Mike Capuzzi: Welcome back to The Author Factor Podcast. Today's episode is a milestone in two ways. It's my 250th episode, and it will also be the final episode of The Author Factor Podcast. After almost five years, it's time to move on, and I'll be sharing my new podcast details very soon. Now, to mark this special episode, I invited today's guest very specifically because what he is doing is something extraordinary for nonfiction book authors. Teddy Smith is an author, podcast host, and founder of publishing, performance, and AI driven advertising platform for Amazon ads. Teddy, welcome to the show.

Teddy Smith: Thank you for having me. And congratulations on the 250 episodes.

Mike Capuzzi: Yeah, and its funny cause you're just starting your podcast, right? You literally just started within the last week or two, correct?

Teddy Smith: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I've four episodes live. I've got about ten recorded, and I think you're coming on in about two or three weeks as well. So I'm. Yeah. Excited about how that's gonna go.

Mike Capuzzi: Congratulations with that. And, you know, you and I were just chatting for a little while about, you know, the podcast journey, and it's. At one point, I thought it was something I was just gonna give up, you know. Okay. I've been there, done it. But I realized I love talking to people like yourself, people that are smart, that are doing things, that are helping other people, nine times out of ten. And you'll. We'll have to see if this is, you know, the case with you as you proceed.

Mike Capuzzi: But nine times out of ten, I leave an interview, like, energized. I tell my wife, I'm like, oh, I interviewed the coolest person today, blah, blah, blah. So I don't know if I want to miss that. But I did want to have you on as the last episode of the author Factor, because, first of all, you've written 19 of your own books, which is a amazing feat. We'll talk a little bit about that. But more importantly, from what you're doing today, I know you're an Amazon ads expert, but you're doing something that I've heard nobody else is doing yet. I want to learn more about it, and it's a way of helping people who are writing specifically nonfiction, but I'm sure fiction authors can probably use it. I don't know if that's true or not, but nonfiction authors really get their books out there on Amazon.

Mike Capuzzi: So without further ado, please give me a little bit of a background of yourself. Share that author, your own author journey. And I. Let's just bring it up to that. And then we'll start talking about what you're doing today with AI and Amazon ads.

Teddy Smith: Sure, sounds great. So I started out selling on Amazon more on the product side. So I've got a products business which is in the meditation space. We sell things like candles and crystals and some other products to help you successfully meditate and have a really great time. And whilst I was running that business, I started selling books. Originally, it was quite similar to a lot of your clients. I wrote the books as a kind of a lead magnet to get people to come to my website, to go to my blog, to click on my ads and my affiliate links, also to lead them back towards my products. And I use them really as just starts of a part of the brand.

Teddy Smith: But actually they started selling well by themselves, which was actually unintended but very nice. And then when they started selling well, I was like, right, why should I do this? Because I was enjoying the writing. I really like books. I'm really passionate about that side of it. So I really enjoyed the writing aspect. So I thought, well, let's spend a bit more time doing this writing now. I think one of the reasons I could get the books to sell quite well was because coming from a products background, I got really good at doing the Amazon ads. And I think, as you probably know, the Amazon ads platform is quite complicated for many people, especially for authors who maybe aren't so business focused, they're much more like either their writers or their concentrating on their own business.

Teddy Smith: The Amazon ad platform is quite complicated and it's essentially all keyword driven. You choose the keywords you want to try and rank for, and Amazon chose products to the customers that it thinks they're going to buy. So using that knowledge that I had about the products, I went over and became really good at doing Amazon ads for authors. Now, as you mentioned at the beginning, I think for non fiction authors especially, it works really well, because when people are searching for non fiction books, I think what they're really asking is the answer to a problem that they're having. So, for example, we were talking about one of your clients who is a physician. A lot of his people who are looking for his books will be looking for the answer to a problem like how do I stop getting a bad back when I'm sitting at my desk all day? Now, those keywords are what customers want to be searching for. And so with non fiction books, if you can find those right keywords to target, you can get your books to appear higher up the rankings, which gives them a much better chance of getting purchased because they're being seen by the customer in the first place. And that's how I got to, that's basically a background to my Amazon journey.

