Escaping the masses through AMS

5 million. That’s a big number. Now imagine someone presenting you with a choice. Here are 5 million books, pick one to read.

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That’s what readers are now faced with when looking for a book on Amazon and, more pertinently, that’s the size of the task facing authors when trying to break out from the masses of published and self-published books that are filling up the behemoth. To make it worse, more are added every day and generally, the old ones don’t go away.

So how is a book, particularly one by a new author, supposed to get noticed? Well, it’s bloody hard. Getting reviewed is a biggie, but I’ve talked about that before, so let’s assume Entangled Earth has a healthy pile of 4 and 5-star reviews (and it’s moving slowly in that direction thankfully). What do you do with all that feedback?

Shove it in people’s faces! That’s what you do. Right in their face, just when they are shopping. In your face potential reader! In your face!

This is where Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) comes in. It’s the self-publishers main tool for getting your book seen. There are a hundred articles on how to go about doing it, and most of you will either know already or won’t care in the slightest about the details so I’m not going to go into them here. This is where I’m at now. Currently running is my first Sponsored Link campaign (Amazon US only as that’s the only place it’s possible for some stupid reason).

As of today, I’ve shoved Entangled Earth into 715 faces at a total cost of $0.76. Not bad value really. They haven’t all bought it, but you never know…