Advertising – sooo frustrating!

It turns out that you don’t sell books if you don’t advertise. Who knew 😉 ?

So, after picking the brains of my good friend, author Karen Cossey, I purchased this software called KDP Rocket which helps you select the right keywords to use in my Amazon advertising campaign. I spent ages (like four hours) researching the keyword strings, crunching the numbers and analysing the trends to determine the good ones for my books. Up until now, I had an Amazon campaign running using seven keywords. Now I set one up that used over 300. I was so excited when I went to bed that night, imagining that suddenly, overnight, I was going to start getting sales on my book.

However, the next morning when I checked my ad, it had stopped very soon into the campaign, and there was a big red WARNING message. The ad hadn’t been able to draw on funds from my credit card. There were a bunch of links suggesting things to fix. I clicked on them all, and nothing seemed to be wrong. So I contacted the bank. Sure enough, they had blocked the payments, because the Amazon address trying to access my account had looked dodgy. They ‘white-listed’ it and I waited (because the Amazon site said that they’d keep trying for 72hours)…but still the payment would not go through.

I then submitted a query about to the Amazon author support team. Due to time zone differences, it took about a day, but eventually I got a response…an email with all the same links and information that their help site had originally suggested. So no help at all. Sigh. A week later, I had to call on Karen’s help again. “Ah yes,” she says, “that happened to me once, too. I ended up clicking a button down the bottom of this page…” We rummaged around the website and eventually clicked on something that seemed to say that my account has been re-set.

We’ll find out if it’s sorted itself out tomorrow. Fingers crossed.