Teddy Smith: So now I've got 19 books in that meditation space, and they're all self written and with the help of editors and things like that. But they're not too long. They're quite as, it's quite similar to your books. They're not quite shooks, but they are, they are, they are quite, you know, short, and they're about specific topics that people can easily digest.

Mike Capuzzi: And again, I think it's. I think for so many people, there's a preference. As a matter of fact, I'll just show this. We're not sharing the video, but a person I just met, and maybe she'll be on my new podcast, but this is her book. Eight and a half by eleven. It's like, it's an encyclopedia.

Teddy Smith: Wow, there's a textbook.

Mike Capuzzi: Yeah, it's a beautiful book. And it's full color inside, by the way. It costs a fortune, and therefore it has to be priced accordingly. And she was like, oh, my sales aren't that great. And I'm like, well, the reason is you got a $50 health book and a $10 health book. Most people are probably gonna, but there's so many, especially for Legion, like what you're doing, what you've done in the past, where you're just trying to make that introduction and get someone introduced to what you have, and then you can, you know, bring them along the pathway. Teddy, you mentioned something, which is a bit of an understatement, because I'm a pretty smart guy, I'm pretty technical, and I still get confused with the Amazon ads platform. You know, I've read books.

Mike Capuzzi: I've got some behind me, I've tried, and I just, for some reason, it just doesn't want to click. And maybe I just. I don't know. I'm just getting too old, but I don't know. So I think it's an understatement. My guess is most probably 98% of nonfiction book authors don't know what to do, which is why what you're doing is so important. But before we jump into the details, especially this new layer that you've added to it, I know from my own experience of doing Amazon ads, where I've paid people to help me, can you have a successful book, a long term successful book in the nonfiction genre that's getting sales over a consistent period of time without doing Amazon ads?

Teddy Smith: Yes, you can. Obviously, it helps if you're famous or something like that, but if you're not famous and you haven't got that additional help, yes, it is definitely possible. I've still got books that I started selling five years ago that are still selling well now and they don't have any ads on them. But I think it's quite difficult to launch a book, especially at first, without having those ads. If you've got your own mailing list, your own platform, you're big on social media, something like that, you probably can have a really good book launch without using ads. But the way Amazon works is it's basically a search engine. It's not that different to Google. Just the difference between the way that Google shows results and Amazon shows results is the intent.

Teddy Smith: So if you think about if I go on to, if I was searching on Google, just use that example earlier, I've got a bad back. I search on Google. How to help with bad back. What I'm going to see is I'm going to see articles by Healthline, I'm going to see links to websites from the Royal Osteo Society, things like that. It's a UK one, but you'll see articles about how to help with your bad back and maybe some shops where they're selling products on Amazon all you're seeing is stuff that you can buy. Theres none of that helpful stuff. Its all about stuff you can buy. So it could be books, it could be products, it could be a mixture of things, but it works in exactly the same way.

Teddy Smith: And its called the organic rank. And if you think about it, the way that Amazon works is they want to show products to the customer that it thinks they want to buy. So they rank those products on Amazon basically in order of how likely they think you are going to purchase that product. Now there's loads of factors that affects that organic rank, but I think the main ones, no one really knows exactly how it works, but I think the main ones are thinking about how likely a customer is going to buy. So they look at a couple of things, they look at your previous history of purchasing. So that is obviously very personalized to you. You've bought different things before, you like different brands, you like different colors. Amazon tracks all that stuff and then shows you products like that.

