I'm publishing my 8th title next month and this is the first time doing a delayed release. The book is done, cover, interior and KDP upload, all done. Now I wait, do some subtle marketing, wait. On the up side, I ordered proofs, found minor mistakes and was able to fix those. But the wait... I am hoping that I am able to build a little anticipation and experience some reward on the launch date but that is yet to be seen. Does anyone else have experience with delayed gratification on KDP? It's just so easy to publish that I never tried building pre-release tension or promotional campaigns. I'm a little nervous and also excited.

So, I will sometimes order copies of my books directly from Amazon, if I need a couple copies quickly as Amazon treats author copies like a red headed step child and will often take weeks to process. Because I order this way and pay full retail, Amazon owes me a royalty on each order processed. In June I ordered 10 but Amazon only reported 5 of these on June report. I'm like, wtf? That's half my sales never being reported and never paying a royalty!!! So I reached out to support and here's what they said, "After investigating your royalty concern, I can confirm that the Amazon order in question was manufactured through our Expanded Distribution printers. While Amazon primarily uses Amazon facilities and printers to fulfill orders for your paperback, we occasionally send orders to our Expanded Distribution printers to ensure timely delivery. For orders manufactured through our Expanded Distribution printers, your royalty will appear on your Sales Dashboard approximately 30 days after the end of the month in which the sale occurred. Importantly, your royalty will be calculated using your Amazon distribution channel royalty rate, regardless of where your book is printed. For example: If an Amazon.com order occurs in October and is fulfilled by our Expanded Distribution printers, the sale will report as a standard Amazon royalty at the end of November and will be paid at the end of January, along with other sales reported in November." Here's my concern, how in the hell are we supposed to accurately track marketing effectively if Amazon is delaying reporting of a sale up to 60 days. Also, if I had never noticed this because I was "buying my own books" would they ever had reported it at all? I mean seriously, this feels like an "oops they caught us skimming" kind of explanation to me.

At some point Amazon did away with 18+ age range category. So now, by default, if you leave the age range blank, the listing shows 16-18 as the recommended age range for all adult fiction. I'm concerned that many shoppers may interpret this as "Young Adult" content rather than adult. Amazon has many reasons, I'm sure, for making this change but it has the potential to mis-categorize many books and cause potential readers to pass on the purchase. Especially because there previously was an 18+ category and there's very little chance that shoppers are widely aware of this internal change. Has anyone else noticed the change to their Adult titles being displayed as 16-18?

I wanted to share some observations from my first Amazon Sponsored Products campaign because the results have been different than I expected. I set a budget and simply let the campaign run. After 12 days, Amazon had permission to spend up to up to my set limit, but it spent only about 22% of that budget. That was one of the biggest surprises. Rather than spending my daily budget, Amazon appears to bid selectively, only entering auctions where its algorithm believes my book is a relevant match for the shopper's search. So far, the campaign has generated: - Over 10,000 impressions - 13 clicks - 2 attributed sales - Approximately 15.4% click-to-purchase conversion The search terms have also been encouraging. Amazon isn't matching my book to random searches—it has connected it with searches such as: - "getting over trauma" - "healing from trauma" - "books on betrayal trauma" - "how to heal trauma in the body" That has given me confidence that the algorithm is beginning to understand who the book is for. The most valuable lesson for me has been that a daily budget is simply a maximum, not a spending target. Amazon seems perfectly willing to leave budget unused if it doesn't believe there are enough high-quality opportunities to show the ad. This is a small sample and my ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales) is running at about 43.85% when I deduct that cost from my Royalties, I'm basically breaking even. So, as an experiment I was willing to spend money on, it hasn't cost me a penny. That's encouraging. What is discouraging, isn't the behavior of Amazon Ads, I'm surprised at the restraint of spending that is occurring. My bottleneck on Amazon seems to be audience pool. There simply aren't enough shoppers searching terms that fit my niche for Amazon to justify spending my very modest budget. I'm planning to continue letting the campaign run without making changes and see what the data looks like over a larger sample size.

I wanted to share my personal experience with using a pseudonym, so far. First of all, my written work is in the non-fiction genre, so why use a fictional name? At first I launched a podcast and was planning to talk about some personal trauma history. Using a pseudonym was my way of not drawing direct attention to people from my past that I might be telling stories about. Later, when I began writing books on the same topics, I wanted to have a cohesive flow back to the podcast content. So, I decided to use the pseudonym for the books and everything downstream from that (including my skool community). More importantly is what happened as a happy accident because of this choice. I was careful to select a pseudonym that was unique back then. The result is that if someone does a google search of my author name, a very cohesive and thorough response is returned (especially when using AI search engines). This has resulted in an online presence that is not distracted by my personal history, my other business presence or any other person with a similar name. The search yields results that include my book titles, book reviews and my social platforms that compliment the books. More importantly, it highlights my authority on the subject I write about (trauma healing and personal transformation) Just thought I would share this as it might help others to gain visibility.