2.      Aggressive Launches

As I mentioned in my “Keys to Success”, a new book launch can be a powerful way to generate profit. By running ads that are profitable or even break-even to a new release, you can turn Amazon’s algorithm into a flywheel. 

The gist of it is this - the ads create sales and reads for the new book, which can help convince Amazon that the new book is popular. If Amazon’s algorithm decides the book is popular enough, it will go on to recommend the book organically to anyone browsing Amazon who it thinks might enjoy it. You can see this at work in the “More Like…” and “Based on your recent views”  or “Products related to this item” carousels on any Amazon book product page. When the book appears in these various recommendation carousels, it can bring thousands of new readers into the fold who frequently trickle through the rest of the books in the series (or to other series in your catalog), creating a lift in sales and page reads that can last weeks or months.

Additionally, as a series is built out, Amazon’s algorithm will remember the people who read the previous book and will recommend the new book to them as well. So launches have the potential to build on themselves, increasing your audience and global sales/reads with every release.

Since this author is both organized and prolific, we spend aggressively on new launches.I’ll break down exactly how I run a launch in a separate case study in the future. For now, I’ll highlight the four major strategic pillars that have worked for this author and may work for you as well:

I. Pre-launch Testing 

This author launches a book every 60-90 days. We test between 10-20 titles for each book, sending traffic directly to the Author’s website to measure CPCs before a product page is created on Amazon. 

Once a winning title is selected, we test between 2-5 covers. We do this by setting a placeholder cover - just simple text on a black or gray background - and a simple one-line blurb on the Amazon product page. Then I make ads with each cover variant and track each ad with Amazon attribution links, so I can measure how each variant performs in terms of CPCs and Preorder CPA.

There won’t always be a massive difference in the covers and blurbs that you test. But even a small boost in performance can go a long way when you’re spending a large amount of money on a launch. 

Let’s say you spend $40,000 on a launch to get 200,000 clicks at a $0.20 CPC. From those 200,000 clicks, if your ads convert at 2.5% then you've moved 5,000 units (sales or complete borrows) of your book.

If pre-launch testing helps bump up your conversion rate (the percentage of clicks that result in a sale) by a single point to 3.5%, it will increase your units moved from 5,000 to 7,000.

Similarly, if pre-launch testing helps you reduce your CPC by $0.05 to $0.15, then that $40,000 now gets you 266,667 clicks. At a conversion rate of 2.5%, that means you move 6,667 units.

And if pre-launch testing helps you reduce your CPC by just $0.05 AND increase your conversion rate to 3.5%, then you’re looking at 9,333 total units from your $40,000 - nearly double the amount of units you would have moved had you not tested anything. 

II. Creative Testing During the Launch

The more you spend on a Facebook ad campaign, the faster the ads decay. For a launch budget of more than $2,000 per-day, you need to keep feeding the proverbial meat grinder every few days.  I usually open with at least 50 different ads, and add another 25 ads every 3-5 days, testing all new creative elements (images, primary text, headlines, placements) or iterating on the elements that were the most successful to try and improve on their performance even more.

I specifically use the 5 x 5 testing technique that Nick Johansen from NicholasErik.com writes about. The gist is that you mix 5 different images with 5 different pieces of copy in each round to create 25 unique ads - because you never know which combos will do better than others. The difference between doing this manually and just throwing everything into a single FB ad is that you can track how each individual combo performs.

By the time I hit 250+ ads in a set, performance has usually decayed to where all but the best ads will be cut off, with the top performers being left to run as spend winds down. 

III. Flexible Budgets

I believe launches are most effective when you follow what the numbers tell you instead of locking in to a fixed budget. 

For this particular author, we have spent as little as $20,000 on some launches and as much as $160,000 on others. Usually we open at around $3500/day in spend and then adjust up or down from there based on the data. 

By the data I don’t mean rank - although that has its own limited uses in gauging performance of a launch. What I’m really looking for, though, is the author’s daily revenue vs expenses, the way that page reads and sales are trending across their series and entire catalog, and the overall CPA of the ads. 

These three points of data tell me three important things: 

1. Is the author making money?

   The first few days post-launch are usually in the red, but after that they should be in the green. If they aren’t, then the daily spend is probably too high.

2. Is the launch creating lift?

   By which I mean, are people moving from the new book to the other books in this author’s catalog? Overall catalog reads from a launch usually peak somewhere between Days 7 and 14 post-release, but the lift created to the series typically peaks later - between Days 14 and 30. This means that your overall sales and total catalog reads should be rising through the first week before the numbers slowly start to settle while the series reads continue to climb. Data is naturally jumpy, so I’m looking for 2-3 day trends vs day to day. If reads are rising, then we keep our foot on the gas. When they start to decline, it’s a sign that we need to start cutting back. 

3. Are the ads profitable?

   Usually launches are loss leaders, but they can occasionally be profitable on their own. For an established series, I try to set my ads to cut off when they pass the point of running breakeven and start losing money - basically when their CPA climbs past the benchmark I had calculated pre-launch. For Book 1s of a new series, I keep a closer eye on the revenue and page reads. But on the occasion when the ads for a launch are straight-up profitable - like if you’re getting , I keep my foot on the gas until the ads stop making money. 

That last point - about keeping the ads running until they stop making money brings me to my final pillar of strategy:

IV. The Launch Isn’t Over Until The Ads Stop Making Money. 

A common mistake I see authors make is cutting off their launch campaigns because they’ve hit a specific deadline - like 2 weeks post-launch or 30 days post-launch, without ever checking to see if they have some gems running. 

I track the performance of every ad I create. Most of the ads I test are losers - around 80% won’t hit my target CPA after 50 clicks, and will be shut off to never run again. Of the 20% that are winners,  they will only hit my target CPA for a week or two before they decay and get shut off. But usually, in a set of 250+ ads, for this specific author, there are one or two gems that can absorb more than $1,000 in spend over the course of several weeks and still hit my target CPA.

For example, one ad from a launch earlier this year has been running for over six months now. It has absorbed over $5,0000 in spend and has held a CPA under $3 - making it straight-up profitable. 

If there are one or more gems like this running in a launch campaign that I manage, I will never just cut the spend off on them. Instead, I just trim down the spend to a level that the ad can handle on its own - usually somewhere between $25-$50 per-day per-ad.