Owl be your guide!
Amazon advertising for indie authors, organized by the problem you are actually trying to solve.
I write about Amazon advertising for independent authors, on the assumption that you would rather understand the system than collect tactics from it. Noctua Forest parliament briefs are made to help authors stay up to date with the stories that matter the most to you right now.
Parliament: A group of owls is called a parliament. This one convenes to debate the self-publishing news that affects your bottom line.
Start with whichever section describes the problem actually in front of you. Each one opens onto a full archive if you want to keep going.
Ad Strategy: Campaign architecture, and what to do about an account that has outgrown its own structure.
Keywords & Indexing: How Amazon reads, classifies, and files your catalog — before any advertising decision matters.
Launch & Rankings: The highest-stakes weeks in an author's calendar, and how they go wrong.
Authropreneur: The business you are actually in, as distinct from the book you wrote.
Catalog & Listings: Covers, metadata, and the unglamorous work of being findable at all.
Before you go deeper...
Much of the writing here leans on precise vocabulary. A Search Query and a Search Term are not the same object, and confusing them is expensive. The Official Glossary of Noctua Forest defines the whole system from the ground up — it is the most useful forty minutes you can spend on this site.
Most bidding decisions reduce to a single number: what a click is worth to you. It depends on your royalty, the share of your readers who borrow rather than buy, and how far a series carries them — which is why the honest figure varies so widely between authors.
The Sponsored Ads author series break-even calculator works it out from your own numbers.
Still need help?
Questions? If something here doesn't fit your situation — or you want to know whether a free audit is worth your time — email tucker@noctuaforest.us.