Re-blog of chrismcmullen’s post:
Advertising: Amazon vs. Goodreads
ADVERTISING e-BOOKS
Since KDP introduced Advertising Marketing Services (AMS) for KDP Select books earlier this year, I’ve placed 50 ads on a variety of nonfiction Kindle e-books.
I’ve also placed over a dozen ads with Goodreads. It’s interesting to compare the two options for advertising e-books.
AUDIENCE
There are two great things about advertising right on Amazon’s website or on a Kindle device (both are possible with AMS via KDP):
Many of the customers who see your ad are already shopping for other books, i.e. they are looking for books to read, they have their wallets out, and they are ready to spend money.
Since they are already on Amazon, your ad isn’t interrupting some other activity and trying to persuade customers to leave one site to visit another.
If you advertise at Goodreads with a link to your Amazon product page, you’re asking readers who were busy doing something else at Goodreads to stop what they were doing and visit another site all together.
You could instead advertise at Goodreads with a link to your book’s Goodreads page or a giveaway page, but if your ultimate goal is a sale, that’s an indirect way to go about it.
However, the way the self-service advertising options are presently setup, Goodreads ads seem to have an advantage with branding. We’ll return to this important point later.
TARGETING
The targeting options are considerably different with Amazon and Goodreads advertisements.
Amazon offers two kinds of targeting with AMS via KDP:
Interest targeting competes for ads based on category. Amazon has recently improved interest targeting by adding subcategories. Some books do fall nicely into one of those subcategories, but those subcategories are still too broad for other books, especially in nonfiction.
Product targeting lets you search for specific books or other products by keyword. Amazon has an advantage here, as Goodreads doesn’t offer keyword targeting, nor does Goodreads let you target specific books, nor does Goodreads let you target other products besides books (like movies).
Goodreads also offers two main kinds of targeting:
Goodreads also has categories to choose from, but these tend to be very broad.
I prefer not to select any categories, but to target by author instead. Visit Amazon and search for very popular books that your specific target audience is likely to read. Then enter those author names at Goodreads to target readers of those authors.
A great thing about Goodreads is that when you target specific authors, they will show your ad to Goodreads readers who have given those authors high ratings.
Imagine if you could target customers at Amazon who rated similar books 4 or 5 stars. You have to love Goodreads for this option.
I try to avoid other targeting options at Goodreads, such as gender, age, or country, since some accounts may not have selected an option.
for the full article please follow this link to chrismcmullen’s blog
Good advise. Tks.
🙂
Thanks so much for sharing your experience and perspective on this. Very useful.
Thank you. I’m glad you think so 🙂
All of this befuddles me. Maybe that’s why my books didn’t sell well. It certainly can’t be the writing! 😉
Thankyou for this post, Chris,
Is there any good independent alternative to these two? i use GoodReads since it seems more reader-based than Amazon. But then I am not terribly interested in selling my books, as I prefer that they be read, above all (and since I did not read my second publishing contract well enough…).
Shira
21.8.12015 HE
Thanks Shira
I know of IBooks, Kobo and Smashwords for ebooks and Readfree.ly, rifflebooks.com and Booklikes.
Sounds like an interesting story about your publishing contract.
Ugh, I was not smart with that -my first book was solicited by them in 2008, published in 2010 and I got editorial advice and an author’s copy or two. In 2014 everything had changed, but I was too tired to notice -no editorial review, photo/bookcover advice, and no copy of my book! When I asked about it, it seems the editor and policy had changed, and I had not read the new contract very well, so of course I could not complain. While I paid nothing, imho the publisher is now no more than a vanity press.
Sorry to hear it 😦
No sweat -a learning experience. Shira 25.8.12015 HE