Teddy Smith: But it's also based on the keywords that you typed in. So if I typed in how to chair to cure a bad back or back support rest, they're quite similar keywords but they are going to show me different products and it works exactly the same with books. Now that organic rank, they show the products at the top that they think you're most likely to buy. Now that is again, based on your previous search history. It could be based on authors you liked before, but it's also based on the keyword you typed in and the sales history of that book. So say, for example, you search for a keyword, you search for how secure a bad back and then you go on Amazon and you click on a book and then you buy it. Amazon goes ah, when someone searched for this keyword, they buy this book. So what we'll do is we'll push that book higher up the rankings next time.

Teddy Smith: So by making sales against particular keywords, you can actually improve your organic rank over time. So going back to your question, can you have a book that lasts well over time? Yes, you can. But you've got to be clever with the keywords you try and rank for. Because just, for example, say someone searches for something completely irrelevant and your book just happens to show, say they search for my dog's got bad back and then your book just happens to be shown on there. If a customer then buys that book, that's saying to Amazon something, a bit of an irrelevant signal. Now, it's not necessarily going to negatively affect you. Obviously, you get money from making that sale, but there's no real point in you ranking for my dog's got a bad back because your book's not relevant to it. So by thinking about those keywords that you really want to rank for and really specifically targeting those and being quite bloody minded about targeting only the main keywords, you can try to improve your rank for those main keywords.

Teddy Smith: And that's how you can get long term success without having a big following.

Mike Capuzzi: So it's interesting you say that because when I launched my last book, which, gosh, now several years ago, it's hard to believe I had a fairly decent launch with strategic partners promoting and all that, and we became number one bestseller and all that stuff. But we were selling a lot of books, at least in my world, it was a lot of books. We were probably selling 3300 books a day, which I thought was pretty good. And it stayed that way for like, we were number one bestseller for months. And then what I did, that was all organic. And then I started layering in Amazon ads and I wasn't spending a ton of money, I was spending money on the person who was doing it. And then the media buy was obviously above and beyond, but, and that I noticed that helped like that kept, it kept us number one. Our sales were high then that relationship, I just felt like it wasn't the right relationship.

Mike Capuzzi: And I started, you know, long story short, I just stopped advertising. And my number, my book hasn't changed, but my sales have gone down. And I'm in my mind, and this is for people like myself who, they're not on tv, they're not famous. Like, you know, we were talking about one of your clients or the person you just interviewed on your podcast who has real fame because he wrote, you know, some books that a lot of people know about. These are folks that are like you and me. They're either focused on their business, they want to have a book. So my opinion, and this is why I wanted to have you on today, if you're going to be on Amazon, you really should be looking at how to leverage Amazon ads. I think it's just, yes, you can spend a lot of money potentially, but that's why what you're bringing to the table is so cool.

Mike Capuzzi: I just think it's really a necessary part of the book marketing recipe.

Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. So you're right, that can happen. And it depends on the niche. So some niches are maybe less evergreen than others, like business, for example. There's always new writers coming out, there's always new concepts. So it's difficult to be like James clear, you know, like that's quite unusual to have a book like atomic habits, which is just like number one for like four years. So it depends on your niche. There isn't like a correct answer to whether it's going to be long term without the ads.

Teddy Smith: But you're right, saying the ads can really help you. And there's one actual bit of data that Amazon show you in the backend, which is the advertising cost of sales that ACOS, now, a lot of people see that ACOS and it's like 50% or 70% or something. They're like, oh, that's so high. Like I'm not going to be any profitable at all. But it can be misleading because sometimes I, you’ve just got to pay those ads in order to play the game. And actually you’ve got to look at your total sales as a result of the fact you’ve still got advertising running. And it doesn’t sound very nice, but sometimes you just have to have your ads running in order to maintain your organic rank if your book is in a more competitive area. So the best thing in that scenario is to look at your overall sales.

