Significantly influenced

Ever wondered about the future of advertising your books online?

I've just discovered it is possible to do one Amazon Ad and have more than one title on that ad.

I read that the future will be significantly influenced by AI. Well, I sort of expected that. Protecting consumer data is also crucial. Wasn't that critical when they were teaching AI to write books, though, was it? so I'm not entirely convinced on that one.

Already AD Agencies are touting for business among authors. "let us do your advertising..." 

Pretty soon they'll be writing the books for the (possibly top-line) authors and reaping the royalties before someone reads the book and says "this wasn't as good as the last one - are you sure s/he really wrote it?" Because  *they* could write any sort of rubbish, stick a famous authors name on it and what re-dress does the author have? Or the reader who paid good money for something that is basically a fraud? There probably isn't a law that covers it ... yet.

*anyone who wanted to and had the IT knowledge to do it, really.

Massive probs for Amazon

I think my time placing Ads on Amazon to promote my books is over.

For the last 18 months I have the feeling they are benefitting from me rather me benefitting from them. Sales are way down and even KENP reads are none-existent. Now this may be for a number of reason but  Amazon glitches are not helping.

To be honest, this time my bank had a rather large part to play because they declined to pay off the invoice for no other reason than fraud protection. They suspected/were checking that I was really me, so they said when I rang today. So they were the reason Amazon stopped everything dead. 

I think the banks should at least e-mail people if they are going to do this. Their action has caused me awful problems and all for nothing - there was no fraud.

Though I have spent a good hour online with Amazon Ads AI helper today telling them their billing page does not allow me to pay the wretched unpaid invoice (for $9.18 cents.) In the end the AI helper handed over to an attendant and though Avindar could send a message to me, I could not send one back to him. No joy with  Microsoft Edge (my normal browser)  or with Firefox or Google Chrome. (The AI helper thought that would help if I changed browsers.) I think Amazon Ads has massive problems these days.  Anyway, I gave up and took the dog for a walk.

The way to go

Lots of writers are turning to ads because book sales are so slow. Google, Facebook and Amazon seem to be the top choices. I think it may have a lot to do with the way Facebook changed the ground rules about who saw which posts - the answer being the average person saw very little, certainly when compared with what had gone before. Time was when it was hard to actively keep up with the number of posts scrolling by - and maybe that volume threatened to break the system.
I deliberately did not do any promotion this autumn. I thought I'd save my efforts for when the new book was published. With no promotion my sales line looked thin, though the odd KENP figures chipped in randomly. Certainly no way to go on if I want my books to be read. I have followed a couple of webinars with Mark Dawson, but to follow the method he advocates you have to be prepared to speculate to the tune of $99 to join Amazon Advantage and it seems to me it is geared to selling paperback books rather than e-books. So I shall be doing a little more reading around the topic..

Ads, anyone? What do you think? Is it the way to go?

Contemplating Ads

Finally I feel better. A tummy bug laid me low

 and it has taken 7 days for it to start, develop 

and finally disappear. I hope it is not going to 

make a reappearance any time soon. It was a 

struggle, but I still managed to get the final 

version of Book 3 of the trilogy to Amazon before the deadline on Monday night. Publication Day will be Friday 23rd November. Between now and then I shall be promoting. I may even try an ad. Gulp!

Maybe a little reading around will be appropriate before I plunge in. I'm told you can start at as little as 3 dollars a day and spend as much as you want. 3 dollars doesn't seem much at all, does it? How much good can that paltry sum do? Will there be any result at all? There's only one way to find out.