Amazon Ads for Graphic Novels

Amazon Ads let you pay to show your graphic novel in Amazon search results and on other books' product pages. Used carefully, they can bring steady new readers. Used carelessly, they can quietly cost more than your royalties. Here's a cautious way to start.

Amazon's ad tools change often — follow its current guidance in your KDP or Amazon Ads dashboard.

Before you spend anything

Ads multiply what your listing already does. If your cover, title, price, and description don't persuade the people who see them, ads will only pay for more people to ignore the book. Fix the listing first. It also helps to have a few honest reviews.

Start with Sponsored Products

Sponsored Products ads show your book in search results and on related product pages, and you pay only when someone clicks. They're the usual starting point for authors.

There are two kinds of targeting:

• Automatic — Amazon decides where to show your ad based on your book's details. Good for discovering what works.
• Manual — you choose keywords ("graphic novel for kids," "Jane Austen comic") or specific books and categories to target.

A common approach: run a small automatic campaign first, then move the search terms that lead to sales into a manual campaign.

Set a budget you're comfortable losing

Start with a small daily budget and a modest bid per click. Treat the first few weeks as a paid experiment. Write down your limit before you begin.

Know your numbers

The number to watch is cost per sale. Compare it with your royalty per copy (use our KDP calculator). If each sale costs more in ads than you earn in royalties, the campaign is losing money — unless it's leading readers to buy other books in your series, which ads alone won't show you.

Read the results, then adjust

After a couple of weeks:

• Pause keywords and targets that get clicks but no sales.
• Keep the ones that sell, and try a slightly higher bid on the best of them.
• Add negative keywords for searches that are clearly the wrong audience.

Ads work best with a series

A reader brought in by an ad who then buys your other books is worth far more than one sale. That's why ads tend to make the most sense once you have several titles — and why a consistent series look matters.

Ads are one tool among many. See how to get more graphic novel sales for the rest.