Teddy Smith: So see how many sales you’ve made overall. So say over a month, you make 100 sales and you make 30 sales from ads, and your ACOS is 50%. So basically, 15 of those books you didn’t really sell because you paid it in advertising. Now, you’ve still made 70 sales at the organic. So you’re getting the full amount of royalties for that. And then the other royalties, you’re just getting half the amount of royalties for. If you can work out your advertising like that, that it's sometimes people call it tacos or total advertising cost of sales, but it's a really good stat to look at because it's quite easy to track. If you stop advertising and your total sales goes down as a percentage, then you can say, okay, well, yes, even though ads aren't necessarily getting all my sales, they're having an impact on my organic rank, which is affecting my sales in a big way.

Mike Capuzzi: I think that's exactly what I'm saying. So let's talk about what you have developed, and it sounds new and exciting to me. When you and I first met, because we met because you were inviting me to be a guest on your podcast, and then we started talking about what you're doing, and I was like, wow, that's really cool. So tell me a little bit more, Teddy, about this new layer using AI, why that's different and why my listeners and nonfiction book authors should really pay attention to this, of course.

Teddy Smith: So it does work fiction as well. So it is predominantly, at the moment, non fiction authors, but it does work fiction, too. But the tool is called publishing performance. And basically the way it works is it uses AI to be your Amazon accounts manager. So I know you were talking before about you hired an account manager, and they did a good job for a certain amount of time, and then it tailed off. I don't know how much you paid for it, but it's probably quite a lot of money. You're spending money on your ads and you're spending money on this person to run them for you. It can get quite expensive.

Teddy Smith: So what we've created is a tool which uses AI to basically be your account manager. So it plugs directly into your backend of your Amazon, and it uses algorithms to adjust your bids to increase your budget, decrease your budget, change your keywords, and it makes thousands of decisions all of the time. So the difference between that and a person is obviously a person goes in, makes a change, waits for a week, sees what happens. This makes changes all the time. So it's seeing what's performing well, what's not performing well, and it should, and it does get better as your book is with it for longer. So it starts learning more about your book. It starts seeing which keywords are making the sales. It tracks things like your organic rank and some other bits of data and basically makes decisions to try and improve those sales.

Teddy Smith: And the aim of the software is to bring your costs down and increase your sales. Because if you're just using Amazon ads, you often find that especially if you're using like auto ads, your cost per click can often get really high because Amazon doesn't have any incentive to get your cost per click down. You know, like they probably make more money from ads than they do from selling books. So they've got no incentive to bring that cost per click down, which is why that doesn't really work. What you've got to think about is that's why this tool can actually adjust those bids so that it can make clever decisions. And it does. Yeah. It makes those updates really, really quickly.

Teddy Smith: So that's the difference. Yeah.

Mike Capuzzi: What is that? Without getting too technical, what is that base? How are those decisions being made? Teddy, where is that data coming from? From Amazon itself. What's the knowledge base?

Teddy Smith: Yeah, so the data comes directly from Amazon itself. So it's, it uses an API, which is like an interface to plug into Amazon. Amazon's pretty open with its API. You've probably heard of AWS, which is actually a bigger company than the main Amazon platform, which just no one's ever heard of it, but basically you can use an API to plug into Amazon. They track loads of bits of data. And some of the stuff, some of the decisions you have to make are based on assumptions. So you have to make assumptions about, for example, we don't know exactly how many books get sold by a book that is, say your category is medicine and your book is 1000th in the bestsellers rank. We don't know exactly how many books are being sold at that level, but you can make estimates based on books.

Teddy Smith: You've seen other ways of making those estimates as well, but in terms of making decisions, yeah, it takes the data straight from Amazon, looks at the keywords that Amazon has, looks at the rank and makes adjustments in real time to give your book more of a chance of making a sale against the right keywords. And that's the important part. It tries not to waste money on irrelevant keywords, which is what you get a lot of with automatic ads. Like my book just went in, I was looking at my ad campaigns today and it's a meditation book and I've got a one of the keywords that the automatic ad was targeting was like, couples relationship advice. And I was like, this is completely irrelevant. It made a sale against it because someone randomly saw it and was into it. They just bought it. But it's completely irrelevant to my book, so there's no point me appearing for that keyword.

