Teresa Fradera – Marketer

So you've done the hard work of putting your expertise into a book. To share your knowledge, improve your professional profile, and potentially even bring in a bit of passive income. Regardless of how well it's already selling, you should be running Amazon PCC ads (PPC = pay per click). When set up properly, they'll help you reach more readers each month while also bringing in a small or moderate profit.

Will you say no to more income for a very little investment?
You can make more money as a non-fiction author and I am here to help you.

When run properly, ads should:

→ Cost nothing and create a profit (we'll start small and only run the profitable ones)

→ Deliver a steady stream of profitable monthly sales (usually between 20 and 120 sales per month)

→ Help with launch by seeding an initial group of readers, gathering those crucial first reviews, and creating early momentum

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But ads can also be a hassle. You can certainly learn it yourself, but discovering the optimizations and efficiencies and traps will cost dozens of hours. My first client was a small indie publisher with ten nonfiction titles. I spent hundreds of hours learning, testing, and experimenting with how to get the best results for nonfiction.

I learned that the "best practices" for fiction simply don't work for nonfiction. As a small example: Kindle Lockscreen ads tend to be a huge waste of money for nonfiction authors. Also, your sales will multiply if you use a "descriptive" book blurb (i.e. "this is who the book is for and this is what it will do for you") instead of a "hype" blurb (i.e. "a revolution in the industry which is a must-read for every single person"). And the best-performing ads for nonfiction are ridiculously specific in who they target; broad keywords and categories are a money sink. Profitable advertising is all about getting your ads in front of the smallest audience who is most likely to buy — and love — your book.

Advertising isn't a magic bullet, but is certainly a useful tool and you should probably be running some ads. I'll remove the hassle and risk from using ads, ensuring that you get the maximum benefit for minimum fuss.

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How many books will you sell each month through ads? And how much money will you earn?

We won't know until a week or two into experimenting with your campaigns, but we'll keep the budget extremely low during that period to ensure that they aren't running at a loss. In general, 20-120 extra monthly sales is fairly standard and can be easily achieved a profit, although outliers (in either direction) do certainly exist.

The profit also depends on your price point and profit margins. As a finger-in-the-air estimate, imagine that you're selling the book at $10 via KDP and earning 60% royalties (i.e. $6 per book). At that price, it's fairly reasonable to earn around $2-4 profit per book sold via ads. If the ads were selling 100 copies per month, they'd be bringing in $200-400 extra profit (after covering their own costs) and adding a steady stream of new readers.

In general, advertising is easier if the book is more expensive. I'd suggest a price point of at least $7+ (Kindle) and $10+ (paperback). Fortunately, readers of nonfiction are much less price sensitive than those of fiction, so you may be able to get away with a higher price than you suspect. (One of the books I manage sells at $30 with more than 50k copies sold, and is growing every month.)

Also, you may (optionally) choose to trade profits for sales. With PPC (pay per click) ads, you can pay a higher price to get in front of more, sacrificing some of your profit margins. Most indie authors prefer to optimize for overall monthly profits, but there are times when you might prefer to maximize readership, such as when you first launch and still need those early five-star reviews.

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I'll be happy to share with you more insights and define you book strategy together, contact me :)