I am still writing the fourth book, which is why this blog hasn’t had any posts for a while. When I am working on a book I am almost completely focused on it and tend to forget about other things like this blog.

A while back I posted a rant about Amazon opening up their ad system to everyone, including the big publishers. The situation hasn’t changed and it seems to be convincing many self published authors who worked exclusively with them to give up writing since their ads don’t get shown and their sales have disappeared. It’s a shame Amazon has abandoned all the authors who built the Kindle to what it is today in preference of large companies who will never be as dedicated to Amazon as the self publishers were. I wonder if the Kindle will survive when there are no longer millions of authors offering up their books for all Kindle owners to read for free.

I have been running a single category ads on Amazon to see if there is any difference in what it costs to run ads for any particular type of book. What I have found is that the average bid to get an ad impression that amazon shows when creating an ad is NOT what is needed to actually get the ad to show. It appears to be the average of what everyone has bid, not the average of the winning bids. In every category Amazon shows an average bid of between 15 and 25 cents. The reality is that to get a winning bid I have to make it anywhere from 30 to 50 cents.

A little math shows that this will prevent any author from making money using Amazons ad system. For example: on a good month I can make one sale for every one hundred clicks. If each click is costing me 30 cents, then to get that sale I have to spent 30 dollars on clicks. I would need to charge around 35 dollars for my books to make any money. The most expensive science fiction book I could find was 24 dollars and that was for a hard cover printed book by a well known author.