(Warning: Inside baseball.)You may need to click on that to make it legible.  Not too long ago Amazon announced that they were creating an advertising program for books in their Kindle Select program.  It read a little… hmm… I’ll say suboptimally designed at first.  Amazon already makes money from every book I sell, right?  They take about a third of my sales, plus a little bit more that they pretend is a “delivery fee.”  Now, I don’t actually mind the cut that they’re getting; as my distributor, they’re entitled to a piece of my sales.  I don’t find it unreasonable.

I do find it slightly unreasonable that they want to directly charge me for an advertising program that makes them more money if it succeeds.  It feels… unkosher, somehow, in a way I don’t like very much.  But, hey, Amazon’s a business partner, here.  They’re not my friends.  They’re allowed to try and make as much money for themselves as they want regardless of whether or not I like it.

I’ve run two campaigns with them (and, I should note, not actually spent any money yet, because they charge per click) and both have, thus far, been literally completely useless.  The first time through, I timed it around Skylights going on sale and specifically targeted it to people who looked at certain other books– I had a list of about forty.  This time, I’m targeting by genre and not by specific books.

The first time, I got 728 impressions and not a single click.  This time… well, they don’t seem to be able to keep their numbers straight.  I had 21oo impressions a couple of days ago, which fell to 820 this morning and now is back up to 1414, but never more than the one click… and that click also disappeared for a time this morning. (6:00 PM edit: I’m down to 1200 impressions, and the click is gone again.)

I have not sold a copy of Skylights since the sale ended.  Scarily, this is still a really good month– even independently of the sale, the first third of February was stellar enough to make up for a genuinely crappy middle third.  And I’ve had 2142 impressions through this “advertising program” that has resulted in (maybe!) one click, for a return rate of .047%.  In other words, less than a twentieth of a percent.  Industry standard is 1-5%.

“But Luther!” you say.  “Maybe your ad just sucks!  Maybe it’s not Amazon’s fault!”

Which could be true– except for the part where Amazon generates the ads themselves, and they all look exactly the same:  the book cover, the title, author, and star ranking.  Skylights has a decent star ranking on Amazon right now, so unless people hate the cover I can’t really blame the ad.

The only good news is that they charge by the click, and if they never get any clicks, I never get charged.  I’m not going to cancel this one for a while, but they’re gonna have to find a way to pick up the pace if they really think they’re going to hit my advertising budget (or even come close) by April 1st.