Crazy Writing Life. Feel free to drop me a line any time at: WomackWriter@yahoo.com.

The Writer’s Playbook: Interview Your Characters

By Steven Harms

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To start, calculators down.

Now answer the following:
What is three times three?
Ten times seven?
Nine times two?
And, to finish this little exercise, what is eighty-five times forty-six? Take your time.

Hopefully you nailed the final answer. You may be asking what this has to do with being an author? Read on.

In the spring of 1985, I was two years into my first job at the Detroit Pistons. Around that same time, in my hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin something occurred that got my attention. The Milwaukee Bucks of the NBA had recently been purchased by Herb Kohl – I’ll get to him in a moment – and I felt the opportunity to return home was worth an inquiry. New ownership of a pro team generally comes with a slate of changes on the business side to align with a new owner’s vision and desire for how they want the place to operate. I wasn’t wrong. I sent a letter of inquiry to the president of business operations of the Milwaukee Bucks, not expecting a reply.

Two weeks later I received a call from John Steinmiller, introducing himself and asking that I come to Milwaukee for an interview. The role was a new position, and the person they were seeking would be responsible for building the sales team and crafting the external sales strategy.

I was flown in the following week and met with John. Our discussion went well, and I was excited to put it mildly. The opportunity would advance my career to the next level. As John wrapped our interview, he informed me that the new owner, Herb Kohl, would also like to meet with me one-on-one.

Who’s Herb Kohl? Perhaps you’ve shopped at Kohl’s. That was Herb’s family business, begun by his father in 1924. Kohl’s began as a grocery chain in the Milwaukee area before adding department stores beginning in 1962, eventually selling it all off in 1979. Herb Kohl purchased the Bucks in 1985 to prevent the team from exiting Milwaukee, in line with his community mindedness, which eventually led to him becoming a U.S. Senator, representing Wisconsin for twenty-four years. That’s the man I now sat across from in his spacious office at a top floor of Milwaukee’s tallest building.

The interview with him was straightforward – my background, schooling, sales experience with the Detroit Pistons, family, goals, and a few other traditional interview topics. Herb was a soft-spoken person, palpably gracious, and he made me comfortable as we chatted. Somewhere amid that interview, completely out of the blue, he asked me that final math question at the top of this article. Stone cold. No pivot. I can’t recall the exact digits, but you get the idea. To this day, I remember Herb said, “Take your time.” It was a jolt. I recall thinking that I was about to blow the interview and wouldn’t get the job. But I figured out quickly how to process the problem and answered it correctly. He then tossed me two more of similar nature. I passed all three. In the end, I landed the job.

My length of service with the Bucks lasted four years before I moved to New York City for my next opportunity. In hindsight, I wish I had taken a moment during my time with the Bucks to ask Herb why he threw those math problems at me. I’m convinced he did so to see how I process information and how I manage myself in a stressful situation. I just never asked. I think I know the answer, at least in part, which aligns with the task we have in creating our characters and developing them.  

Every good author understands that characters tell the author what to write, not the other way around. We’re responsible for bringing the people in our stories to life, intently listening to each, being thoughtful of their backstory, and abiding by who they are as a character. Their dialogue and actions drive the plot. How those are handled by an author is critical to maintaining a compelling, authentic story.

But what happens when a scene or chapter or subplot just won’t materialize, better known as writer’s block? All authors experience that moment, some less than others, but it’s unavoidable. It will happen, probably multiple times in the process of producing a manuscript. Successfully dealing with the problem opens the door to kickstart the interrupted creative process. There are many methods, but taking a cue from Herb Kohl, consider copying his technique.

Have a conversation with the characters on what they’re thinking. Throw them a wildly incongruent question of fact or importance that is unconnected to the story and see how they respond. If their answer misses the mark, that’s alright. Now you know. If they arrive at a plausible, reasonable answer, now you know that as well. If they hem and haw and sweat, tell them to take their time and only move on after they’ve answered. That’s also informative. You now perceive facets of them you hadn’t known, which may be a key ingredient in unblocking yourself and taking your story to a higher level.

Next time you’re at a Kohl’s, or drive by one, or see one of their advertisements, think back to this article and consider the “Kohl method” of interviewing a character(s) to handle current or future writing blocks. He or she may be able to figure out the “math question” you pose. Or maybe not. Either way their strengths, weaknesses, make-up, countenance, and other previously unrevealed attributes will come to the fore.

Just one rule, though. No calculators allowed.