Teddy Smith: So that's what the software does. It learns more about your book, looks at your keywords, and it's really easy to set up. You basically just put your book in and then it goes off. You give it a few keywords that you want to target, but then it makes decisions based on that.

Mike Capuzzi: So, gosh, I can make this gonna be a multi hour. But don't worry, I know it's getting your evening, your time. Let me pause for a second. Cause I was just talking to a client the other day about her Amazon KDP account, and I was walking her through some things. And, you know, just as an aside, you have those keywords that you set up on your book page, right? Those seven keywords?

Teddy Smith: The seven keywords, yeah.

Mike Capuzzi: Right.

Teddy Smith: Yeah.

Mike Capuzzi: I've always said those things are pretty much meaningless. I don't know what your opinion. So there's those keyboards. When you set up a book, you get seven for the Kindle, seven for the paperback, whatever. You have the categories and all that. It's sort of a loaded question. But, like, aren't those enough? Should I just be using my Amazon ads to address those? What you're doing is so much more deeper in real time analysis because even coming up with those seven keywords, when I talk to clients or even my own books, I'm like, okay, I think this is a good keyword.

Teddy Smith: So you're doing the right thing. There's basically three places where keywords can be found in your book, and these are all going to help your organic rank. So you've got the backend keywords, like you mentioned. You've got your title and subtitle, and that's the most important one. And then you've got the book description on the listing. So all of the Amazon uses that data to understand what your book's about and to show you to the right people. What it doesn't do using that data, is get you higher up the rankings until you start making sales against those particular keywords. So that's why you need to really do the ads whilst you're launching, because Amazon gives you this short honeymoon.

Teddy Smith: They call it the honeymoon period. It's like the first two or three weeks where you get a bit of a boost. So that period is really important. You know, that's when you want to be telling Amazon, these are the keywords I want to be ranking for. So what the AI does, it takes those words and it makes other phrases, it makes other connected words to it. So you might think again, let's use the example about the back, doctor. You might think people are searching for bad back, but actually people are searching for what's that thing where you get the nerves down your leg?

Mike Capuzzi: Sciatica.

Teddy Smith: Sciatica, yeah, people might be saying Sciatica and you might not have thought about using Sciatica. So the AI can actually go, okay, bad back, other symptoms. Let's try these keywords out as well. So it's a bit more clever than.

Mike Capuzzi: This is now on the Amazon ads platform. It's literally either adding or adjusting those keywords that you can go in and manually do. It's doing that for you. Oh my gosh.

Teddy Smith: Basically, yeah. So it's working as like a, your account manager in person.

Mike Capuzzi: You said something that brings to mind somebody have to talk to you about it offline. But I have a client that's, he's planning a big book launch. He's planning it for January. So he's already given himself lots of time. He really wants to make a big bang. And honestly I hadn't even talked to him about, I was like, we can do this organically. But in your opinion that organic and ad avenue, there's two pathways. You're saying they should be parallel is what I'm hearing.

Teddy Smith: Yep. I think basically they should be parallel. Yeah. Because, you know, when you say organic do you mean, I mean your own.

Mike Capuzzi: Offline you're promoting to your own list, you're doing what you just, that's always.

Teddy Smith: Gonna be more powerful because it's people that trust you. You know, you've got that people have signed up to your mailing list for a reason. They want to hear from you about your stuff. That's always gonna be way more powerful and that's where you're gonna get your first purchases. But say you’ve got 10,000 people on your list and you’ve got a 10% conversion rate. Youve got 1000 people by your book then the other 9000 people don’t. And those 1000 people, that’s great at first, but then they’ve gone. Thats when you need to start getting the new customers.

