Amazon Advertising Insights With Russell Blake And Michael Beverly

Book marketing through organic reach on Amazon is over, but there's no point lamenting the end of an indie era.

Surf the changes and get to grips with Amazon Ads — or outsource them if you're ready to. Some hard talking — and encouragement — with Russell Blake today, as well as tips from Michael Beverly.

In the intro, I talk about the Audible Captions rights discussion [The Verge], Dean Koontz signs with Amazon Publishing [Publishing Perspectives], and Mike Shatzkin outlines how things have changed over the last 10 years in publishing.

Plus, my personal update around recovery from laser eye surgery — what grooves are you stuck in? Plus, Map of Plagues is out this week!

Russell Blake is the bestselling author of 60+ novels. He's a happy customer and investor in AMS AdWerks.Michael Beverley runs AMS AdWerks which manages Amazon advertising for established authors.

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

Show Notes

* On the maturation in the Amazon retail landscape

* Why Russell was converted to using ads and how it’s affected his writing pace

* Which types of books are most effective with ads

* Why writing in series continues to matter

* How to calculate read through, which is an important stat when advertising

* On the eternal KU vs. Wide dilemma

* Why reader satisfaction matters to Amazon’s algorithms

* On how AI will affect advertising

You can find Russell Blake at RussellBlake.com. You can find AMSAdWerks at AMSAdWerks.com

Transcript of Interview with Michael Beverly and Russell Blake

Joanna: Michael Beverley runs AMS AdWerks which manages Amazon advertising for established authors. Russell Blake is the bestselling author of 60 plus novels. A happy customer and investor in AMS AdWerks.

Welcome, Michael and Russell.

Michael: Good morning. Thank you for having us on.

Russell: Hi Joanna, always lovely to talk to you.

Joanna: Oh indeed. And for listeners of the show, Russell has been on the show before talking about writing fast and that was a couple of years ago. Now you've got a ton more novels.

Russell: I do. And by the way you see, I'm trying to shame you and you're having me on more.

Joanna: Well it's working really!

Russell, I do want to start with you because you've been successfully self-publishing for eight years and you recently talked about that on your blog.

Why get into doing more advertising at this point? Is having a large backlist not enough anymore?

Russell: Would that it were enough! The problem is that at least as far as I can tell and Michael is the expert. I'm not. But the problem I ran into about two years ago was that I noticed that my organic visibility was fading and I couldn't understand exactly why.

And then speaking to a bunch of other authors and doing research I learned that Amazon was giving preferable visibility via advertising. So really the landscape had transitioned from one whereas authors we got free visibility via also boughts and by via recommendations etc.