Get excited about this scoop!

Hi there,


Welcome to a new edition of Reedsy’s weekly marketing newsletter! I’m particularly excited about this one, and that’s because I recently heard two major news that will open huge new doors to indie authors worldwide.


Now, these may seem small and inconspicuous at first, which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d missed them. So allow me to explore them in proper depth and show you just why you should care.


Let’s start with one that will delight all Amazon advertisers…

Amazon Advertising opens Sponsored Brands ads to KDP authors


Sponsored Brands placements are not new. They were already available to most Amazon Sellers, except for… indie authors. Yep, that’s right. KDP accounts were the only ones that didn’t have access to Sponsored Brands.


It was past time for that to change, and it finally did! Any KDP user with at least three unique ASINs under a single author name can now access Sponsored Brands, which is great news because these tend to be the most coveted placements. And I’ll explain why below. 

Prime real estate

See, Sponsored Brands ads show up as the very first result for any search on Amazon. Here’s an example:



The first two products in this search are “Sponsored Products” ads. But look above them. You should see three books showing up together in a carousel: that’s a Sponsored Brand ad. And I’m sure you can now see why those are coveted placements.

Perfect for series writers

Of course, they’re not for everyone. First, as I mentioned, you can only access them if you have at least three ASINs under a single author name in your KDP account. Keep in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean three books — since paperback, ebook, and audio formats all have unique ASINs, you could technically access Sponsored Brands with just the one book in three different formats.


But really, these ads are going to be most meaningful to series authors. In my limited Amazon Advertising experience (using a special account that already had access to Sponsored Brands), these ads have almost always outperformed Sponsored Products or Lockscreen ads for series authors.


You might have noticed that a headline is also included in the Sponsored Brands ads. You'll get to customize it, though you’re limited to 50 characters. If you’re short on inspiration, I recommend you run a few searches on Amazon.com related to your genre, and check out other advertisers’ headlines for their Sponsored Brands ads.


As for the image that shows up next to the headline, Amazon will automatically pick your author photo for it — but, again, this is customizable. For example, you may instead choose to show your logo, or part of your cover. The only requirement is that the image has to be round and visible as a mini-thumbnail (think mobile), so you can’t really place a full cover there.

Less competition… for now

Even better? This feature is brand new, and few people really know about it (that is, until they read my newsletter 😉). This means that there will be less competition for Sponsored Brands placements for a short while. But since there is only one Sponsored Brands placement per search (versus several for Sponsored Products), it’ll quickly become a much more competitive space. So make sure to get in on this early!


“Okay, that’s great. But how do I set up a successful Sponsored Brands ad?” 


Ah, it sounds like you could do with some Amazon Advertising training. In that case, I recommend you take my free 10-day course on the topic, which I happened to update only yesterday!


Now, you'll remember that I mentioned two pieces of major news at the start of this newsletter. And that second news is almost as exciting as the first (perhaps even more so if you have audiobooks out): BookFunnel now delivers audiobooks! Which means that you can finally use audiobooks as reader magnets.


But to learn more about that, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until next week, as this newsletter is long enough already! #cliffhanger #sorrynotsorry


Until then,

Ricardo