Mike Capuzzi: Can I pause you real quick for a sec? Sorry, but don’t forget my clients are doing legion. If a thousand of their own clients already buy the book, that’s great for getting traction on Amazon, it doesn’t serve their purpose of finding new clients. Right. So that's why it's, to your point, I just wanted to say, like, they're trying to find new people.

Teddy Smith: Yep, yep, exactly. But it's still really important to do that mailing list stuff first, though, because the ranking is done right on purchases. So, you know, if you can, it's even better to get your people, you really know, to search for your book using a keyword and then buy it. Because then Amundsen goes, okay, it is. Yeah, if you can do that, that is good. I mean, it's, you're lucky if you.

Mike Capuzzi: Can get him to buy it.

Teddy Smith: Yeah, exactly. You're lucky if you can get him to buy it. So that's more for really people, you know, but yeah, so you should be doing that as well because obviously if you get 1000 people buy your book, Amazon is going to go, hey, people, buy this book, let's, let's show it. But the ads alongside it are going to be gathering new people, learning about which keywords to rank your book for. And also remember, you get this data. So if you, you can see in our reports, okay, these are the keywords that are making sales. And you can use that in your other advertising off Amazon as well. You could potentially use that in Facebook advertising if you're doing that as well.

Teddy Smith: So you can see specifically which keywords are making those sales.

Mike Capuzzi: Another thing I know a lot of authors are concerned about is the cost. There is typically, again, very few people can figure out Amazon ads on their own, in my opinion. So they're paying someone to do it. So you get that investment, the media, the ad spend, that's a moot issue. Maybe you help can save because of what you're doing. But have you done any analysis yet, Teddy? Because what we're talking about here, this platform that we're talking about is fairly new, right? This is something you've developed within the last year, correct?

Teddy Smith: Yeah, we went live in July.

Mike Capuzzi: Okay, so just a few months ago.

Teddy Smith: Yep.

Mike Capuzzi: Have you done any analysis yet of because there's a cost of being on your platform, correct. I'm going to ask you to share that information. But then for an author who doesn't have a big budget behind them, are they going to save money with your platform?

Teddy Smith: So that is a good question. So the cost of the platform is a dollar for your first month, so you can try it basically for free. And then every other month after that is $39. So that's the platform for that, which.

Mike Capuzzi: Is a little bit less costly than an Amazon ad expert?

Teddy Smith: Slightly, yeah. Yeah. I mean my last agency was like $1,500 a month for running Amazon ads that I’ve worked with. So yeah quite a bit less. And in terms of saving you money over the long run, yes it would save you money because it will adjust your keywords. It should reduce your bids for each keyword. So your acquisition cost should be lower. Also overall you should be getting more value for money in the long run.

Teddy Smith: In the short run I wouldn’t say necessarily your first month would be cheaper, but I think it would be more effective. You can obviously still set your budget. You should control how much you spend with your budget, not with your clicks. If you pay a dollar per click, but your conversion rate is 100%, then that dollar has been really well spent. It doesn’t really matter if your bids are high. What it is making sure that over the long run you're eventually bringing the cost down and making more sales. But you can still set your budget. So it wouldn't necessarily save you money.

Teddy Smith: At first I don't think I could say it would, but over the long run it would. I'd say you should be setting your budget at least dollar ten a day when you're starting, if you've got that budget, ideally a bit more, but you don't necessarily want to go crazy whilst the, you know, you don't know what keywords people are searching for because you might end up spending lots of money. You know, if you've got a book that is related to habits, for example, you don't really want to be competing with atomic habits, that, that feels like a bad person to try and compete with. So you don't want to be having a massive budget because if otherwise everyone who's searching for habits is just going to buy the atomic habits book. So you've got to think which are the keywords that people are going to be searching for.

