Is using Amazon's advertising for a children's ebook effective?

Not any way that I can think of. I would trust Amazon's judgement on this one. They want to sell your book just as much as you do.

Obviously you need to generate more leads. But then you need to segment your list. Your basic list are those leads who "come aboard" and want to know what's going on. Your qualified leads list are your potential buyers. Between the two, you need a gate. So, they come on your big list. Then they need to get something that qualifies them from being a basic prospect to being a qualified prospect. That puts them on the second list. Leads >> Qualifier >> Qualified Leads. What's the topic of your book? Qualify by things people have said in similar book reviews. This is a lot easier if you are doing non-fiction, but it's possible with fiction as well. In the reviews you'll see people saying things like, "I bought this book because..." What they say after that is the pain point. Use this language, as they wrote it, in your qualifier. For example, in a review for SPIN Selling, someone says, " I don't do "hit and run," one-time sales. Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar offer great tactics for those kind of salespeople, but they don't work for me." Another says, "...I had no idea how to sell professionally. I had already read a few books by Tom Hopkins, but felt he was targeting used-car salesmen types. It seems as though Hopkins' techniques relied on "closing" gimmicks when it came down to it. (I must say I did learn some good principles from Hopkins, but his gimmicky style is not for me.) I was instantly attracted to SPIN SELLING when I saw that (1) it was based on extensive research, and (2) it dealt primarily with the large sale. Since I want to start my own corporation after my MBA, and want to have Fortune-500 companies as my customers, I realized SPIN SELLING was for me." See the commonality? So if I was launching a solid B2B sales techniques book, I would make use of this language. First, I would attract them to my basic list with the promise of a corporate B2B sales book. Then, I would qualify further with language like, "Are you looking to build real relationships with your customers, instead of hit-and-run one-time sales tricks? Are you eager to understand the secrets of professional corporate selling?" A Call To Action would follow. Those who respond to this language are qualified leads, as salespeople in other situations would not resonate with that copy. How can you transfer what I've shown you here to your niche? If you're writing non-fiction, as I said, it should be straightforward. If it's fiction, then you can find similar stories and pull from the reviews for those...the things they say they like about the author's style (assuming yours is like theirs), the story structure, the excitement, the thought process, or whatever. Why not just go straight for the qualified leads? Because your net won't be big enough. Better to grab a whole lot of interested readers, which you can make use of later as well, and qualify from there.

Hello! My name is Humberto Valle, I'm the co-founder of www.Unthink.me, growth hacking and digital marketing service. I can go over all the different tactics and strategies that you can implement but there is a book by a fellow growth hack marketer, Ryan Holiday, in this book he talks about how he did just what you are looking for. In essence, he scheduled his book release with enough time that allowed him to promote snippets of the book through blogs, forums, influencers, etc and get traction on this website to capture emails from interested marketers and business owners. You can also trade emails for snippets/sections of your book as well as schedule a timeline releasing chapter by chapter through a blog wrapping up the entire project with the release of the book itself. (sounds contradictory, but if your book is good people will want to have a physical copy and support you for it) Once the book is launched you reach out to influencers who have shown support before hand as well as through emails and even paid ads. Check out his book is definitely worth it.

First, I think you need to look at why no one showed up for your writing on Medium. Did you just publish and forget it? What's your view-to-read ratio? Are the people reading your articles engaging with it (or at least reading to the end)? Selling ebooks is about 5% writing and 95% marketing. I wish that weren't the case, but the fact is that most ebooks are utter trash: riddled with typos, mostly packed with useless information, and generally executed poorly all around. But those terrible ebooks sell because they're marketed well. You can find tons of free resources on marketing, or you can buy (warily) any number of books about marketing ebooks online. You can also talk to someone who's helped other people set up successful ebook-selling operations — I'd be happy to help. The basics are: 1. Write something people need. If no one has the problem you're solving, it won't sell. 2. Put out lots of content around the subject matter on your own site/Medium that links back to your sales page for more info/next steps. 3. Write for other sites with big audiences. Guest post about your subject matter. Most sites are constantly hard up for content, so you have a decent shot of getting a post run of you submit it properly. 4. Be consistent. You can't run two guest posts and expect millions of dollars in sales. Many of the best sellers are putting out dozens of articles a month. 5. Test and iterate. Set up simple split testing on your site. Watch the conversion rates from your articles and see where spikes and dips are happening. Adjust as necessary. Making money from ebooks is not easy, and it's mostly an effort in self-promotion and sales. But if you follow through and keep testing, there's a lot of money to be made. If you'd like an experienced set of eyes to help with putting together a launch/marketing strategy, I'd be happy to give you a hand. Let me know. Good luck!

Basically, the question is this: Are people reading the book for your writing, or for your ideas? If it's for your writing (say, if you're a fiction author) then you should probably write it yourself. It'd be disingenuous not to. If they're interested in your ideas (which is the case with most Kindle non-fiction books), then what's important is that your ideas aren't lost. That doesn't mean ghostwriting is fine, only that you need to find an efficient way to get your ideas out without wasting your time writing. Basically, the process I use is to outline the book myself, sit down with a microphone, and talk through the entire book (basically recording a really rough draft of the audiobook straight from the outline). Then I transcribe it, and then hire a "writer" to work from the transcription to the finished text. That way it's high quality and maintains my ideas, but I don't have to do all the work of typing. I wrote a book that breaks down the process in a bit more detail (especially the process of outlining, how to record effectively, how to find that editor, etc.), but basically what I said above is all you really need to know. Here's the link if you want to check it out: www.amazon.com/Book-Box-Method-Quickly-Easily-ebook/dp/B014EUTYGM/