Mike Capuzzi: Is your platform offer the promise of almost like a set and forget? Is that a realistic expectation? Teddy, where like you said, I'm a physician, I wrote a book, I don't have time. I'm not necessarily interested in hiring a person, but I like this idea of what you're sharing. Is it a set and forget or me the author? How much time do I have to interact with your platform?

Teddy Smith: So no time at all really. So when you set it up, you just plug it into your backend. You choose which books you want to advertise, you set your budget and give us a couple of keywords that you think you want to rank for. But apart from that, you don’t need to do anything else apart from just checking and see the results. You definitely can just set it and forget it. Just as long as you set your budget for that day. If you’ve set a daily budget really high, then I would say don’t set it and forget it. Come and check to make sure that its not ruining you.

Teddy Smith: But if you’ve set your budget $10 a day or something low, then, yeah, you can just set it and leave it and just let that carry on. You don't need to do anything. Just, you can come in and check to see how that's performing. And if you want to make any adjustments, you can contact our support team or that's it. Really? Yeah.

Mike Capuzzi: All right, two last questions before we wrap up. One, everyone's probably thinking this, okay, I sign up, I do the dollar trial, I'm in how long, realistically, and I know there's so many parameters, Teddy, what kind of genre, all that, but let's just say on a general, what's a realistic timeframe that I should start seeing results with your platform?

Teddy Smith: We say to people, three months is when you should be, when we've got enough time to do some learning, understand the market. The algorithm has had its time to understand your book. Uh, that's when it should be learning. But I've had books which sell really well after like a week, two weeks using the software. Um, other people have, yeah, have waited more like two to three months for to see really good results. But it should start spending your budget straight away. You should be getting keyword reports straight away. So you should be starting to see, you know, exactly what money your budget's been spent on, which, sorry, which keywords your budget's been spent on, which keywords have resulted in sales.

Teddy Smith: So you would see some results straight away. But we say over three months is when it should be starting to really adjust and performing better.

Mike Capuzzi: Okay, two more questions, actually, if I can.

Teddy Smith: Yes.

Mike Capuzzi: When you join your platform at dollar 40 a month, does that cover all my books or is that just one book?

Teddy Smith: That's all your books.

Mike Capuzzi: So that, I mean, that right there, for a multi guy like you, has 19 books, that's a huge potential savings.

Teddy Smith: Yep. Yeah.

Mike Capuzzi: That's really nice. Okay, last question.

Teddy Smith: Just, sorry. It is all your books, but that's just one of one marketplace. So that would be like, right, north America.

Mike Capuzzi: Well, that's a good point, right?

Teddy Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's another $10 for all of the marketplaces.

Mike Capuzzi: So just $10 more and then per marketplace or just for.

Teddy Smith: No, for all the others. Oh, wow.

Mike Capuzzi: Okay. That's reasonable, too.

Teddy Smith: Yeah.

Mike Capuzzi: Let's go back to, like, my client who's looking to launch a book in January, and he's a local business owner. He has a, but he has a worldwide offering. Now, when does he start the timeline? When does he start Amazon ads? Like, when does he start working with your platform, Teddy? Right now or in January.

Teddy Smith: So is his book. So. Well, you can't start ads until your book is uploaded to Amazon.

Mike Capuzzi: Okay, so his book is not. But now they're allowing you to even with paperback. Now, I don't know if you've seen that they're now allowing you to upload your book and have a release date.

Teddy Smith: Yep. So as long as you've got that release date set up, then as long as long as the book's uploaded to Amazon, you can start to set your ads.

Mike Capuzzi: You can. So let's just say January 1 is the launch date. It's not the actual launch date. January 1. We're now in September.

Teddy Smith: Yep.

Mike Capuzzi: Does your sister, your system is doing something between now and January 1?

Teddy Smith: No. No. So only does it once your book is live and for sale.

Mike Capuzzi: Okay. Okay.

Teddy Smith: So it can't pre learn.

Mike Capuzzi: Okay, so there's. Okay, so. But to your point, if my book launches on January 1, according to you, we should then be doing Amazon. Push that button for Amazon ads to start doing some work.

Teddy Smith: So other people have slightly different approach. Some people wait until they've got ten or 20 reviews before they start ads because the more reviews you've got, the better the conversion rate is. And we know that's a fact because we see it in the data. Not just our data, everyone's data, like my own books, everything. But my personal view is you should start doing ads straight away because you've got that honeymoon period and you're telling Amazon, right, this is my book. Let's get it live. Let's get in front of customers, and let's start to build that base of reviews. There are some services that can help you get reviews, like build up that advanced read list, for example, like use your mailing list.

Teddy Smith: Encourage people to leave reviews for your book. That's really important. It's also important to note you can't incentivize a review or ask people to leave you a good review. I just want to say that in case people are listening, like, you can only ask people to leave you an honest review, and that's really important. Amazon are quite strict on that, so don't you know, I know it's tempting, but it's best not to get your parents to leave your review and stuff like that.

Mike Capuzzi: They typically, they know a lot of stuff. It's amazing.

Teddy Smith: Yeah. But, yeah, they know a lot. So, yeah, I personally start ads straightaway. Other people do recommend waiting, but personally, I think you should use that honeymoon period to get your book out there and get it launched. I mean, if your book's also in KDP, you can do the free five days book promotion, which I'd also recommend doing during your launch because.

Mike Capuzzi: Oh, you can do that during the launch.

Teddy Smith: Yep. I do that with my ads turned on. So I get, sometimes I get like thousands of downloads in my first two or three days because it's free and you've got ad running. So you've got all these people who are seeing a free book.

Mike Capuzzi: Yeah. You're a smart guy.

Teddy Smith: It's not profitable at first, but it gets people reading it. And especially if you've got a series or you're using it as lead Gen, then it doesn't matter if people get the book for free because it's a lead gen book.

Mike Capuzzi: Hey, Teddy. Very cool. I think. Listen, I can't wait to try it out. As soon as we hang up here, you and I are talking. I appreciate. I want to start putting this to in my business, look for my clients. How can our listeners learn more about you? How can they learn more about the platform? And if there's somebody, because I know you've got a new podcast.

Mike Capuzzi: Is there a certain type of podcast guest you're looking for that someone might be a suitable candidate?

Teddy Smith: Great question. So I've got my. To follow me on Instagram or Twitter is just Teddy Ag Smith. AG is Alan George. So you can follow me there. And I've been doing a lot of content on there at the moment in terms of podcast guests. Yeah. So really I'm open to offers to anyone who's really a writer, has had some success with selling books.

Teddy Smith: The main aim of the podcast is to talk about the business side of it. So I'd want to be talking about your marketing. I'd want to be talking about how you do your launch, how you do your networking. So it's not really about your inspirations or why you wrote particular characters. It is a bit more like how do you do your pr? Like how has book signings affected your sales? Those are the questions I've been asking recently. So, yeah, if you want to talk about that sort of thing, I'd be very happy to chat to you. And if you want to learn more about the software, then it's publishingperformance.com. and you can see all the information on there, and you can do your first month for a dollar.

Teddy Smith: And if you don't like it, then you can leave no problem.

Mike Capuzzi: And your podcast information is there, too, also, isn't it?

Teddy Smith: Podcast information is also on that website, and you can just search for the publishing performance show, and then that should pop up on all of the platforms and on YouTube.

Mike Capuzzi: Well, Teddy, I appreciate you putting an exclamation mark at the end of the author factor, the run for the author factor. So I do appreciate that. I think this has been very helpful. I think you've got a home run here with your background. And now that you're leveraging technology at different, different way, I think you've got a real winner here. So thank you very much.

Teddy Smith: Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed being on this podcast, so thanks.

Mike Capuzzi: All right, Teddy. Take care.

Teddy Smith: See you, sir.